In Wake of COVID Rebound in China, Falun Gong Founder Says Virus Targets CCP

Mr. Li Hongzhi gestures to the crowd at a Falun Dafa experience-sharing conference held in Washington on July 25, 2010. Mark Zou/The Epoch Times

More than three years since the first outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, which became ground zero in the worldwide pandemic, the virus is seeing a resurgence in the communist country.

As the fast-spreading Omicron variant dubbed “Eris”—named for the Greek goddess of strife and discord—takes hold in China, the country is again seeing a spike in deaths among members of the regime’s top echelons, despite their special access to medical care and drugs that are denied to ordinary citizens.

Among those who have died in the latest wave are dozens of Chinese officials, senior executives, prominent academics, and scientists, some in their 20s and 30s. The spike in deaths seems reminiscent of that seen in late December, when the country was grappling with another huge upsurge in cases that saw hospitals and crematoriums pushed beyond the breaking point.

Recent obituaries of prominent figures published by Chinese media, state-owned entities, and Chinese universities have highlighted their CCP affiliations, using titles such as “outstanding Communist Party member.”

Mr. Li Hongzhi, founder of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, told The Epoch Times on Aug. 26 that the virus is directed at the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), along with those who blindly follow the Party, defend it, and give their lives to it.

In January, Mr. Li said that more than 400 million people in China had died of COVID-19 and that the Party has been covering up the true situation of the pandemic since it broke out more than three years ago.

Since the start of the pandemic, the Chinese regime has systematically covered up information about the origins of the virus and the true death toll—consistent with its practice of concealing news unfavorable to the Communist Party’s image.

Three years of lockdown measures also isolated people and made it difficult to glean information about at-home deaths. Many doctors have told The Epoch Times they were instructed not to cite COVID as the cause of death. But numerous pieces of evidence, including crematoriums across the country running over capacity, body bags piling at hospitals, memorial signage littering residential neighorhoods, and funeral supplies running out all paint a picture of devastation.

Health care workers attend to a COVID-19 patient in Shanghai on Jan. 14, 2023. China in recent weeks has seen another resurgence of the virus. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

During the early months of the pandemic in 2020, a funeral home in Wuhan had thousands of ash urns stacked inside the facility for pickup. In January, a Chinese study indicated that about 900 million Chinese were infected with the virus during the late 2022 outbreak.

In June, the Ministry of Civil Affairs omitted cremation figures from its report on marriage and social welfare after months of unexplained delays, withholding a key indicator of the death toll from the December COVID wave.

Data released in July from the Zhejiang provincial bureau showed an over 70 percent spike in cremations from last year. That report was subsequently deleted, along with media coverage of the data.

At the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, Mr. Li described plagues as an inevitability when moral values deteriorate.

“When humans become corrupt in their hearts, they will generate karma, fall sick, and suffer calamities,” Mr. Li wrote in an article titled “Rationality.”

“But a pandemic like the current ‘CCP Virus’ (Wuhan Pneumonia) has come with a purpose and with a target. It has come to eliminate the followers of the evil Party and those who go along with the evil CCP.”

Mr. Li’s advice is that people “stay far away from the evil CCP and don’t align with the evil Party because what lies behind it is the red demon. Its behavior and actions are thuggish, and it stops at no evil.”

In China, almost everyone has joined a Party-affiliated organization at some point in their life. Demonstration of loyalty to the Party is a necessary condition for holding a position of authority.

Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a discipline rooted in traditional Chinese beliefs on moral and spiritual development. Incorporating meditative exercises and a set of moral teachings centered on the principles of truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance, the discipline is practiced in more than 100 countries worldwide.

The practice gained an estimated 100 million adherents in China by 1999. The communist regime, fearing this popularity, launched a violent persecution of the faith that has caused the deaths of an untold number of practitioners.

A Historical Perspective

Over the past 3 1/2 years, the world has learned to live with the virus while China’s ruling regime aggressively pursued its draconian “zero-COVID” campaign aimed at eliminating every potential case.

Eris, now a dominant variant driving up infection rates in the United States and elsewhere, so far appears no more dangerous than previous strains, according to health experts.

While officials in China have played down the public health risk and on Aug. 28 dropped COVID-19 testing requirements for inbound international travelers, some observers have taken the deaths of Chinese elites as a sign that the situation in the country might not be as rosy as authorities are seeking to project.

Patients are cared for by relatives and medical staff as they are seen on beds set up in the atrium area of a busy hospital in Shanghai, China, on Jan. 13, 2023. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

The death toll in China vastly exceeds that of any other country during the pandemic, noted Heng He, a U.S.-based analyst of Chinese political affairs.

Mr. Heng observed that throughout history, natural disasters have tended to surge around a time when China was experiencing a dynastic change.

“In traditional Chinese culture, there’s a prevalent belief that disasters are a reflection of the state of morality,” he told The Epoch Times.

A case in point, he said, was a bubonic plague during the last phase of the Ming Dynasty. During the 1640s, that deadly epidemic wiped out hundreds of thousands of people and contributed to the collapse of the dynasty. The plague disappeared when China entered the succeeding Qing Dynasty, its last imperial era.

What’s happening today appears to mirror this, he said.

“The CCP’s rule, from what I see, is approaching its end,” Mr. Heng said.