The December 2019 outbreak of a novel coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was accompanied by an information blackout and misleading propaganda by the Chinese Communist authorities that spread throughout China, culminating in a global catastrophe with no end in sight to this day. To date, the narrative that the Chinese Communist authorities have strived to create and propagate is that China took timely and decisive measures to contain the outbreak for the benefit of all of China and the world. But the rest of the world’s narrative is that the Communist authorities’ information blackout and misleading propaganda led to the worldwide catastrophe, and that they have been playing hide-and-seek with the world over the origins of the disaster. The clash between these two narratives has become more pronounced as experts from the World health Organization traveled to China this week to investigate the origins of the outbreak.
Outbreak topic continues to be hypersensitive in China
The novel coronavirus (also known as Wuhan pneumonia) outbreak has been a super-sensitive issue for the Chinese Communist Party authorities from the start, with the Chinese media under orders not to conduct independent investigations and reports, and citizen journalists severely punished for doing so.
Former Shanghai lawyer and citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was sentenced to four years in prison on December 28, 2020, by a court controlled by the Chinese Communist Party authorities after he went to Wuhan during the outbreak to report on the ground there. During the trial, the prosecutor accused Zhang of making so-called “problematic statements” via Weibo, WeChat and Youtube, but did not cite Zhang’s articles or texts, nor did he show the Youtube videos he produced. To observers, this approach by the Chinese authorities clearly demonstrates how sensitive the issue of the epidemic is in China today.
The Communist authorities and the Chinese government are punishing not only Chinese citizens for reporting on the epidemic, but also other countries that are demanding independent investigations into the origins of the epidemic. It is widely believed in world opinion that the Chinese Communist regime is punishing Australia in this way. And, in addition to refusing to import many Australian goods, the Communist authorities are also refusing to import Australian coal, preferring to leave the people of many Chinese cities to suffer from a lack of energy in the middle of winter.
The general rationale for this punishment of Chinese citizens and foreign countries by the CCP authorities is that the CCP government, led by Xi Jinping, has been open and transparent about the origins of the epidemic and the response to it, and that individuals or countries that offer different opinions have ulterior motives and are maliciously attacking and discrediting, so it is justified and reasonable for the CCP regime to fight back and punish.
This threat from the Chinese regime has silenced many Chinese and Hong Kong people. A usually outspoken commentator in Hong Kong, when asked for comment by Voice of America, said he was reluctant to comment on the Chinese authorities’ response to the novel coronavirus outbreak because of so-called national security laws, although he found much of the Chinese government’s propaganda difficult to justify, such as the Communist authorities’ claim that cases were cleared, but the outbreak resumed in many places.
As we enter 2021, on Jan. 12, Heilongjiang province in northeastern China, which has a population of more than 38 million, went into emergency mode due to a rebound in the epidemic. Since January 7, Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province, with a population of nearly 11 million, has been under a complete lockdown due to the resurgence of the epidemic, and all transportation in the city has been blocked and people are prohibited from entering and leaving.
China’s two conflicting narratives with the international community
The Chinese government’s current approach of closing the city and entering a state of emergency at every turn is in stark contrast to its approach in late 2019 and early 2020 of blocking and downplaying news of the outbreak and spreading misleading messages of peace at the time of the outbreak and for a long time thereafter.
Since the outbreak, the narrative promoted to the Chinese public and the international community by the Communist authorities, led by Xi Jinping, has been that the Chinese government took the outbreak very seriously from the beginning, that it took decisive and forceful measures to stop the outbreak quickly, that China was open and transparent about its response to the outbreak, and that China’s response to the outbreak was a model for countries around the world. On January 28, 2020, during a meeting with visiting WHO Director-General Tan Desai, Xi Jinping said that he “has been personally in charge and deployed” to prevent and control the epidemic in China.
However, the general consensus and narrative of the international community is that the Chinese Communist regime was authoritarian and dictatorial, and that in the early stages of the epidemic, when it was most likely to be contained and nipped in the bud, China blocked information about the epidemic, spread false news about the world’s peace internally and externally, and severely punished medical personnel for talking about the epidemic, even if they did so in private, a situation that led to the development of the epidemic and the outbreak that has led to today’s unmanageable worldwide catastrophe, which has also affected China.
