News Analysis
Although Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has largely faded from the front of mind of North Americans, Europeans, and Oceanians since governments widely relaxed mask mandates, social distancing, and vaccine passports in early 2022, all along, the pandemic has remained central to the lives of mainland Chinese under Xi Jinping and his Chinese Communist Party’s much decried “Zero-COVID” scheme.
In late November, Xi and the Party were faced with unprecedented national protests and riots on mainland soil by citizens fed up with living under perpetual lockdown house arrest or being sent to COVID “quarantine” concentration camps, leading to the Chinese people finally calling directly for an end to the CCP.
In response, Xi’s administration decided to first relax, and then abruptly end virtually all restrictions, most notably a moratorium on international travel, a decision which produced a sudden and sharp renewal of Chinese tourism across the world.
But the timing of the outflow of China’s travelers coincides with a remarkable escalation of pandemic cases and death counts admitted to by the regime, fueling fears that the Party’s actions could spark a new wave of global infection and fatalities rivaling the earliest days of the epidemic’s spread in 2020.
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However, data shows that despite an influx of outbound travel combined with the appearance of a multiplication of the pandemic’s severity inside China, destination countries most popular with Chinese tourists have remained largely unaffected.
What the human race can deduce from this situation is that the pandemic is Divine in nature and targets the Chinese Communist Party.
A solemn announcement
The Editorial Board of the Minghui website, which reports on the CCP’s 23-year persecution of the Falun Dafa (法輪大法) meditation and spiritual discipline, confirmed information stated by the practice’s founder, Master Li Hongzhi.
“The latest surge of positive cases is grave in China, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is still covering it up and lying to the world after more than three years of the pandemic,” Minghui wrote.
“This editorial is to confirm that Master revealed the facts to us on January 15, 2023: over 400 million people have died of COVID in China in the past three plus years, and the total death toll will reach 500 million by the time this wave ends.”
In March of 2020, Master Li stated in an article regarding the pandemic published on both the Minghui and Falun Dafa websites, “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.”
“The Gods are starting to eradicate it, and all who align with it will be eliminated. If you don’t believe it, just wait and see,” Master Li told his students and other readers.
Lunar New Year rush
According to a Jan. 13 post by Trip.com, a Singapore-based hotel, flight, and rental car sales aggregator, the company has observed that “mainland Chinese demand for travel continue[s] to surge in the run-up to the Lunar New Year holiday season.”
The Lunar New Year, also called the Spring Festival, runs from Jan. 21 to 27.
The company, which is an official partner of the World Economic Forum, operates a Chinese-language specific platform called Ctrip, which they say enjoyed “search interest for outbound flights from mainland China increas[ing] by 83% compared to the two-week period prior,” while bookings increased by 59 percent.
Specifically, bookings by mainlanders to Hong Kong increased by 1,800 percent compared to the same holiday in 2022, the firm stated.
Ctrip data showed that Thailand was the top destination for Chinese travelers, with an overall doubling of volume compared to the previous year.
The increase was so significant to Thailand’s tourism economy that, “The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT)…launched a campaign called ‘CHINA IS BACK’, to welcome the return of Chinese tourists,” Trip.com stated.
The company added, “They expect more than 300,000 Chinese tourists to visit Thailand in the first three months of 2023 alone.”
Singapore and Malaysia followed closely, showing a 499 and 584 percent increase in mainland China-originating travelers respectively.
Data discrepancy
COVID statistics offered by the CCP have always been extremely dubious.
According to data aggregator Our World in Data, which sources statistics from John Hopkins University, the Party alleges that from the beginning of the pandemic to Nov. 1, 2022, China has only suffered 1.04 million positive COVID cases and 5,549 COVID deaths against a 2021 population estimate by the World Bank of 1.4 billion people.
When measuring these figures against numbers from the United States and its roughly 332 million residents, by Nov. 1, 97.56 million Americans had tested positive for COVID-19 and 1.07 million Americans had died from the disease.
The enormous disparity is self-evident in indicating the Party’s numbers are a coverup.
Jan. 17 reporting by The Bangkok Post stated reports had emerged from private hospitals in Beijing that doctors had been instructed by Chinese officials to not declare COVID-19 as the cause on death certificates if a patient has passed away from respiratory failure.
“Instead, if the deceased had an underlying disease, that should be named as the main cause of death,” the outlet said, citing Reuters.
The instruction additionally ordered, “If doctors believe that the death was caused solely by Covid-19 pneumonia, they must report to their superiors, who will arrange for two levels of ‘expert consultations’ before a Covid death is confirmed,”
The Party established a precedent of hiding the catastrophe of pandemics from the Chinese people and the world during the 2003 SARS outbreak.
Reporting from The Sydney Morning Herald on 2003 SARS titled China Confesses to SARS Cover-up announced to the western world that one day in April, the Party had suddenly admitted a slew of new deaths and positive cases while simultaneously firing Health Minister Zhang Wenkang and Beijing’s Mayor Meng Xuenong, in addition to banning the national weeklong May Day holiday.
In 2007, the New York Times reported in an article titled China Bars U.S. Trip for Doctor Who Exposed SARS Cover-up that Jiang Yanyong, a retired PLA surgeon, was forbidden by the Party from entering America to accept the New York Academy of Science’s Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of Scientists Award.
