Dismantling the myth of the exemplary management of the pandemic in China

If the Great Confinement of 2020 took a long time, imagine having spent it in a repressive regime that watches everything.

And that almost three years later you are still the same: as soon as there is a positive in a neighborhood, they lock everyone up, put up fences and patrol the doorways.

This is the case in China, a country that at the beginning of the health crisis was held up as an example of good management.

Some even deduced that authoritarian governments have advantages to deal with something like this.

Now the Chinese are fed up with confinements, and they have the courage to protest, while they see on TV that the rest of the world is leading its normal life, and even filling stadiums.

The documentary

from HBO, has been translated in Spain with the tricky title of

, but it does not deal with where the bug came from, whether from an animal market or from a laboratory, nothing of it's.

What it does do, and well, is dismantle the myth of exemplary management.

First, Beijing denied the disease, and arrested eight doctors who raised the alarm;

then he downplayed it;

then he said that he had it under control;

then confined Wuhan;

then confined everyone.

From start to finish, he went all-in on censorship: he needed to control the message.

Documentary director Nanfu Wang, in June in New York.Michael Loccisano (Getty Images for HBO)

The American director of Chinese origin Nanfu Wang, who was surprised by the pandemic on a visit to her homeland, builds a harsh story that contrasts official propaganda and what was happening in hospitals, with recordings made very much on the front line.

We see how health centers stopped admitting patients, and some of them died on the street.

And we listen to the testimonies of those retaliated for telling the truth.

Wang intersperses scenes filmed in the United States, where he was able to return, which would have made for another film.

Tucked in here with a shoehorn, they send the message that we in the West are not here to give lessons on how the pandemic was managed.

It's true.

In Madrid, for example, elderly people were left to die alone and without medical attention.

And that had no electoral cost.

In China, directly, there is no electoral cost.

But sometimes people say enough is enough.

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