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Home » China » China Insights » China Staggers Under Huge Pandemic Losses

CHINA STAGGERS UNDER HUGE PANDEMIC LOSSES

Mass depopulation covered up by communist regime amidst growing societal unrest
By Leo Timm
Leo Timm covers China-related news, culture, and history. Follow him on Twitter
at @kunlunpeaks
Published: January 26, 2023
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People line up for nucleic acid tests to detect COVID-19 at a public testing
site on November 17, 2022 in Beijing, China. (Image: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

News analysis

Millions are dying throughout China with the novel coronavirus infecting 1
billion people per the latest estimates — a tremendous blow to the country that
is already grappling with severe economic downturn and population decline.

The decimation is apparent from rural communities, where people passed the
Chinese lunar new year by struggling to bury or cremate the dead, to the top
echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which now has elderly and retired
cadres “going to see Marx” at more than a dozen times the normal rate.

Currently available information suggests that the pandemic has taken an
astronomically greater toll upon China than official figures claim — and that
the Communist Party has spared no cost to cover up the true extent of the
disaster.

For three years, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, has been spreading
across China and around the world after emerging from Wuhan in late 2019.

Despite years of exorbitant mass testing and brutal lockdowns enforced under the
CCP’s “zero-COVID” policy, the regime proved unable to contain the pathogen, and
lifted nearly all pandemic restrictions last December.

* ‘We Don’t Want the Communist Party’: Chinese Rise Up Against ‘Zero-COVID’
Lockdowns
* Xi’s Credibility Nosedives as CCP Loses Control Over Pandemic in China
* In Leaked Recording, Elite Chinese Scholar Laments Crippling Dysfunction of
Communist Regime

As Chinese welcomed the lunar new year on Jan. 22, the atmosphere for many was
anything but celebratory, with blue and white wreaths of mourning lining the
deserted streets in many locales. News about infections and deaths continue to
flood around China and beyond as nearly every family encounters tragedy.

SENDING OFF THE DEAD

Symbolic of the massive surge in pandemic deaths is the difficulty many Chinese
now face in making funerary arrangements for their loved ones, as described in a
recent article by The Epoch Times.

A mourner carries the cremated remains of a loved one as he and others wear
traditional white funeral clothing, during a funeral on January 14, 2023 in
Shanghai, China. (image: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

A “review of 10 provinces and major cities found that more than 30 funeral homes
published tenders for cremation ovens, ash urns, vans to transport bodies, and
refrigerators over the past three weeks alone,” writes reporter Eva Fu in the
Jan. 24 piece, noting that China’s famous ceramic producers have been unable to
meet demand due to the crushing amount of deaths.

In Beijing and other major cities, permanent traffic jams have developed around
crematoriums. Making an appointment can take months or in some cases years,
according to internet posts and those with family living in China.

A woman living in eastern China who recently had three family members die on the
same day waited until midnight on Jan. 5 for the online booking schedule at a
funeral parlor to reset. Despite clicking to book an appointment less than half
a minute after 12:00 a.m, she found herself in roughly the 160th of 400 total
slots allotted for the day.

On Jan. 22, a Chinese man living in New York surnamed Cheng told overseas
Chinese-language outlet Apollo Net that according to a friend of his living in
Beijing’s Fangshan district, one elite family saw five deaths recently. One of
the deceased was a deputy director of the Beijing Public Security Bureau.

Even so, the family has been unable to cremate any of the dead. According to Mr.
Cheng’s friend, whose relative works in a funeral parlor, even pulling
connections can do little to expedite the procedure.

“This is a deputy head of the police, and even he [has to wait for three
months], to say nothing of ordinary folk. It also indicates that there are even
more powerful higher-ups waiting [to be cremated,]” Cheng said.

Doctors and ordinary residents in China’s countryside have described the
catastrophic toll the virus has taken on their communities. Mr. Zou, living in a
southern Chinese town of 20,000, told The Epoch Times on Jan. 23 that 200 or 300
locals had died over the previous four days alone. Many people in the town,
located in rural Hunan Province, were unable to arrange cremations, so they
buried the deceased in ditches and along hills around the town.

In northern China’s Shanxi Province, a doctor with the family name Li said that
90 percent of the residents in his town had contracted COVID-19 and “more than
4,000 people have died.” He noted that surrounding villages were each suffering
dozens of deaths, and that both young and elderly people were succumbing to the
disease, some of them suddenly.

* Does the Pandemic Target the CCP? International COVID Stats Following Return
of Mainland Travelers Sheds Some Light

Mourners gather outside the memorial halls for the deceased at a funeral home in
Shanghai, China, on Saturday, Dec. 31, 2022. (Image: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via
Getty Images)

One family of four all perished after battling the infection for 20 days, Li
said. Echoing this tragedy, a Chinese woman posted a tearful video online in
which she said that her cousin’s family of four died suddenly after weeks of
infection.

On Jan. 17, the Chinese National Bureau of Statistics announced that the
country’s population had shrunk by nearly 1 million in 2022 — the first time
since the famine of the 1960s that resulted from the communist Great Leap
Forward campaign and claimed tens of millions of lives.