Some critics in China and abroad have pointed out that over the past year, the Chinese Communist Party authorities have used various means to try to make the Chinese public and the world forget the many ways in which they initially blocked and downplayed information about the outbreak, including punishing medical personnel for talking about it in private. Pneumonia”. In an effort to create an atmosphere of peace, hospitals were forbidden to inform doctors about the outbreak, resulting in thousands of uninformed medical staff and people becoming infected.
As the outbreak became more apparent, the Communist Party-controlled Chinese Internet went into overdrive to delete thousands of posts by Internet users reporting and discussing the outbreak. As the outbreak entered its major phase, near the end of January 2020, large public events such as the Wanjia Banquet were organized in Wuhan, the site of the outbreak and center of the epidemic, to create an atmosphere of normalcy.
Critics inside and outside China point out that Xi Jinping made a televised address to the nation without mentioning Wuhan, the epidemic, or the closure of the city, hours after the epidemic could no longer be concealed and the city was declared closed on January 23, 2020. To some observers, it was clear that Xi was demonstrating to all of China and the world the determination and actions of the Communist authorities under his command to block and downplay news of the epidemic at a time of a major outbreak.
Two very different narratives highlight the difference between universal values and Chinese characteristics
The epidemic caused a hitherto intractable catastrophe for countries around the world, and the response of each country became a political issue for all countries. But for infectious disease research, for the public health research community, and for public health departments in various countries, figuring out how the epidemic went from nothing to a major outbreak in China is a question of critical importance. It is important because it can provide lessons to researchers and public health departments so that they can better prevent or respond to similar public health crises in the future.
However, as World Health Organization experts return to China to investigate the origins of the outbreak, the international community has criticized the Chinese government for continuing to erect obstacles that make it difficult for domestic and international researchers to conduct a smooth investigation. At the same time, the Chinese government insists that it has been open and transparent in its investigation of the outbreak.
To Bao Tong, secretary to the late former Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, it is clear that two very different narratives are being developed between China and the international community on the outbreak. Bao Tong said.
“I know two things, one thing is that the whole world is complaining, and the second thing is that China has declared itself to be completely open and transparent. I think both of those things are true news. China’s leadership is indeed declaring to the world that he is open and transparent. There are many media outlets around the world and there are many organizations, including the current director general of the World Health Organization, Desmond Tan, who have complained that the Chinese government has not cooperated well on this issue. I see that (both sides) are well-founded. The world thinks it is not transparent, China thinks it is. The world thinks it is not transparent, the Chinese government leadership thinks it is. I think both of those things are true. That is to say, China’s openness and transparency is what the world thinks is not open and not transparent. What the world thinks is not open and not transparent is what the Chinese government thinks is completely open and completely transparent. I think that’s probably the case.”
Bao Tong’s reference here to WHO Director-General Tan Desai’s complaint about the Chinese government’s poor cooperation on this issue is apparently a reference to a January 8, 2021, international media report that the Chinese government had delayed issuing visas to members of the WHO team traveling to China to investigate the origins of the outbreak. Tandse said, “I was very disappointed by this news, considering that two members of the team had already started their journey while others could not make it at the last minute.”
Bao Tong said that as an ordinary citizen who does not have inside information, he is not in a position to judge whether world public opinion and the relevant international organizations or the Chinese government are telling lies, but he can see that there is a clear divergence between China’s account and world public opinion, and he believes that this divergence demonstrates a situation that in his view is not good. He said, “The divergence is that universal values and Chinese characteristics are in opposition, and the concept of Chinese characteristics is opposite to the concept of universal values around the world. That’s the only way I can understand it.”
Chinese authorities play hide-and-seek with the world
On Monday, January 11, China’s National Health Commission issued a one-sentence missive: “After mutual consultation, the WHO International Expert Group on the Tracing of New Coronavirus will visit China on January 14 to conduct joint scientific cooperation with Chinese scientists on the tracing of the new coronavirus.”
China’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that a WHO team of experts will fly from Singapore to Wuhan on Jan. 14.
Hu Ping, editor-in-chief emeritus of the political magazine Beijing Spring, which has closely followed news reports about the outbreak since it began, is not optimistic about the prospects of this investigation. He believes: “China’s National Health Commission have not even announced the specific itinerary of the WHO team of experts in China, plus we have seen earlier reports that the WHO is going to China to investigate, but to investigate together with Chinese experts, but which clearly tells everyone that places like the Virus Institute in Wuhan, South China Seafood Market is part of the Chinese experts to investigate, is World Health Organization can not intervene, can not intervene. That is to say that several key locations are not accessible to the World Health Organization.”
