Commentary from the Web, Week 41, 2020

Nine Days in Wuhan, the Ground Zero of the Coronavirus Pandemic
by Peter Kessler New Yorker, Oct 12, 2020,
“When Wuhan was sealed, the strategy of isolation was replicated throughout the city. Housing compounds were closed and monitored by neighbourhood committees, with residents going out only for necessities. Toward the end of the first month, the guidelines were tightened further, until virtually all goods were delivered. On February 17th, Fang Fang wrote, “Everyone is now required to remain inside their homes at all times.” Like other Wuhan diarists, she often referred to food, because it became hard to find much variety.
“Meanwhile, approximately ten thousand contact tracers were working in the city, in order to cut off chains of infection, and hospitals were developing large-scale testing systems. But isolation remained crucial: patients were isolated; suspected exposures were isolated; medical workers were isolated. A nurse told me that she left for work on February 3rd and didn’t return home until June 7th. She was housed in a hotel room, like most medical workers with families. For four months, the nurse communicated with her husband and their five-year-old son only by phone and WeChat.
“In order to create solitude on such a scale, it was necessary to do a great deal of construction. I met a young manager from a building company that renovated a hundred and ten hospitals, clinics, schools, gymnasiums, and other buildings. Much of their work involved installing walls, barriers, and special entrances and exits that allowed people to keep away from one another. The company also helped build Huoshenshan, one of two emergency hospitals that were constructed to house coronavirus patients. Huoshenshan, which had a thousand beds, including thirty in an intensive-care center, became a prime subject of government propaganda, because it went up in roughly ten days, from January 23rd to February 2nd. At one point, there were seven thousand workers on site, along with more than a hundred excavators.
“The young manager, whom I’ll call Zhang, recruited and oversaw labor. He told me that he often appealed to the workers’ patriotism, but mostly he just paid them well. Recalling this period, he used a phrase that translates as “Money can make the Devil push the grindstone for you.” It was common to pay unskilled laborers the equivalent of hundreds of dollars a day, because of the risk and the long hours. The most Zhang ever handed over for a week’s work, to a carpenter, was fifty thousand yuan, about seven thousand dollars—ten times a normal wage. Even so, recruitment was difficult, because the city’s death toll was surging, and the lack of information terrified people.
“The Huoshenshan site had been designed in zones, and Zhang’s workers were still finishing the hospital’s back zone while infected patients were being admitted in the front. “A big group of workers fled,” he said. “They didn’t even claim their salaries.” Once the hospital had been finished, it was immediately necessary to turn around and go inside, in order to fix leaks and other problems that resulted from the hurried construction.”
The article is to be found here.

Moving businesses out of China? This American manufacturer says no
See the video at this link.

The U.S. needs an enemy, and it chose China
China-U.S. trade deficit is the result of the U.S.' accounting model, not China's trading practices. China's growing confidence and its rapid development led the U.S. to make it the enemy to justify its large military spending, says Paul Craig Roberts, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan.
See the video at this link.

How has life changed in Xinjiang?
See the video at this link.