"Picking quarrels and provoking trouble"

In China, journalism is a crime.

The other day, I saw this meme making the rounds on Facebook:

First of all, China does have a vaccine against COVID-19. Several vaccines, in fact. (More on that in a moment.)

More importantly, I don’t believe for a second that China has “recovered” from the pandemic at all. As I’ve written before, I’m prepared to accept that they’ve done a better job tramping down the virus than Western countries. They locked down and sealed off the epicenter of Wuhan - which may have suffered ten times as many COVID infections as officially reported - to a degree that would never happen in a democratic country. But I remain very skeptical that life in the country has returned to what passes for normal in a dictatorship.

It turns out that when you jail anyone who reports on what the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want people to know, you can make things look very rosy indeed:

Zhang Zhan, a 37-year-old former lawyer and citizen journalist who was arrested in May while reporting from Wuhan, has been s…