Despite this officially recognized population drop, which would indicate
millions of excess deaths, the CCP has acknowledged less than 100,000 deaths
from COVID-19 to date.

‘EVEN IF A FEW MILLION DIE, SO WHAT?’

While maintaining impossibly low statistics about the pandemic, the Communist
Party has kept up its propaganda narrative about prevailing over disaster and
expertly governing the Chinese people.

Jiang Yunzhong, a Marxist scholar and Party official at Beijing’s prestigious
Tsinghua University, claimed that the COVID-19 death toll in China “still falls
in an acceptable range.”

“Even if a few million die, so what?” he wrote on Chinese social media on Jan.
14. “China had 10 million deaths in 2021; even if there are 5 million more
deaths, it’s just a 50 percent increase — a difference between two deaths versus
three deaths.”

Workers set up beds at an exhibition centre that was converted into a hospital
in Wuhan in China’s central Hubei province on February 4, 2020. (Image: STR/AFP
via Getty Images)

Jiang’s statements echo those made by communist leader Mao Zedong during the
Great Leap Forward famine (1959–1962), who told fellow Party officials that
“even if one finger were cut off, there would still be nine left.”

Estimates of starvation deaths following the Great Leap Forward range from 30 to
50 million — roughly two or three times the number of Chinese who died in the
Japanese invasion during World War II.

Those familiar with the history of Communist China are aware that the regime
minimizes disasters by not only covering up or ignoring the scale of the damage,
but also by spinning calamity into “victory” for propaganda purposes to maintain
the Party’s image of being “great, glorious, and correct.”

The director of Beijing’s Center for Disease Prevention and Control, Huang Chun,
recently attended a conference where he praised the Center and its personnel for
the three years of “zero-COVID” work, saying that they “lived up to their
mission.”

UNVEILING THE SHROUD

Various observers have called the CCP’s narratives into question, including
Western data analysis agencies who estimate that millions, not thousands, have
died from SARS-CoV-2; as well as those in the overseas Chinese community.

Yi Fuxian, a noted Chinese demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
believes that the CCP has long covered up the truth about China’s population
decline. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, he estimated that the actual population
of China is not 1.4 billion as officially claimed, but closer to 1.28 billion
— making India (now with nearly 1.4 billion people itself) the world’s largest
country by population.

Breaking down available data about cremations, burials, and the normal death
rate in China, New York-based political risk consultancy SinoInsider estimates
that the pandemic could be having a far outsized impact on the country.

Employees wear the protective clothing disinfection in a cinema in Wuhan on July
20, 2020 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China.(Image: Getty Images)

In a newsletter analysis published Jan. 19, SinoInsider estimated the possible
rate of death during the peak of the latest wave of infections tearing across
the country. They pointed to a heavy backlog of scheduled cremations, and
extrapolated the number of people being buried as opposed to cremated at about
40 percent, the figure under normal conditions.

“About 10 million people die in China each year on average, or 27,400 people per
day. The cremation data and rate above suggest that the daily average death toll
during the peak of the latest pandemic wave in China could be in excess of 3.06
million people … or 111.7 times the normal daily average deaths,” the newsletter
concludes.

Previously, SinoInsider had scrutinized Chinese flu data from 2019, and found
significant discrepancies as compared with previous years. This led SinoInsider
to suspect that SARS-CoV-2 could have been spreading in China months prior to
November 2019, when the Wuhan pneumonia is normally believed to have begun.

In July 2022, hackers leaked a national database belonging to the Shanghai
Public Security Bureau. The police files include biometric and identification
data for about 970 million Chinese citizens, or several hundred million less
than the official tally of 1.4 billion people.

A policewoman (R) speaks with a woman on a blocked street in a neighbourhood
under a Covid-19 lockdown in the Jing’ an district of Shanghai on June 2, 2022.
(Image: HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images)

According to a recent technical analysis by the Chinese-language Vision Times,
the 23 gigabytes of data contain the entirety of the Shanghai PSB’s search
backup database stored on Alibaba Cloud — that is, information on the whole
Chinese population for whom the CCP has records.

All Chinese citizens are required to apply for official identification by the
age of 16, and such documents are required for many aspects of academic and
professional life.

* Chinese Reject the Party Line as Pandemic Resurges Nationwide
* Communist Politics Are Bringing Disaster to China–And Xi Jinping

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC PRESSURE

Don Tse, SinoInsider’s lead researcher, believes that the calamity could far
outstrip the death toll of the Great Leap Forward famine, with major
repercussions for the Chinese economy and regime politics.

“During the three years of famine, most of those who died were in the
countryside, and very few people starved in the cities,” Tse told Vision Times
in a written exchange. “Even so, Mao Zedong had to issue a self-criticism and
retreat to the second line [accept a diminished role in the CCP leadership].”

According to Tse, the fact that the pandemic is killing many well-connected CCP
elites and retired cadres puts tremendous pressure on regime head Xi Jinping,
despite his having taken a norm-breaking third term as Party leader last
October.

