Epidemic control workers stand guard behind the locked gate at an apartment building in the Central Business District in Beijing on Nov. 26, 2022. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Beijing’s policies and actions during the COVID-19 pandemic have received insufficient scrutiny, particularly considering revelations and policy reversals over the past several months.
In the face of rising evidence to the contrary, the Chinese regime has adamantly maintained for three years that the zoonotic theory is the only true basis for the virus outbreak. Chinese scientists went to great lengths to obfuscate the virus origins by removing at least 13 genome sequences representing the earliest virus strains from public databases early in 2020.
However, according to The New York Times, scientists from Australia, France, the United States, and other countries subsequently discovered “previously unseen gene sequences from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan” in an online database.
Furthermore, in February, in a classified report based on new intelligence provided to the White House and Congress, the U.S. Energy Department concluded that the pandemic “most likely arose from a laboratory leak,” according to The Wall Street Journal. This was just the latest in a series of intelligence reports and independent analyses that concluded that the lab leak was almost certainly the most likely explanation for the virus outbreak.
Then there was the abrupt reversal in December 2022 of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s signature “zero-COVID” policy that was exposed as a complete failure after nearly three years of harsh measures that killed many Chinese and depressed the economy. Even mask mandates are being rescinded in China. As Reuters reported on April 16, “Beijing’s subway has dropped mandatory mask requirements for travelers,” which is consistent with a broader policy that relaxed the mask mandate for people using public transport.
And like all failed policies concocted by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), “zero COVID” has subsequently been filed down the memory hole to shift accountability away from the CCP. And foreign media have obligingly avoided condemning China’s “zero-COVID” policy since it was reversed, too.
Police officers block Wulumuqi Street in Shanghai on Nov. 27, 2022. Protests against zero-COVID occurred the previous night in response to a deadly fire in Urumqi, Xinjiang. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
It must be remembered that the CCP consists of privileged bureaucrats who are authoritarians first and foremost. In all things, they inherently know what is best—or at least claim they do. The No. 1 objective of the CCP is to cling to political power; everything else is negotiable. And it uses all the tools at its disposal to do so, including the tentacled bureaucracy and surveillance state that reaches every corner and household in the country, as well as the People’s Police to suppress public dissent, the Great Firewall that restricts access to foreign information sources, and GAPP’s total control of the narrative by state-run media that censors any viewpoints except those that are CCP-approved.
A large part of that effort is to control the information available to the Chinese people, as well as to craft and deliver messages intended for internal consumption. Their internal messaging is synergistic with the external propaganda by the state-run media and Chinese diplomatic corps targeted at the United States and other Western countries. Two of their main state media outlets are Xinhua and Global Times, but many more outlets are carefully coordinated to convey CCP-approved narratives. Xinhua and Global Times post articles in Chinese dialects for internal consumption but also in English, French, Russian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, and other languages for external consumption.
These media have been hard at work over the past three years conveying the CCP narrative on the pandemic, the supposed benefits to China and the world of Xi’s “zero-COVID” policy, the alleged beneficence of communist China in providing medical supplies and Chinese vaccines to other countries, and countering news reports in foreign media that expose the truth about the virus origins and Chinese intransigence in sharing genome sequences and other critical virus-related information with the medical and scientific communities.
Keeping in mind the main CCP objective of retaining power at all costs, it is easy to discern how the above messaging helped accomplish that by convincing the Chinese people that the regime was competently managing the virus, by claiming their government is magnanimously helping other countries combat the virus, by playing on inherent Chinese xenophobia by attacking foreign critics of the regime, and by persuading the Chinese to adhere to strict “zero COVID” measures to “fight the virus.”
Peter Daszak (R) and other members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus arrive at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, in China's Wuhan city, on Feb. 3, 2021. Hector Retamal/AFP via Getty Images
Part of the existing social contract between the CCP and the Chinese people is that the regime would deliver economic opportunity and an improved standard of living. As long as the regime can appear to deliver relative prosperity to the average Chinese, the people have been content to tolerate the CCP’s authoritarian measures—at least up to a point. That contract crumbled in the second half of 2022 as the pandemic shut down China’s export economy and people protested in the streets against the “zero-COVID” policy. And since the CCP cannot withstand major unrest, Xi lost face by reversing his signature policy.
Concluding Thoughts
CCP messaging during the pandemic has been increasingly exposed as lies by foreign governments and researchers, especially as related to the virus origins and Xi’s “zero-COVID” policy. Even the World Health Organization has weighed in, requesting that the Chinese be more forthcoming in providing key data about the virus’s origins.
As reported by CNN on April 6, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s COVID-19 technical lead and head of its program on emerging diseases, has stated that “key data from China about the origins of the Covid-19 outbreak [is missing], putting the world in jeopardy” (emphasis added).
Furthermore, no one knows the real Chinese death toll from COVID-19 since the first official case was reported in November 2019. The official death toll was static at just over 4,600 from May 2020 through December 2022. The CCP almost certainly underreported it for political reasons to “show the world” that China’s response was successful and should be copied by other countries.
After the “zero-COVID” policy was terminated, China reported an outbreak of a milder strain of the virus beginning in January. Yet the death toll underreporting continued.
TIME quoted an analysis from Zuo-Feng Zhang, chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles: “Using a report from the National School of Development at Peking University that found 64% of the population was infected by mid-January, he estimated 900,000 people would have died in the previous five weeks based on a conservative 0.1% case fatality rate. That means the official hospital death count is less than 7% of the total mortality seen during the outbreak.”
Yet the Chinese statistics reported by Worldometers on April 24 reflect a mere 503,302 total cases and only 5,272 Chinese deaths to date. That’s far from 64 percent of the population being infected (.64 x 1,454,886,466 = 931,127,338) and an estimated 900,000 deaths!
There can be only one conclusion: the CCP’s COVID narrative is nothing but a pack of lies. This is what communists do.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
Stu Cvrk
Author
Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. Through education and experience as an oceanographer and systems analyst, Cvrk is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his political commentary.
