Thank you for being open-minded. Not many are like that today so I applaud that.

I agree with a lot of what you say. There are some things that I think deserve a different perspective. What I'm going to say may sound shocking or ridiculous. That's because mainstream reporting on China is so distorted and negative nowadays that anything that deviates from the mainstream narrative sounds ridiculous. Please hear me out.

The "information supression" narrative is greatly distorted. I assert that it's not so much "deliberate information suppression", but rather "nobody had any idea what's going on, so it was chaotic and nobody knew what the best course of actions were".

You should read this article: "The Fable of the Chinese Whistleblower"
https://www.chinausfocus.com/society-culture/the-fable-of-th...

You're probably thinking about Li Wenliang, the eye doctor who later died from COVID. The first doctor that discovered that something was wrong, is Zhang Jixian, not Li Wenliang. A few days before Li noticed anything, Zhang started an investigation and escalation process which on December 31 led to escalation to WHO.

Li Wenliang heard about Zhang's investigation and also felt that something was wrong, and so he warned friends in a private social media group about "there being SARS in the hospital". Li Wenliang is in fact not a whistleblower: he never intended to tell the public, nor did he (or anyone else for that matter) know what exactly it was. His social media messages then somehow leaked out to the public. Li Wenliang was never arrested or jailed, as the mainstream media claims. The police reprimanded him for "spreading rumors" and he had to sign an NDA. That's it, nothing else happened. He could go back to work immediately after.

What happened to Li was not even that consequential in the bigger scheme of things. Because Zhang was never censored or suppressed. Unlike Li, Zhang followed official procedure from the beginning, he kept working, and his work resulted in escalation to the national CDC as well as to the WHO within days. The timeline is very telling:

- Zhang started investigating on December 27

- Li posted on social media on December 30

- Zhang's work led to escalation to national CDC and WHO by December 31. By this time, Chinese media already reported about the mysterious virus. Proof: https://twitter.com/Sky_Blue168/status/1245551783167942656

- Li's post leaked around the same day, when Zhang already escalated and when the media already reported

- Police reprimanded Li on January 1

Is the police's treatment of Li right? I make no big judgement on this, but I'll add some perspective. Back then not much was known about COVID (transmission rate, fatality, etc). But Li said that it was SARS — a much more deadly disease than COVID. His messages could have caused widespread panic. If panic in itself isn't bad enough, consider this: if people started moving out of Wuhan en masse, then it would have spread COVID to the entire country, making lockdown impossible.

Anyway, my opinion on whether the police's treatment of Li is right, isn't that important. Because Li took the case to the judge, and the judge ruled in Li's favor, saying that the police's treatment was inappropriate. The police then apologized.

Think about how weird the previous paragraph is, from the perspective of mainstream reporting about China. Isn't China totalitarian state where everything is tightly controlled, where citizen have no freedoms and are at the mercy of the government? How could a judge possibly judge in favor of a citizen and against the police??? This is already proof that China is very different from what many westerners think. But I digress.

It's a tragedy that Li later died from COVID, and many Chinese are angry about this fact. The Wuhan government screwed up big time initially, no doubt about it. They were hesitant because they had no idea whether it was really bad, and they'd rather err on the side of believing that everything was fine until there was enough evidence to the contrary. We now know that that was a mistake.

But Chinese are also angry about how the situation is misrepresented in western mainstream media. None of the above important facts are reported by western mainstream media — they all go with the simple "Li was jailed and censored" story. I'm among one of those angry people. Many Chinese climb over the firewall, and become shocked at all the bullshit stories that western mainstream media writes about China. Many are then shocked into becoming very pro-China.

This is perhaps the biggest irony. Many westerners believe that Chinese become "enlightened" if only they can escape censorship and read the "free flow of information". In fact, for many Chinese, the effect is opposite. Western mainstream media misinformation about China is very big, so big that most westerners don't even know that they're being propagandized themselves. Bad western mainstream media reporting on China is better pro-China propaganda than any actual Chinese propaganda (which is usually pretty bad; you should watch them).

FYI, there are also US intelligence reports that corroborate that no Chinese government official had good knowledge about COVID back then.