Grammar and Tones

This post is gonna be dark.

Germany, 1933

On 30th January 1933, the NSDAP – the Nazis – rose to power in Germany. The NSDAP was known to be an antisemitic fascist party – but the speed at which they implemented their deadly ideology must have been unbelievable. In March, they opened the first concentration camps. In April, they started boycotting Jewish businesses. On 12th April, they carried out the first murders in the concentration camps. In the following years, some Jews emigrated, but many stayed.

Five years later, on 1st September 1938, Germany invaded Poland and started world war II. In the build-up to the war, Hitler had already been ramping up the hatred and discrimination against Jews, but on 9th November 1938, the Nazis escalated the holocaust by destroying hundreds of synagogues, damaging thousands of Jewish businesses, and arresting tens of thousands of innocent Jews and sending them to concentration camps. In the following years, the Nazis murdered 6 million Jews, and were responsible for the death of 60 million people in the world war.

German kids learn the history of Nazi-Germany over and over again throughout their whole school life. In history class we learn the history of it, in German class we read books written by Jewish authors of the time, in politics class we learn social and political functioning of authoritarianism, in fine arts we look at propaganda posters from the time, and on our excursion days we visit concentration camps. This is all to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself.

China, 1949

On 1st October 1949, Mao Zedong, leading the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rose to power and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. In the following years, the communists murdered at least a million people for owning land rather than farming themselves on the land. From 1959 to 1961, beat or tortured 2 million people to death, but this number of is dwarfed by the 50 million people that died of starvation in what was the deadliest famine in human history that was caused by the disastrous economic and political mismanagement of the country by the communists. From 1966 to 1976, another million or two died in various massacres carried out by the communists during the cultural revolution. On 4th June 1989, hundreds, or possibly thousands, of peacefully protesting innocent student were murdered in the Tiananmen Square massacre (coincidentally, Tiananmen means gate of heavenly peace).

Authoritarianism has many parallels in its left and right wing variants.

Till today, the Tiananmen square massacre is “commemorated” with silence: every year on 4th June, all VPNs (which are used to bypass the Great Chinese Firewall to access Western websites) are blocked, and social media is even more censored than on normal days. You won’t get any search results for “Tiananmen”, either. 4th of June is “the day when nothing happened”. Unlike German kids, Chinese kids do not learn anything about this history at school, but on the contrary, they learn lies to attribute anything that cannot be outright denied to either foreign forces or natural disasters.

Reading the writing on the wall

I often wondered how millions of jews stayed in Germany and neighbouring countries throughout the early years of the Nazi-regime. Clearly, the best time to leave was right after they rose to power. If not then, then clearly they should have left by the time the war broke out. And if not then, then clearly they should have fled when they saw neighbours disappear or transported away in trains, although at that time, fleeing was not an easy feat anymore.

I would find out in 2022 in China.

I happened to be stuck in China throughout the Covid-years. From the very beginning to – almost, but not quite – the very end. Most of this time, I was glad to be in China: after about 3 weeks of initial lockdown in early 2020, Covid basically did not exist in China, and while the West struggled with wave after wave after wave and a constant meandering of policies, all we had to do in China was scan a QR code when entering a building (for tracking). This may not be what people typically think of China, but I felt safe and free during that time.

By early 2022, however, Covid was largely a matter of the past, and most countries had vaccinated their populations with highly effective mRNA vaccines and were opening up again. China had failed to vaccinate its population – after an initial vaccination campaign of the Chinese-made vaccine of questionable effectiveness, the government focussed fully on their zero-Covid policy and neglected vaccinations – in fact, they even banned Western-made vaccines – apparently for purely ideological reasons. The Covid variants of late 2021 and early 2022, however, spread so quickly, that any attempt to control them with lockdowns was doomed from the onset.

The media and social media around the topic were tightly controlled. Every now and then, however, some information would leak, since it takes a couple of minutes or hours to censor new content. Bizarre, absurd, and sometimes funny scenes emerged: Videos of people in hazmat suits spraying the streets with disinfectants like ghostbusters, grannies racing away from Covid police on their mobility scooters, people in “quarantine camps” playing ring toss to win a can of instant noodles so they’ve got something to eat for the day. Whenever I got one of these videos or images, I immediately saved them on my phone and I eventually built up a respectable collection.

