Don’t Be Duped by China’s Changing COVID-19 Policies

Don’t Be Duped by China’s Changing COVID-19 Policies
A person holding an umbrella with a slogan on it takes part in anti-CCP protests, amid China's "zero-COVID" policy, near the Chinese consulate in New York on Nov. 29, 2022. (David 'Dee' Delgado/Reuters)
Jennifer Margulis
Joe Wang
2/2/2023
Updated:
3/24/2023
0:00

It’s easy to be duped by the mainstream media’s coverage of China, but it’s important to realize that information originating from the Chinese regime is never intended to inform the public about what’s actually going on. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) promotes disinformation to serve the sole purpose of furthering its own agenda.

In fact, in communications that are only available in Chinese, the CCP openly defines the official Chinese media as government-sponsored information.

For example, in this recent official document, translated from Chinese, the CCP states: “The media sponsored by the Party and the government are the propaganda positions of the Party and the government. They must be surnamed the Party and must be in the hands of the Party.” In Chinese culture, “surnamed the Party” means owned by the CCP and “in the hands of the Party” means “completely controlled by the CCP.”
At the same time, we know for a fact that the pandemic is running rampant in China now and that millions of people are currently feared dead. Even the CCP’s powerful propaganda machine hasn’t been able to prevent information about the atrocities happening inside China from leaking out.

The Failure of the CCP’s ‘Zero-COVID’ Policy

While the CCP pretended that its draconian “zero-COVID” policy kept the virus in check and the death rates down, people living inside communist China have told The Epoch Times that this is not the case.

We believe that throughout the pandemic, people have been dying in record numbers from untreated viral infections, bad reactions to the vaccines, and the CCP’s anti-human policies that were supposed to contain the virus.

For quite a while now, crematoria haven’t been able to process the overwhelming number of dead bodies showing up at their doors. In rural areas, people are being forced to bypass cremation, and bury their loved ones in the ground.

The Chinese Regime’s Pulling Its ‘Official Data’ out of Thin Air

Joe Wang, one of the authors of this article, got his hair cut at a Chinese barbershop in Toronto the other week. The barber has friends and family members who live in China. She talks to them every week or so on the phone. When her friend’s father died, there was a long wait to get the body processed. Her friend resorted to bribing the director of the crematorium with a large sum of money to jump the queue so his father could be properly buried.

The director told the bereaved son that he would cremate his father separately, instead of with several other bodies, which is what the crematorium has been forced to do for a long time now because so many people have been dying.

It’s impossible to believe any of the official information coming out of China. Death numbers are far from accurate. In fact, the CCP pulls these numbers out of thin air.

For three years now, the ruling CCP has stringently enforced its propaganda-driven zero-COVID policy.
Under the guise of containing the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the CCP forbade citizens from going out to get food, which resulted in people starving in their apartment blocks. Meanwhile, Chinese citizens who tested positive were forcibly taken to relocation camps.
All scientific discussion and debate about the best way forward was summarily silenced.
Wang is a molecular geneticist who spent over a decade studying viruses. He can tell you from his experience that a zero-COVID policy was destined to fail, as the CCP’s policy was never science-driven and never made scientific sense.

Burned Alive

Two and a half months ago, in late November, the citizens of China and people around the world finally realized that the CCP has been taking things too far.
On Nov. 24, 2022, a fire started on the 15th floor of an apartment block in the Xinjiang region, in the extreme west of China.

As the blaze continued spreading upward, residents burned alive, their screams audible to people on the floors below them.

These victims of the fire, many of whom were well-to-do, could not leave their building, and no emergency technicians could get to them.

Why? Because the regime had locked them in, and firefighters were not even able to approach the building due to lockdown barricades.

No one is sure how many people died in that fire. The official number from the Chinese authorities is 10 killed, with nine others injured by inhaling toxic smoke, according to regime mouthpiecel China Daily. But activists, dissidents, and relatives of the fire victims insist that dozens more died as firefighters tried to put out the blaze with water that fell far short of its target because of the bollards blocking them from getting closer to the building.
Shocking footage of the incident, which went viral on the internet, spurred widespread and angry protests across China over the deaths of these helpless citizens.

Controlling People by Dehumanizing Them

In the aftermath of the fire, the world rightly saw the totalitarian excess that exemplifies the CCP’s dehumanizing approach to controlling the people of China.

Western media has reported that the Chinese people’s protests caused the regime to finally back down on its draconian zero-COVID policy and afford the Chinese people a reprieve from lockdowns.

But we believe that the CCP’s decision to reverse course did not have much to do with the protesters. Rather, the protests gave officials an excuse to stop a failing policy. And if there is, indeed, a surge in COVID-19 cases and deaths, that will allow the CCP to blame the protesters: “See? You wanted us to open up. We did. Now look what happened!” It will also give the regime a way to continue to hide the real data—that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent Chinese people have died under “zero-COVID”—and have a justification for the lower census numbers that are sure to be recorded this year.

By ending its inhumane and unsustainable policy, the CCP was, according to Wired, “unleashing the biggest coronavirus outbreak the world has ever seen.”
Bloomberg reported estimates leaked from the Chinese regime that 250 million people may have been exposed in the first 20 days of December, including a single-day high of 37 million, which the news agency called “the world’s largest COVID outbreak.”

You Can’t Lock Out a Virus

People in the West passed through lockdowns much more comfortably than the Chinese people. In most countries, people were able to go to the grocery store and shop online, and many managed to continue working, from home.

In comparison, the large-scale imprisonment of the entire Chinese population, which started before the Western countries’ policies and has continued long after, has been utterly brutal.

But no one was going to escape COVID-19 completely. The idea that we could spend two weeks apart (two weeks that turned into two months and then two years) in order to avoid overwhelming hospitals and emergency response workers was short-sighted from the start.

SARS-CoV-2 is an endemic coronavirus that could no more be contained or eliminated than the common cold.

It’s true that some countries—most notably New Zealand—managed to stave off infections for a while by shutting their borders. But once New Zealand opened its borders, cases of coronavirus, regardless of vaccine status, skyrocketed.
The zero-COVID policy in China has served as a justification for continuing to brutalize the Chinese people in the name of enforcing it. Given the lack of any kind of credible or accurate data, it’s impossible to know whether it indeed delayed infection and kept death rates lower.

Chinese People Deserve Freedom

Simmering anger at the CCP is widespread inside China, and the people have also spent decades trying to protest the Party’s unreasonable, inhumane, and intolerable edicts, often with less successful results.

The fight for access to accurate information and ways to express themselves without censorship is daily and ongoing in China.

The Omicron variants are spreading in China now. These variants are more contagious and less lethal, centering their activity in the nasal area rather than the lungs.

We aren’t in the same situation as we were in January 2020. Many have been exposed. We have effective treatments. The variants are less virulent. And we understand much more about the virus than we did three years ago.

The Chinese people have suffered for far too long. They deserve accurate, science-forward information about COVID-19, and they deserve freedom from the tyranny of the CCP.

Jennifer Margulis, Ph.D., is an award-winning journalist and author of “Your Baby, Your Way: Taking Charge of Your Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Parenting Decisions for a Happier, Healthier Family.” A Fulbright awardee and mother of four, she has worked on a child survival campaign in West Africa, advocated for an end to child slavery in Pakistan on prime-time TV in France, and taught post-colonial literature to nontraditional students in inner-city Atlanta. Learn more about her at JenniferMargulis.net
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