China's 'Zero COVID' not so Different to U.S., Some Say Amid Protests

As protesters in China risk incarceration and possibly worse to demonstrate against the Communist Party's "Zero COVID" policy, some in the United States are wondering how the lockdowns, compulsory masking, suppression of critical opinions, surveillance, forced vaccinations and closures of businesses differ from America's recent experience — minus the extraordinarily harsh punishments the Chinese demonstrators may face.

"There's a direct correlation," Louisiana pastor Tony Spell told Newsweek. "The only difference is the confrontations are more physical in China, where with us it's been lawsuits, time, intimidation and false imprisonment."

Others say authorities in the U.S. were also guilty of "unprecedented censorship", "trampling rights" and "bullying" during the pandemic.

Pastor Spell was arrested for the first time on March 13, 2020, when COVID was tearing through the United States, for refusing to close his Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge. He was ordered to wear an ankle bracelet and confined to his house, while authorities installed nine cameras, some at his church, some at his home — including one at his bedroom window to monitor the whereabouts of him and his parishioners.

The federal government issued more than $7 billion to churches with its pandemic bailouts to help businesses during forced closures, but Spell chose instead to violate shutdown orders, and was arrested 32 more times.

"They told us if we go to church we'll die, but we could go to Walmart and liquor stores. and Planned Parenthood. We lost our intestinal fortitude to fight back," said Spell. "It's hypocritical and naive. You know who's not naive? Those young people who are revolting in China."

Small pockets of Chinese protesters, some waving blank pieces of paper so as to protect themselves from repercussions should they be accused of disparaging the Chinese Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping, broke out early last month. The demonstrations were driven by anger over the deaths of at least 10 people died in a fire at an apartment building in Urumqi that had been locked from the outside due to COVID restrictions.

White House coronavirus response coordinator Ashish Jha on ABC's This Week on Sunday addressed the differences between China and the U.S., saying their policy "is not our strategy" because it is "certainly not realistic for the American people. Our strategy has been, build up immunity in the population by getting people vaccinated."

The two countries are now at very different points in the pandemic with Chinese COVID infections hitting records and those in the U.S. way down.

In Spell's case, he sued Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards and on May 13 the state's Supreme Court ruled 5-2 in Spell's favor, with Judge William Craine noting that it was legal for executives in a conference room to, in close proximity, talk, eat and engage in any other operations of the business. "However, if 10 of these individuals left the conference room, walked across the street to church, and entered an otherwise empty sanctuary building for a worship service, they were subject to criminal prosecution."

Thus, Spell had recourse unavailable to protesters in China. And, of course, nothing so draconian as forcibly locking people in their homes has occurred in the U.S., though many lost their jobs, were arrested or cited, had their businesses shuttered and were forced off osocial media for challenging COVID restrictions. Incidences include:

Since January, 2020, Twitter challenged 11 million accounts for violating its COVID policy, suspended 11,230 of them and removed 97,674 pieces of content, according to information released by Twitter's new chief, Elon Musk.

Maurice Monk, 45, was arrested in Oakland in June, 2021, after an altercation with a bus driver who demanded he wear a mask. Monk subsequently died in jail, allegedly after authorities refused him his blood pressure medication.

Paddle-boarder crackdown

In April, 2020, a man paddle-boarding at a Malibu, California beach was arrested for violating COVID lockdowns. A YouTube video shows the man alone in the water with no one within 100 yards of him, until a police boat pulls alongside him and chases him ashore. A week earlier, a surfer was fined $1,000 in Manhattan Beach when he similarly ignored orders to leave the ocean.

Also in April, 2020, Riverside County, California, public health officer Dr. Cameron Kaiser announced that staying home, covering your face and social-distancing were no longer suggestions but mandatory. Failure to comply would result in fines, imprisonment, or both. Other areas across the U.S. would soon issue similar mandates.

In October, 2021, a 17-year old boy was arrested for violating a mask mandate at a school board meeting in El Paso, Texas, even though the board's mandate had been suspended by a court a week earlier. The board decided a day after the teen was arrested to not press charges, according to ABC News.

Early in the pandemic, liberal think tank American Progress was chronicling the ways jurisdictions were enforcing their protocols, and its list included dozens of arrests and suspended business licenses and closures.

One of the more bizarre incidents involved a man in New Jersey who was shot by a gunman in April, 2020. When police arrived, they arrested the gunshot victim because he was in his place of business, a recording studio, in violation of COVID shutdown protocols. American Progress ceased additions to its list a few weeks later.

Thus far, officials in President Joe Biden's administration have been restrained in their response to the demonstrations in China, expressing support for peaceful protests wherever they may take place. Ted Cruz, the Republican senator from Texas called such remarks "pitiful" and tweeted that, "At a potentially historic inflection point, Dems shill for the CCP," shorthand for the Chinese Communist Party. Congressman Michael McCaul, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, tweeted: "As Chinese citizens bravely protest, Joe Biden & the corporate class shrug."

Scott Powell of the Discovery Institute, a non-partisan think tank co-founded by supply-side economics pioneer George Gilder, has noted that some Chinese protesters, as opposed to those waving blank sheets of paper, are risking their lives by outwardly calling for an end to the CCP and Xi Jinping's rule.