The British newspaper “The Guardian” published a report on January 12, said WHO expert group members, German professor of highly pathogenic microbial epidemiology Lindez said that there are many uncertainties in this field investigation to China, but one thing is clear to him, which is that the international scientists among the group of experts in doing the investigation, in some people are concerned that China may try to set obstacles to the investigation, around what places can go to see what people and such complex and sensitive diplomatic issues will be handled by the WHO, and the handling of these issues will be the WHO Director-General Tan Desai.
In the eyes of international opinion, since the outbreak began in China, the Chinese communist authorities have been playing hide-and-seek with the world over the initial development of the outbreak and the source of the virus that caused it. A May 6, 2020 editorial published in the US Wall Street Journal stated.
“The evidence is clear, and that is that the Chinese Communist Party initially covered up the scale of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan for weeks, but what we don’t know is why the CCP covered it up. A natural claim that surfaced was that the virus came from a laboratory in Wuhan. Beijing denies this, but the world deserves a full accounting of what the Chinese authorities knew and when they knew it.”
“There are reports that Beijing destroyed test samples from other laboratories in the early weeks of the outbreak. For its part, the World Health Organization said China refused to cooperate with an independent investigation into the source of the virus. When Australia proposed an independent investigation, Chinese officials threatened diplomatic and economic retaliation.”
More than half a year after the Wall Street Journal published the above editorial, the issues raised in the editorial remain unresolved.
In response to claims by international media outlets like the Wall Street Journal that Chinese Communist authorities covered up the outbreak for weeks, Chinese authorities have countered that it was all a malicious attack and misrepresentation made out of thin air.
At the same time, observers have noted that the Chinese Communist authorities have been very reticent to bring up a number of facts, including the fact that China’s National Health Commission on January 15, 2020, still issued a circular stating that “the available findings indicate that no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found and that limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of sustained human-to-human transmission is low “On January 18, 2020, less than a week after the Wuhan authorities organized the “Wuhan Community Banquet for Ten Thousand Families / 40,000 Families to Share Neighborly Love” as the pneumonia epidemic was exploding in Wuhan, Wuhan, a city of 15 million people, announced an unprecedented closure in human history. The city was sealed off in a measure unprecedented in human history.
Xi Jinping takes direct control of virus source investigation
The source of the virus that caused the worldwide catastrophe has been the focus of international attention, and the question of whether the virus was leaked from a virus laboratory has been a lingering question for many researchers and observers in China and abroad.
In interviews with Scientific American and other media, Shi Zhengli, a virus researcher at the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, admitted that her first concern, after initially receiving news of the outbreak of the new coronavirus in Wuhan from overseas, was whether the virus had leaked out of the laboratory at the Institute of Virus Research.
Shi had this concern because Wuhan’s Virus Research Institute collects a large number of viruses that can cause disease from bats from remote mountainous areas in the south, such as Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan, for research. She said she was relieved when she later confirmed that the disease-causing viruses did not match the characteristics of the bat viruses collected in her laboratory, suggesting that the virus causing the outbreak did not come from her laboratory.
However, Shi’s claim has been a one-sided one, which has been further discredited by the Chinese Communist Party authorities, who have banned independent investigations into the source of the virus by researchers inside and outside China.
In late November last year, a team of Associated Press reporters attempted to investigate a bat cave in Mojiang, a remote area of China’s Yunnan province, but they were followed by plainclothes police whose cars blocked their way.
Last December 23, a team of BBC journalists also tried to investigate an abandoned mine in the mountains of Tongguan Township in remote Mojiang, where six copper miners contracted a mysterious disease in 2012 and three of them later died. However, the BBC team encountered a situation rich in Chinese characteristics.
“Plainclothes police and other officials in unmarked cars followed us for miles down narrow, rough roads. When we stopped, they stopped too; when we were forced to turn around, they turned back after us. We found a number of obstacles on the road, including a ‘broken down’ truck. Locals confirmed that the truck had been placed on the road a few minutes before we arrived.”
The AP and BBC investigation teams had to return without success in the face of the insurmountable obstacles set up by the Chinese government.
