The Communist Party of China (CPC) has been suspected of withholding information after the outbreak of the CPC virus (New Coronavirus) in Wuhan, Hubei Province last year. Radio Free Asia today cited information from the Hubei Provincial Civil Affairs Department, which said that more than 150,000 elderly people suddenly disappeared from benefit rolls in the province in the first quarter of 2020 alone, and that there was a large increase in the number of cremated remains in the province last year. This could mean that the number of deaths due to the Epidemic last year far exceeded the official notification.
Free Asia revealed that some local scholars and media people recently combed through official information from the Hubei Provincial Department of Civil Affairs and found that the province cremated a total of nearly 410,000 sets of remains in the first three quarters of last year, compared with more than 374,000 and 360,000 sets of cremated remains in the same period in 2019 and 2018, respectively. However, funeral information has been officially regarded as a state secret, and the authenticity of the information is in doubt.
Meanwhile, information released by the Civil Affairs Department on so-called allowances for people over 80 years old (75 years old in the Shennongjia Mountains) shows that as many as 150,000 elderly people suddenly disappeared from the list in the province in the first quarter of last year alone.
An academic, Mr. Zhou, who wished to remain anonymous, pointed out that both nationwide and in Wuhan, aging is becoming more and more serious, and the number of elderly people is increasing every year, but the information on elderly allowances from the Hubei Civil Affairs Department has dropped precipitously, which is not normal in itself. He also pointed out that this only involves the situation of the elderly over 80 years old, and the breakdown of statistical information is tightly blocked, the full picture of the epidemic will be even less known to the outside world:.
“This is definitely not normal. It is because the hospitals are vacated, so that other diseases, which have caused an increase in the number of deaths, are also an indirect effect. In the domestic word, it is not counted in the number of new crown deaths.”
Liu Jun, an NGO, was quoted as saying that he previously judged the number of deaths to be at least five times higher than officially announced, but now it seems that the actual number far exceeds his original judgment: “I thought at least five times was concealed at the Time, that may still be less serious for me here. Because I live in this area in Wuhan city is considered a remote place. Maybe in Hankow, in the center, there are more. Because we do not have the opportunity to prove this thing, the people who seek evidence are shut down. These things we have to write it down, right, one day try to restore a truth.”
Just days before, Wuhan people bought flowers to pay respects to their deceased relatives during the traditional New Year period, causing the city’s flower market to break, which had also raised questions about the authorities’ deliberate efforts to hide the number of people who died in the Wuhan epidemic.
Liu Jun believes that both the seemingly unintentional release of information on the elderly allowance by the Civil Affairs Department and the Wuhan media’s report that the so-called flower market break was just retaliatory consumption by the public can be seen as a disguised resistance under high pressure.
“How can the locals give up when they have suffered such a big loss? So there are always people who are willing to put a twist on things, euphemistically speaking, right? This should be so. The local media in Hubei is not unaware of the fact that people are buying flowers for the dead, but they can’t write about it, so they are deliberately doing a positive report on the phenomenon, and then they let us understand how to break the story.
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