In the recent outbreak of a local outbreak of Wuhan pneumonia in Ruili, a city on the China-Myanmar border, local Party Secretary Gong Yunzun was dismissed and investigated for dereliction of duty.
According to the Yunnan Daily, Gong Yunzun, a member of the Standing Committee of the Yunnan Provincial Commission for Discipline Inspection, has been investigated for “serious dereliction of duty” in the prevention and control of the epidemic.
The report said that Ruili had three consecutive epidemics in more than six months, and that the recent “3.29 epidemic incident” had “seriously affected and damaged the national and provincial epidemic prevention and control situation”, and so on. The Yunnan authorities decided to revoke Gong Yunzun’s party position and political duties, and downgraded him to a first-class researcher.
However, it is a common practice in the CCP officialdom to remove officials at higher levels for investigation and handling of public incidents, and many officials have been dealt with before for epidemic prevention issues, which have been pointed out by the public as scapegoats for the CCP hierarchy.
Yunnan has reported a number of new confirmed cases since March 30, including Chinese and Burmese nationals. The authorities then asked all residents of Ruili to stay home for a week, and later announced a full vaccination program for people in four border counties, including Ruili.
As of March 7, Yunnan officials reported 79 confirmed cases, including 3 imported cases and 76 local cases; 44 asymptomatic cases, including 19 imported cases and 25 local cases.
Ruili was declared closed for another week on March 31. The city was closed in September last year after Ruili was also “closed” due to the current epidemic, when officials claimed that the epidemic in Ruili was caused by the smuggling of Burmese nationals into the country.
Local people revealed that since the epidemic in September last year, Ruili City units pack sections of 24-hour guard, a large number of people were forced to participate in the border guard.
The Xinhua Daily Telegraph, a newspaper sponsored by Xinhua News Agency, the official media of the Communist Party of China, on March 31 posted an article questioning, “Six new local cases confirmed in Ruili, Yunnan, have lessons learned from last year?” questioning the local epidemic prevention efforts.
But this questioning by Xinhua made local people, especially the large number of people involved in border defense, extremely unhappy. Some local netizens questioned, “Do you know how long the border in Yunnan is? Ruli is close to Myanmar, and it is not possible to set up a few checkpoints to guard against smuggling.
There are also netizens denounced: “Chilling. All the citizens of Ruili City almost New Year’s Eve are guarding the border, how to take precautions?”
Several netizens asked Xinhua News Agency to come out and apologize. One of them left a message saying that his father had worked hard to prevent the epidemic and his hair had turned white, and that many soldiers had died on the front line, scolding, “What the hell do you think a Xinhua News Agency has done to negate the efforts of so many people on the border?” “The Chinese government has no conscience in order to gain attention,” and asked Xinhua News Agency to “come out and apologize!”
In addition, some people also exposed that the Chinese Communist Party authorities may have concealed the epidemic.
The Free Times quoted the owner of a jewelry store in the Yucheng trading area in Sagao as saying that the epidemic mainly occurred in the Guomen community in Sagao and that there were confirmed cases in the community on March 27; a man surnamed Li in Mengmao town said that there should have been cases in mid-March.
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