On December 30, 2020, the AP sent out a lengthy investigative report saying, “A team studying bats recently managed to collect some samples, but those were confiscated by authorities, two people with knowledge of the situation said. Experts studying the coronavirus were given orders not to speak to the press.”
The AP report added: “The Associated Press has found that the Chinese government has provided large sums of money to some scientists with ties to the Chinese military to study the source of the virus in southern China. But internal Chinese government documents obtained by the AP show that the government closely monitors the findings of these Chinese researchers and requires that any publication of data or findings must be approved by a new task force run by the Chinese State Council, which is directly under the authority of President Xi Jinping. Leaks of relevant internal government documents are rare. Those dozens of pages of unpublished documents confirm what many have long suspected, which is that the directive to restrict the flow of information about the embargo came from the highest levels.”
Hu Ping, who has been closely following the CCP’s response to the epidemic and the movement of the investigation into the origins of the epidemic, commented on this, “I don’t think the CCP is unaware of this. Because to do so is to give people the impression that there is no silver bullet here, to cover it up, which obviously will strengthen the suspicion of others. Then why do it? I think the reason is very simple. If he is not a thief, he will not be weak.”
Many observers and commentators have pointed out that the virus that caused this worldwide catastrophe may have come from a Chinese laboratory leak, which has occurred in China before, and in this case, since the Chinese government claims that the virus did not originate from a laboratory leak, it would be logical to encourage an independent investigation to better convince the people and the international community, but the Chinese authorities are doing the opposite.
Why did the Chinese authorities, led by Xi Jinping, do this? Hu Ping’s explanation is, “Why even do it? The reasoning here is simple: he knows it’s there, but he just thinks, ‘I’m just going to control it this way, and you guys can be as suspicious as you like, and as long as you can’t get first-hand evidence, I’ll deny it, and there’s nothing you can do about it.’ That was his thinking.”
Xi plays hide-and-seek with the Chinese public and the international community
Some observers have pointed out that the Chinese Communist authorities have played hide-and-seek with the international community and the Chinese public over the source of the virus that caused the outbreak and over the initial development of the outbreak, and that Xi Jinping himself has physically played hide-and-seek with the international community and the Chinese public himself.
By playing hide-and-seek, observers mean that he claims he has been “personally directing and deploying” China’s epidemic prevention and control, giving clear instructions on January 7, 2020, but to this day, Xi himself and the Communist Party propaganda apparatus he controls have been tight-lipped about what instructions he gave on that day.
Moreover, although Xi Jinping himself and the CCP propaganda organs under his control have touted his “personal command and deployment” of the nation’s epidemic prevention and control from the very beginning, the “Xi Jinping’s ‘epidemic’ journal” published by the Chinese Communist Party News website, which promotes Xi’s great achievements, is blank from January 7 to January 20, the two weeks when the epidemic was in full swing in China.
The game of hide-and-seek continues to this day
As a World Health Organization team of experts travels to China to investigate the source of the virus that caused the outbreak, the international media has noted the continuation of a national-level hide-and-seek by Chinese authorities over the source of the virus and the origin of the outbreak.
Reuters reported, “As a World Health Organization team prepares to visit China to investigate the source of the novel coronavirus, Beijing has stepped up efforts to prevent a new outbreak while vigorously building a narrative about when and where the outbreak began.”
“In the face of criticism from around the world, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi became the highest-ranking Chinese official to question the consensus on where the outbreak originated, claiming that ‘a growing body of research’ shows multiple origins for the outbreak. China is also the only country in the world today to claim that the New Crown virus can be imported through imported frozen foods, saying that previous New Crown outbreaks in Beijing and Dalian were introduced by foreign imports of frozen foods.”
Prior to this, Chinese officials and official media also claimed that the original source of the outbreak was Italy and that it was the United States; Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said it was U.S. military personnel who brought the outbreak to Wuhan.
Chinese authorities initially claimed that the new coronavirus infecting people came from wildlife at Wuhan’s South China Seafood Market and closed that market on Jan. 1, 2020, later saying that no virus was collected from wildlife there, indicating that wildlife there was not the source of the outbreak. Then later, claims that the virus came from outer space appeared on the Communist Party-controlled Internet.