The Times wrote that Jiang had been credited with circulating an internal Party message “to international news organizations that at least 100 people were being treated in Beijing hospitals for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.”
“At the time, the Chinese medical authorities were asserting that the entire nation had only a handful of cases of the disease,” the Times explained.
On Jan. 15, Vision Times reported that according to Master Li, the 2003 SARS pandemic claimed the lives of additional 200 million Chinese over the years. The resulting population drop compelled the Communist Party to relax its one-child policy to a two, and then a three-child policy.
Blazing flames
The Wuhan Pneumonia epidemic in mainland China following its re-opening appears so drastic that overseas Chinese have been reported as emptying the shelves of thousands of dollars worth of over-the-counter cold medicine and painkillers from countries such as South Korea and Japan, sending the purchases back to the mainland, as reported by The Korea Times, The Japan Times, and CNN in late December.
In Jan. 19 reporting by Reuters, Xi’s administration was paraphrased as claiming that “the number of COVID patients needing critical care in China’s hospitals has peaked” following the relaxation of pandemic policy and the release of travelers throughout the world.
At the same time Reuters reminded readers that the situation was far from good, “China said last Saturday that nearly 60,000 people with COVID had died in hospitals between Dec. 8 and Jan. 12 – a roughly ten-fold increase from previous disclosures.”
The wire service added that, based on computer modeling by UK health data analytics firm Affinity, it has been calculated that “as many as 36,000 people could die each day from the disease” inside China.
“Other experts” spoken to by the outlet were paraphrased as stating that “over 1 million will die from the disease this year.”
No wildfires
But despite the frightening surge of Wuhan Pneumonia inside of mainland China, and in spite of Chinese travelers being freely accepted into foreign countries with only minimal restrictions being applied, COVID-19 cases and death counts outside of China are not trending.
The Government of Thailand’s Public Relations Department posts a weekly update of the country’s COVID case and death count on the bureau’s official Facebook page, showing that the week of December 25 to 31, the country of almost 72 million registered only 2,111 cases and 75 deaths.
By the week of Jan. 1 to 7, those figures had dropped to 997 cases and 58 deaths.
The most recent update posted is the week of Jan. 8 to 14, which showed that Thailand’s pandemic situation has stayed flat at 969 cases and 65 deaths.
The situation in Singapore is also highly subdued. Our World in Data shows the city of 5.5 million has not endured a spike in cases or deaths following China’s re-opening, with new cases remaining in a trend between 276 and 1,817 per day since the beginning of December.
Since Dec. 1, Singapore’s COVID confirmed daily death count has never been higher than 3.
In the case of Malaysia, the country of roughly 33.5 million people has enjoyed a trending decline of COVID cases since China’s reopening, from a high of 2,421 on Dec. 2 to a low of only 227 on Jan. 16.
Malaysia’s COVID fatality count has remained in the mid-to-low single digits since Dec. 1, with the exception of 16 deaths logged on Dec. 6 and 10 deaths logged on Dec. 11.
Hong Kong, however, has been harder-hit.
Home to 7.4 million people, the city briefly showed a large spike of positive cases as high as 31,406 per day on Dec. 19 and 29,207 on Dec. 31.
Fortunately, positive case count immediately and sharply retreated following New Year’s Day, returning to November of 2022 levels of under 4,000 daily, according to Our World in Data.
Death count, however, has risen and remained elevated since the mainland’s re-opening.
Hong Kong is posting a range between 46 and 75 COVID deaths per day throughout January, compared to November and October’s figures, which were consistently in the single and low-teens.
Perhaps the reason Hong Kong has endured a lasting spike in its death count while other countries popular among the mainland’s newly freed tourists have not, rests in the fact that the CCP violated its “One Country, Two Systems” promise to have Hong Kong remain a democracy until 2047 after millions of residents hit the streets to protest the Party’s rule in 2019.
In Master Li’s March of 2020 notice, he told the world, “At present, the hardest-hit countries are those that associate closely with the evil CCP, and the same goes for individuals.”
The only solution
Over the last three years, the Chinese Communist Party’s various policies and measures, leading all the way up to its more severe “zero-COVID” scheme, have been thoroughly proven to have failed to defeat Wuhan Pneumonia.
Likewise, the rest of the world’s emulation of the regime’s method in the form of unprecedented lockdowns, social-credit style vaccine passports, and even the deployment of quarantine camps, have shown a total inability to defeat SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.
Falun Dafa’s founder explained in his article, “When humans become corrupt in their hearts, they will generate karma, fall sick, and suffer calamities. At such times, those who don’t believe in Gods will resort to various measures.”
Master Li continued, “The homophone [in Chinese] of this noun is already telling you that a ‘measure’ is in fact a misguided approach.”
“There have been many positive lessons in history, yet all because of the atheistic mindset of modern-day Chinese people after being brainwashed by the evil Chinese Communist Party (CCP), people do not believe in Gods and do not believe in the lessons from history,” He added.
But the Master conveyed to readers that all is not lost, and a path that can lift the pandemic still remains to be walked, “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, only this is the panacea.”
The article also provided clear guidance to those wishing to evade the disease’s calamity, “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.”
“As people’s hearts change for the better, things will take a positive turn,” Master Li further stated.
