In his New Year’s message for 2020, Xi Jinping called the year “extremely extraordinary for the Chinese people”! Xi Jinping declared that the Chinese Communist Party under his leadership had “written an epic” against the epidemic with “people first” and “great love for humanity.
A tragedy that was widely exposed by the international community and that led to a global pandemic that killed 1.8 million people worldwide because the truth about the early spread of the epidemic was concealed, Xi Jinping easily called it “an epic of resilience in the fight against the epidemic”.
The origin of the epidemic is still far from clear due to Beijing’s obstruction, and the latest AP report shows that Xi Jinping is personally in control of the investigation into the traceability of the epidemic, and apparently it is hard to be optimistic that a WHO expert mission will go to China to trace the epidemic; Wuhan was closed on January 23, and the final figure from the authorities is that more than 50,000 people were confirmed in Wuhan, while the CDC’s serological study shows that at least ten times as many people were confirmed in Wuhan, so how many people died from the epidemic in Wuhan?
All of China is under strict epidemic prevention as the New Year approaches, and all major cities have cancelled major New Year celebrations, except Wuhan, the first city to have an epidemic outbreak, is partying, and the people of Wuhan have a reason to party after the catastrophe, but do the people of Wuhan know the truth about the epidemic in their city, and do they know why other cities have not been allowed to party so far to celebrate the “epic of the fight against the epidemic”? Do they know the truth? Do the people of Wuhan really believe that on January 23rd, the highest authorities of the Chinese Communist Party would order the city to be sealed off just because the official report of Wuhan had only 571 confirmed cases, including 95 severe cases and 17 deaths? Comparing the 2003 Sars epidemic, there were 1,514 cases in Guangdong Province and 2,000 cases in Beijing. The number of confirmed cases and deaths in Wuhan was far lower than in Guangdong and Beijing, where Sars was rampant that year, so why did Wuhan have to seal the city? Some experts on China have analyzed that those in power in Beijing learned about the situation below through ‘internal affairs’ rather than through reports from subordinates, and that the data available to the highest authorities in the CCP at the time was many times greater than the published data. The people of Wuhan may not believe the official figures released, but can they tell the truth to the outside world?
Beijing is still suppressing people who are looking for the truth about the epidemic in Wuhan, from admonishing Dr. Li Wenliang late last year and silencing Dr. Affin, to the official propaganda machine that managed to override the civil protests after Li Wenliang’s death, to the forced disappearance of Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin, and Richard Li, to the unprecedented siege of Fang Fang, a writer who simply recounted the days and nights of Wuhan’s closure, because her “Wuhan Diary” was to be published overseas. At the end of 2020, Zhang Zhan, who was seriously ill and on hunger strike for many months, was put on trial in a wheelchair, for what the authorities wanted, for her to speak out about the epidemic in Wuhan and to make an example of all future Zhang Zhan’s. Beware, Zhang Zhan’s fate is their fate.
The Internet circulates the phrase, “2020, starting with Li Wenliang and ending with Zhang Zhan, so heavy.” Beijing’s Wuhan epidemic narrative thus drew a circle, and Xi Jinping loudly announced that he had “written an epic against the epidemic,” a success that, in the view of the French newspaper Le Monde, was “Xi Jinping’s ‘success’ in rewriting the narrative of the new crown epidemic The success, in the view of the French newspaper Le Monde, is that “Xi Jinping has ‘successfully’ rewritten the narrative of the new crown epidemic”.
The second “great achievement” mentioned by Xi Jinping in his New Year’s greeting is that “in 2020, a great historic achievement was made in building a moderately prosperous society, and a decisive victory was achieved in the battle against poverty”, “100 million rural poor people were all lifted out of poverty, and 832 poverty-stricken counties were all removed from the cap”.
A questionnaire survey released by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences on November 9 showed that the average annual leisure consumption of Chinese nationals within the past year was RMB 5,647. Among them, 22.7% spent RMB 1001-3000, 10% spent RMB 3001-5000 and 11.1% spent RMB 5001-10,000. 11.8% spent more than RMB 10,000, but 44.4% spent only one-tenth of the annual leisure spending of high-income groups. However, 44.4% of people spend less than one-tenth of the annual leisure spending of high-income groups, or less than RMB 1,000. If we use this poll result as a sample and compare it to China’s total population of 1.4 billion people, this means that 620 million people have only RMB 83 yuan per month for fun and 320 million people have less than RMB 3,000 yuan per year, which is equivalent to about RMB 250 yuan per month. Only the 160 million wealthy people have above-average leisure spending, with tens of thousands of RMB on hand to spend on recreation and entertainment each year. In an interview with the Voice of America, Wu Ming-ze, an associate researcher at Taiwan‘s WI Harper Institute, said the 333 principle is a basic assessment guideline for a well-off society, one that serves as a source of spending for life enjoyment and leisure. Unless the majority of Chinese people only earn money and don’t spend it, he said, this poll shows that more than 60% of China’s population (about 940 million people) may spend less than 3,000 yuan a year on leisure, representing that they are living a life of mere subsistence, which can hardly be called a well-off society.
China has achieved total poverty eradication? Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, answering a reporter’s question on May 28, reminded that 600 million people in China have an income of just 1,000 yuan per month. Hu Ping, editor-in-chief of “Beijing Spring”, analyzed China’s “poverty eradication achievement” from another perspective, saying that China’s poverty eradication rate is indeed the highest in the world in the past 40 years, but that’s because China’s poverty creation rate was the highest in the world in the previous 30 years.
Another “success” of Xi Jinping, according to French newspaper Le Monde, is to renege on his international commitments and put Hong Kong under terror. But Xi’s New Year’s message made no mention of the “extraordinary” and subversive changes that have taken place in Hong Kong, where the opposition is being liquidated by the authorities after Beijing enacted a “national security law” for Hong Kong. From this perspective, it seems that Hong Kong is completely under Xi Jinping’s thumb, as the founder of Apple Daily, Lai Chi-ying, was put back in jail not a few days after the judge ruled that he be released on bail. Why did Xi not include such an “extraordinary” achievement in his New Year’s message?
Xi Jinping is increasingly resented in the West, while he has become an unstoppable strongman in China.
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