Other videos were more disturbing. Videos of “quarantine camps” where people had to sleep in paper boxes because there were no beds. “Quarantine camps” were thousands of people were lying in a brightly lit hall even at night, making it impossible to sleep. People in their apartment complex fighting for food because half a carrot is not enough to feed a family (during lockdowns, food deliveries were organised by the apartment management). Reports of people being unable to leave their apartment building during an earthquake because the management had welded the gate. Reports of chronically ill people dying at home, because they did not get permission to collect their necessary medicine. Once, a picture of a delivery van with a fridge got censored, because it alluded to the fact that so many people were building up food reserves to be prepared for a possible lockdown that fridges were sold out for some time. We too, kept a weeks’ supply, just in case.

On 2nd April 2022, a video leaked that showed small children, including new-borns being separated from the parents and isolated without care or supervision. Rumour said that more than a hundreds kids were forcibly separated from their parents and isolated in a “quarantine camp” with only a handful of nurses that did not appear to be taking (or be able to take) care of so many children. With the censorship, it is impossible to tell what exactly was behind the pictures, but it certainly did not seem like parents voluntarily left their kids there.

We had a 10-month-old child at the time.

When would you have left?

I don’t know if this is a German thing, but in my mind I started to translate what I saw into the language that must have been used in world war II Germany.

There were “quarantine camps”, but really, Covid was already over in the rest of the world, and no other country needed to forcibly quarantine anybody anymore. Large numbers of people being forcibly sent to a camp without sufficient medical, sanitary, and food supplies, were really more akin to “concentration camps”.

People with Covid, which at the time had become a disease most people recovered from without any major complications, were marked, excluded from society, and arrested. Like the Jews in Germany.

People were dying, not from Covid, but at the hands of the communists: through starvation or lack of medical supplies. Only a few cases emerged, but given the censorship it is impossible to know the true numbers. The communists have a long standing track record of starving millions of people to death.

I was imagining Xi Jinping sitting in his echo chamber, asking his ministers how the zero-Covid policy was going, and everybody confirming that things were going great, but they would be even better if they did even more lockdowns.

I was imagining Mao Zedong in his days was sitting in his echo chamber, asking his ministers how his economic reforms were going, and everybody confirming that things were going great, but they would be even better if they did smelted even more pots and pans and tools to produce useless pig iron.

I was imagining Adolf Hitler sitting in his bunker, asking his ministers how the war was going, and everybody confirming that things were going great, but they would be even better if they killed even more Jews. And then I wondered if today was 30th November 1933, or 12th April 1933, or 1st September 1938, or 9th November 1938.

What’s this got to do with grammar and tones?

With a 10 months old baby, I concluded that no matter if this was just the early days of the communists gradually tightening their control on society, or if this was the day before they would start accusing foreigners of infecting China with Covid (fun fact: according to Chinese propaganda, you could earn 50,000 USD from the US government if you infected someone in China with Covid!) and prosecuting and arresting them, or if this was just altogether false alarm. I had to take my son out of China.

You see that the statement “I want to take my son out of China to protect him from the communists’ zero-Covid craze”, has a lot of background story that is shaped by the unique cultural background of a German. I will never be able to understand what it is like grow up in a cultural environment were gullibility and unfiltered trust in the government is fostered from early age, but my wife (who is of course just as loving and caring about our kids as me) seemed surprisingly relaxed about the same videos and images we saw from zero-Covid China on our phones. Sure, some things went wrong, but mistakes are there to learn from. If a video of X happening emerged, then this most likely means that that X no longer happens, because the party leadership is now aware of the problem and can fix it.

Even if I perfectly understood Chinese tones, and she perfectly understood German (or English) grammar, the misunderstandings come from the cultural background that the other one simply doesn’t have. An “I think we should leave” and an “I think we should stay” mean so much more than the grammar and the words comprising the sentence. There is a whole story, a whole education, and a whole world view behind them.

But we did leave China just four weeks later.