“The anger that the relatives of these deceased elites feel towards Xi no doubt
far exceeds the opposition Mao faced during the great famine. Xi will lose
supporters and make new enemies,” he told Vision Times on Jan. 26.

In addition, the massive losses from the pandemic will hamstring China’s economy
and the supply chains that run through it. “It’s likely that the CCP’s mantra
about it having a huge consumer market of 1.4 billion will be revealed for the
fraud that it is, and foreign investors will abandon the Chinese market in ever
greater numbers,” Tse said.

Previously, SinoInsider had scrutinized Chinese flu data from 2019, and found
significant discrepancies as compared with previous years. This led SinoInsider
to suspect that SARS-CoV-2 could have been spreading in China months prior to
December 2019, when the Wuhan pneumonia is conventionally believed to have
begun.

Mr. Cheng, the Chinese man residing in New York with official connections in
Beijing, told Apollo Net that he was acquainted with a cadre in the Chinese
Health Commission, who described to him the true level of devastation meted out
by the pandemic.

According to the Health Commission official, 10 percent of the CCP’s membership
had already succumbed to the virus, but the causes of death are not given as
COVID-19 — known as “novel coronavirus pneumonia” in Chinese — and instead
attributed to other ailments.

The official, who is tasked with helping boost China’s fertility rate, said that
the CCP leadership is aware of the grim situation. “They have population
monitoring models, which shows that the top level of the central government
knows,” Mr. Cheng said.

REVELATION

Master Li Hongzhi, founder of the traditional Chinese spiritual practice Falun
Gong, said in a Jan. 15 statement that 400 million people had died of the
pandemic in China over the last three years. He added that another 100 million
would perish by the end of the disaster, the scale of which the CCP has been
desperately attempting to conceal from the world.

Additionally, Master Li said that the SARS pandemic beginning in 2003 claimed
the lives of 200 million Chinese over the years.

This, he said, prompted the CCP to relax its one-child policy to allow two and
then three children per couple once the authorities realized that the population
was in severe decline.

Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa (法輪大法), is a traditional Chinese meditation
discipline. Master Li teaches that through mind-body cultivation, practitioners
can elevate in levels and reach spiritual perfection.

Falun Gong practitioners perform the exercises at a rally commemorating the 20th
anniversary of the persecution of Falun Gong in China, on the West Lawn of
Capitol Hill on July 18, 2019. (Image: Samira Bouaou/The Epoch Times)

From 1992 to 1999, tens of millions of Chinese took up practice in Falun Gong,
but it was suppressed and subject to harrowing persecution by then-leader of the
Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Jiang Zemin. A vast yet still-indeterminate
number of Falun Gong practitioners have been killed by the regime, many of them
murdered in Chinese state-run hospitals to fuel the Party’s profitable organ
transplant industry.

Though reliable statistics are hard to get out of Communist China, scholars
agree that the CCP is the deadliest regime in human history.

In addition to the Great Leap Forward famine, the Party’s land reform and
“anti-rightist” campaigns killed millions of “counterrevolutionaries,” while the
decade-long Cultural Revolution — launched by Mao in 1966 to regain the
authority he lost due to the famine — is estimated to have caused millions more
deaths from terrorism, factional conflict, and suicides.

While Falun Gong is harshly persecuted in mainland China, millions of adherents
continue to raise awareness about the persecution, tell people about their
faith, and encourage their compatriots to distance themselves from the CCP.

Since 2004, more than 400 million Chinese have made statements disavowing the
Communist Party and its affiliated youth organizations. Every day, thousands of
people post messages and declarations explaining their reasons for quitting the
Party.

REJECTING THE CCP

In March 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading worldwide, Master Li wrote:

“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.”

“So, what can be done? 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.”

A protester holds a sign with the slogan ‘Heaven will destroy the Chinese
Communist Party’ in Hong Kong on Jan. 1, 2020. (Image: The Epoch Times)

Since last November, Chinese have been protesting the CCP’s rule en masse. Many
prominent Party members and retired communist officials have died in past weeks,
among them Jiang Zemin, the architect of the anti-Falun Gong campaign. His Nov.
30 death in Shanghai was given as multiple organ failure caused by leukemia.

In his 2020 article, Master Li added: “People must sincerely repent to the Gods
and look for where they have gone wrong in the hopes that they may be given a
chance to mend their ways—only this is the solution.”

According to many personal accounts, the majority of which are published on
Falun Gong website Minghui.org, increasing numbers of Chinese have experienced
miraculous recovery in the pandemic through heartfelt recitation of the “nine
true words” — 法輪大法好，真善忍好, which translates to “Falun Dafa is good, zhen–shan–ren
are good.”

Usually rendered as truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, Zhen, Shan, and
Ren are the core principles taught in Falun Dafa.

* Tag:
* Tag: CCP virus
* Tag: china population
* Tag: china protests
* Tag: chinese population
* Tag: Falun Gong
* Tag: Li Hongzhi
* Tag: Master Li
* Tag: Novel Coronavirus
* Tag: sars-cov-2
* Tag: sinoinsider
* Tag: Wuhan pneumonia
* Tag: xi jinping
* Tag: Yi Fuxian
* Tag: zero-COVID

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