Writing for Discovery on November 29, he posited that the Biden administration "know that if they support the Chinese people's revolt, they will also be acknowledging the irrationality of the CCP's policy. And by implication, they would be indicting their past COVID policies" in the U.S., which he writes has included: "unprecedented censorship, the corruption of science and administration of health care, the decertification of dissenting doctors, the banning of non-vaccination alternative therapeutic treatments for COVID, and later, the mandatory injections of an emergency use authorized COVID-19 vaccine formula with a safety profile that's being increasingly questioned."

A soon-to-be published poll from the Trafalgar Group indicates that 49.5% of adult Americans believe that "Biden should be more vocal in his support for citizen-led protests in China" while 19.8% do not and 30.7% are unsure. Such a high percentage who are not sure indicates that the mainstream press is not significantly covering the story, Trafalgar said. A much larger number of Republicans than Democrats believe Biden hasn't been sufficiently supportive of protesters.

But John Vecchione, an attorney with the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which proclaims it "views the administrative state as an especially serious threat to constitutional freedoms", says the issue is less about partisan politics and more about "risk tolerance," noting that a handful of Democrat governors joined their Republican counterparts in balking at shutting down large portions of their economies during the pandemic.

"There was an effort here to use the power of the government to get people to toe the line with vaccines and speech," Vecchione told Newsweek," noting that thousands of troops in the U.S. armed services received general discharges for refusing COVID injections.

"The Communists in China do much worse to you than the worst lockdown-states in America," he said. "But the COVID hysterics aren't criticizing China. Are there people here who would do what they are doing in China? I'm afraid of the answer to that."

Suppressing speech

The NCLA is among those that are assisting Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt sue Biden administration officials for allegedly colluding with social media companies to suppress freedom of speech. The attorneys recently deposed Dr. Anthony Fauci, though Vecchione isn't at liberty to say what Biden's chief medical officer said during his deposition.

Vecchione is also working with Mark Changizi, Michael Singer and Daniel Kotzin in a lawsuit against the Department of Health and Human Services. The three men built large followings on Twitter until censored "due to their reasoned criticism of COVID-19 restrictions," according to the NCLA. The "speech ban included information the government later conceded was true," and, "Statements by President Biden, Press Secretary Jen Psaki, and other federal officials unequivocally prove they told social media companies what and whom to censor."

A lower court refused to hear the case, thus Vecchione and the NCLA have appealed.

Some make the case that U.S. officials asking social media companies to remove COVID-19 posts that question the government narrative of the moment is similar to what China has been doing.

Two weeks ago, for example, a public post on the Chinese app WeChat titled "10 Questions" went viral then simply disappeared, allegedly at the behest of the CCP, and an account that promoted the missive was permanently banned. Among the questions were: "Compared to influenza viruses, is Omicron's fatality rate low or high?" Also, "In human history, have we ever successfully eradicated any strain of influenza virus?" and, "The vast majority of people have received three or more doses of the vaccine, so why are outbreaks of infections continuing apace?"

The letter coincided with the opening of the World Cup soccer tournament, and China state TV was airing commercials warning of large numbers of COVID deaths in the West, even as thousands of maskless fans cheered their teams — Chinese television appeared to show scant shots of the crowd.

At the website Weibo, users can see the maskless fans in Qatar alongside images of workers in China wearing white hazmat gear, and a maskless Xi Jinping hobnobbing with Biden. For some, the former is reminiscent of photos of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and California Governor Gavin Newsom dining and partying maskless at a time when Californians were told that mask-wearing was mandated outside one's home.

"It's always a danger when there's an emergency that people's rights will be trampled underfoot," Vecchione said. "There's even people in the U.S. who were vaccinated but fired from their jobs because they didn't get the booster shot, and courts are ruling that losing your job is an important injury."

Attorney Tracy Henderson, founder of California Parents Union, which helps parents fight against school pandemic protocols, represented the father of a Mountain View, California 4-year-old boy "who had been going home inconsolable for hours due to this mask-pressure crap," as she put it.

Henderson sent a cease and desist letter to the school's principal claiming that mask mandates were always "non-binding recommendations" and that schools are not enforcement arms of health agencies. The letter accuses the boy's teacher and others of "unspeakable conduct" and of "bullying, discrimination and severe harassment" over his refusal to properly wear a mask.

In lieu of suing, the father, Shawn (Henderson doesn't use his last name for fear of retribution), took video in August of his child's school principal explaining that, "I cannot keep spending time on this same issue ... I'm going to have you removed from campus if you don't leave at this time," before calling in a police officer to remove the man and his son. Henderson helped Shawn edit the video, and it went viral on the Internet.

"It was tried in the court of public opinion, and within 24 hours they backed down," Henderson told Newsweek. The Mountain View Whisman School District later told Fox News, in part, that Shawn "worked with an advocacy group outside Mountain View to create a professional video in order to nationally shame a public servant doing her job."

Earlier this year, Henderson and her group penned a writ of mandate challenging school districts and the California Department of Health that includes dozens of examples of what she contends is overreach. Among them is a 12-year-old girl who was made to stay an unspecified number of days outside her classroom in sun, then in the cold, and was provided hand-warmers and hid under a bench to avoid being rained on. The "segregation and isolation blatantly put (her) on display," says the writ.

"I can't believe they're protesting this kind of thing in China," Henderson said. "In China, they'll kill you, but the censorship is basically the same as it is here. We just have more freedom to get away from it. But we have to replace leadership, or we're headed toward that place where doors are bolted because someone, maybe, has COVID."