To Hu Ping, the Chinese authorities’ dazzling, dizzying hide-and-seek and dumping practices on the origin of the epidemic are easy to understand. He said, “For a long time the Chinese authorities have been flinging pots and pans around. They don’t really want people to believe them, because they know that the evidence they give is so thin that no one will believe them. But he just wants to confuse people’s minds, thinking that it’s not clear, who knows? This way the real killer is hiding. He needs a smokescreen to keep the real killer hidden, so that people think they can’t find him or her and do whatever they like.”
As the Chinese Communist Party continues to play hide-and-seek with the Chinese public and the international community over how the outbreak spread and the source of the virus that caused it, and has been criticized internationally for doing so, Bao Tong, secretary to the late Zhao Ziyang, general secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, said a full investigation into the source of the outbreak would be beneficial to all parties. He said, “Through a comprehensive and in-depth investigation, the source of the epidemic will be clarified and revealed, which I think is responsible to the world, responsible to humanity, responsible to Chinese citizens and responsible to the Chinese leaders themselves.”
Whither the game of hide-and-seek
A dynamic report published by Johns Hopkins University in the United States said that as of Jan. 13, there were a total of 92,482,273 confirmed cases of infection worldwide and 1,981,680 deaths caused by the outbreak.
The victims of the new coronavirus outbreak, which has led to a global catastrophe, are not only the millions of people infected and killed, but also the World Health Organization and its credibility. Critics say that the WHO and its director general, Desai Tan, have been too subservient to the Chinese authorities and have even participated, consciously or unconsciously, in the game of hide-and-seek that China is playing with the international community.
What critics mean by the WHO’s involvement in China’s hide-and-seek game is that the Chinese Communist authorities have maintained that they did not hide the outbreak from the international community and the WHO, but took the initiative to report the outbreak to the WHO in the first place. For his part, WHO Director-General Desai Tan said in vague terms at an April 20 press conference that the first report of the outbreak came from China, giving the impression that the Communist authorities had indeed taken the initiative to report the outbreak in the first place.
However, following investigation and questioning by the U.S. Congress, the WHO revised its story in early July 2020, acknowledging that it was not the Chinese government that initially reported the outbreak to the organization, but rather the organization’s China office saw the information on the Wuhan Health Commission website and asked the Chinese authorities twice on January 1 and 2 for information on the cases in question before China provided the WHO with information on the outbreak on January 3.
Subsequently, China’s National Health Commission and Ministry of Foreign Affairs reacted to the international reports in question and issued a statement saying those reports were not factual. But the Chinese authorities’ statement merely repeated the Communist authorities’ supposedly open, transparent and accountable attitude, without presenting facts to challenge the WHO’s new timeline for reporting the outbreak.
Hu pointed out that according to the WHO’s International Health Regulations, which came into force in 2007, contracting states are required to notify the WHO in a timely and effective manner of public health emergencies in their countries that may be of international concern; failure to do so would raise questions about the responsibility of the country concerned, with serious consequences for the victim or affected country to hold it accountable.
Hu Ping went on to say that Article 6 of the IHR, “Notification,” is divided into two subarticles: subarticle 1 states that a State Party shall report to the WHO within 24 hours if it becomes aware of a public health emergency that may constitute a public health emergency of international concern. However, the Chinese official media tells us that the Chinese government knew about the outbreak as early as the end of 2019, but did not report it to the WHO until January 3, 2020, a gap of more than 3 24 hours.
In fact, a study published in the prestigious international medical research journal The Lancet reported that the first cases in Wuhan appeared on December 1, 2020, and by mid-December the outbreak was already very evident in Wuhan.
In addition, for a long time the World Health Organization joined the Chinese authorities in calling the alleged leak of the virus from the laboratory nonsense. However, The Australian, a leading Australian newspaper, reported on January 13 that Dominic Dwyer, an Australian microbiologist and member of the 10-member WHO expert team sent to China this time to investigate the source of the virus, said that in addition to investigating to understand China’s initial response to the outbreak and the genetic signature of the virus, they would also be going go to the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research.
The Australian reports that “Professor Dwyer said China gave (the group) permission to go to the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research, which was in plain sight because it was working on the coronavirus before the outbreak.”
However, as of now, neither the Chinese authorities nor the WHO have mentioned that the panel will go to the Wuhan Institute of Virus Research or what information the panel will be allowed to see there or who it will meet.
It is unclear to outsiders whether this low profile by Chinese authorities and WHO is out of caution or part of a hide-and-seek operation by either or both sides.
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