China’s totalitarian regime has been boasting to the world that its superior government and people have conquered the coronavirus while decadent westerners struggle with the pandemic. Chinese President Xi Jinping believes that his latest slogan — ‘zero’ — representing a goal of no new cases of the virus, will further vindicate China’s broader goal of global leadership and domination.
How Xi plans to reach that goal is obvious: lie.
The government, which claims that virtually no new COVID-19 cases have appeared recently in Wuhan, has begun to relax the lockdown in Hubei Province. But while the Chinese regime tries to control perceptions of events inside the country, widespread anger and intensified distrust at the government’s moral and administrative failures is giving rise to a groundswell of citizen journalists attempting to break through the official propaganda machinery of CCTV, CGTN, People’s Daily, and Global Times and to expose what is happening.
The evidence they present about COVID-19 contradicts official narratives. Stories on Chinese social media, censored or removed almost as soon as they appear, reveal how local governments cover up new cases and how hospitals are ordered to report new cases as normal flu or pneumonia.
Ordinarily, a Communist government that lies about a disaster would only affect the people inside the country. But the truly dangerous aspect of this Chinese campaign of lies and deceit is that they’re lying to the world as well. They are giving false information to world health authorities that could potentially be catastrophic down the road.
The stories indicate that Hubei Province, far from moving toward normality, is being locked down again by people and police in the surrounding provinces who know the real situation in Hubei. One video showed a riot that occurred when Hubei police tried to open the border with Jiangxi — people and police in Jiangxi revolted because they would be exposed to Hubei.The government brags about mass recoveries from the virus, but independent media have reported that up to 14 percent of those have tested positive again. The regime appears to be cooking the books on epidemiological statistics, to be not counting cases in which tests indicate infection but people are asymptomatic. Censors almost immediately removed a photo from the Caixin website showing a truck delivering 2,500 urns filled with the ashes of cremated people. Censors removed as well … an accompanying report that a truck had made another such delivery the same day.
Wouldn’t you like to know if there was a one in six chance that, even if you contracted COVID-19, you could get it again?
How many people actually believe the Chinese government’s lies? The western media is swallowing them whole. Here in the U.S., the media finds it useful to hold up the Chinese government’s response and compare it unfavorably to Trump’s. Even though Beijing’s statistics are as phony as a three-dollar bill, we’re told that the way out of this crisis is to follow the Chinese shining example.
China’s misinformation and propaganda are a threat to global public health. And it’s their own people who are suffering because of it.
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