Last night, I received an update from the American doctor who has been writing in about the coronavirus situation. His wife is from China, and is plugged in to Chinese media and social media. What he wrote last night is extremely frightening. I post it here with the obvious caveat that I can’t confirm any of this, and that you should take it as a comment, not as gospel truth. I know who this doctor is, and have been corresponding with him. I brought another physician, in another part of the country, into our conversation, and this second physician tells me he definitely believes the Doctor is onto something.

Read this below: either the Doctor is a paranoid with a vivid imagination, or he is seeing something that is not being reported in our media. If these stories from China are true, I don’t necessarily fault our media for not reporting them; I am sure that the Chinese government has things on intense lockdown, and would not let Western journalists into the most heavily affected areas. What I find interesting, though, is that these apocalyptic images of fighting locusts are being broadcast on Chinese television (which they watch via satellite), but are not being spoken of in the US media. The Daily Beast just posted a piece about the unusual threat from locusts this year, and how the Chinese state media has been trying to downplay it.

Note also the photo of the Buddhist prophecy. The Doctor has the right take on it — he doesn’t know if it is authentic or fake, but the more important aspect of the story is that lots of Chinese elites believe it could be true, and are passing the thing around on social media. One of the Doctor’s consistent themes in his post is the resurgence of religious consciousness in the face of this plague, and how sustained fear and anger is making Chinese people increasingly unafraid of their totalitarian government. That “prophecy” sounds like exactly the sort of thing someone would invent in a time like this — even a government propagandist who is trying to give the people something to believe in to make them more resilient. In fact, if I were a high-level Communist Party functionary, and I came to believe that we in the Party were facing a disaster that we could not control, this is the kind of propaganda I would make up and release into social media, in the hope that it would encourage people to develop resilience.

If you, reader, are the kind of person who is saying, “Well, that’s obviously a made-up document, so we don’t have to take it seriously,” you are missing the point the Doctor is making. At the risk of being obnoxiously redundant, even if this is a document invented five minutes ago, it is being taken seriously by educated Chinese people, and they may act on it. This is how a religious falsehood (assuming it’s fake) becomes a social fact.

One note on that, then I’m going to go to his post. Last night at a reception, I ran into old friends from when we lived in Dallas. The wife is a Chinese immigrant. She was telling me about her elderly parents, who live in an assisted living facility in Dallas, along with a few other elderly Chinese. She said that all the old Chinese are miserably paranoid of each other, and that this is the legacy of communism. She said that the Chinese Communist Party maintained control by making everyone mistrustful of everybody else (this is what happened in the Soviet Empire too). To trust others was to put your own life at risk. Naturally, society adapted to that fact. As a consequence, nobody trusts anybody. Now, she said, these elderly people are safe in an assisted living facility in America, but they can’t allow themselves to relax and to trust the others around them. They are out of communist China, but communist China is not out of them.

Think about how weak and fragile that ideology has left the Chinese people in the face of these plagues!

Now, to the Doctor’s latest dispatch:

I am very sorry this took so long – I wanted to make it as thoughtful as I possibly could. Much has happened in the past few days. Here in the USA, we are in the grip of a 2nd wave of influenza – and I have been profoundly busy the past few days because of this. People who comment about epidemics and the fact that influenza is much worse here in the USA are not making that up – this is a particularly bad year – but what is happening in China is really just as bad if not worse – and I am beginning to really despair that we here in America are just having this whole thing really downplayed by our media and leaders.

So here is the update on multiple fronts.

First of all my wife’s family.

Her father has still not been heard of — now approaching a month. No words can express my wife’s grieving. I am running out of ways to help her cope.

Her brother and his family are still in their upper floor apartment in a major metro area — not Wuhan. The martial law and lockdown continue. They have not left their apartment in about 3 weeks. Food is delivered to them twice a week. There is no end in sight at this time. The family immediately across the hall was forcibly removed about 3 days ago because one of them was sick. My wife is concerned about their mental health – but so far they are staying healthy.

Her mother remains under in home quarantine in her apartment in a small city on the Western frontier. She seems to be fully recovered. She is eating rice that she has had piled up in her apartment for just such a reason – and refuses to eat any food that is brought to her door. This city is in the middle of a vast agricultural area. Hogs, cows and chickens are a staple of their economy. My mother-in-law has told us that the “death stench” has permeated her city the past week or so and getting worse daily. She cannot even open her windows. Why? No one is going to work – and no one is taking care of the livestock. No shipments of grain are coming in for the animals — and throughout the land the animals are starving in the pastures. The bodies by the hundreds of thousands are just laying in the sun and rotting. All this while the industrialized part of China is beginning to have severe food shortages. Something in my doctor brain is telling me that having millions of people so close to rotting animals cannot be good. What could possibly go wrong?

Three days ago, 20% of the workers in my brother-in-law’s city were ordered back to work. The photo I have attached is from American media, showing a transit train during rush hour on that day. Yep, that worked. The people of that big city are in open defiance of the Communist Party in a way that has never happened before. It has been my concern all along that the lies and fraudulent numbers coming out would reap the whirlwind for the Communist government not just from the West — but also from their own people. When exactly are the people going to feel safe going back to work? Who knows?

Some of the comments I have read on some of my previous posts have been concerned that the tone was too macabre or apocalyptic. Well, snowflakes — that is because things are very macabre and very apocalyptic in China today. The true scope of this disaster is being grossly underplayed in the American media.

My wife is a PhD graduate of Tshingua University in Beijing. It is an institution that would be similar if our Harvard, Yale, and MIT were all combined into one place. The graduates there are heavily recruited by the Communist Party – and most of them go on to work in the government, the universities, and the law. It is their version of the one-percent elite. My wife belongs to multiple social media groups of Tshingua alumni and current students. Imagine my surprise reading multiple comments repeatedly bashing the Communist government and officials and their handling of this incident. These are future and current Communists and this would have been unthinkable just a few days ago. But the real stunner came last night — another jpg of Chinese text was sent to all current students and alumnus of Tshinghua. I have enclosed the photo.

The doctor continues: