I’m sure nowhere’s food safety is perfect. My point there is more about degrees of comparison. One of the talking points I remember when Covid was getting started was this stuff about China and something something “open air meat markets” and this being speculated as a way it started, along with the Wuhan stuff. But naturally, this was written by the west, who also writes things like “at what cost?” about China trying to address poverty, or claims they are committing genocide, or says something something Tiananmen social credit, so the whole narrative there is suspect from the get-go.

Incidentally, this is something I want to write its own post about, but haven’t gotten around to completing it and posting, is the difficulty sometimes in talking about the realities of AES states vs. the good/evil dichotomy. In dispelling, or arguing against, propaganda against them, it can sometimes come out sounding like the view is that there is nothing wrong with them and they are utopian. When the goal is something more like trying to straighten out how they rank in comparison to other countries and also how they are doing in comparison to the phantom version of them made up by the anti-communist west.