OK. Sit down, brace yourselves – this is going to come as a bit of a shock.
China is still lying about the Xi Plague pandemic.
Shocking, I know. Who’d have thought that a mass-murdering communist dictatorship would lie? Next, they’ll be telling us that China murdered and enslaved tens of millions of its own people.
Of course, we all know that all politicians lie, some worse than others. But China lies like the rest of us breathe – and like the lies of their former fellow communists the Soviet Union their lies ultimately have catastrophic global consequences.
As the world struggles to contain the coronavirus outbreak without triggering a new Great Depression, China is withholding vital information that would save lives and significantly alleviate the economic catastrophe that now threatens to immiserate hundreds of millions of people around the world.
This isn’t the old cover-up, when Communist Party bumbling and deceit allowed a local outbreak to turn into the worst global disaster in decades. The new cover-up is even more brazen. China continues to falsify vital information about the epidemic on a massive scale.
As the rest of the world struggles to deal with the consequences of Beijing’s earlier lies, a pandemic sweeping the globe, what is desperately needed is reliable data. China’s continuing lies make that almost impossible.
The evidence comes from many sources. In a classified report to the White House, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that China underreports both deaths and the total number of cases. The Economist magazine compared China’s reported statistics with those from other countries and found that numbers changed dramatically in response to political events, such as the firing and replacement of local officials. Using conservative figures and assumptions, a report by Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute estimates 2.9 million total cases in China, rather than the total of about 82,000 Beijing reports. If Mr. Scissors is right, the number of cases that China has concealed is greater than the total number of cases reported in the rest of the world.
These data matter. Without accurate information about the number and location of cases, including asymptomatic cases from China, it is much harder for the rest of the world to understand basic facts about the disease and its spread. And the absence of accurate information from China makes it much more difficult to know when it is safe to lift lockdowns[…]
Just as in December and January China’s official culture of secrecy unleashed a terror on the world, so now that same culture weighs down the world’s efforts to cope.
As Theodore Dalrymple once wrote, communist regimes lie; everyone knows they lie – but that’s not the point. The point is to hang on to power by any means necessary.
After seven decades in power, the party still depends on a governance system that combines arbitrary rule, brutal repression, eye-popping corruption and massive levels of deception, fraud and abuse. The coronavirus outbreak[…]cruelly exposed the gap between the imposing image Beijing seeks to project and the gritty, unsavoury realities of one-party rule.
To divert public attention, China’s rulers reverted to their standard playbook: concealing information, squelching discussion of the disaster, and whipping up nationalist sentiment. The trouble is that the steps Beijing saw as necessary to shore up its power at home have dramatically worsened China’s economic prospects and its international reputation[…]
Unfortunately, China can’t level with the world without levelling with its own people. That is the one thing the party can never do.
Not that Beijing really cares about outside opinion. Just as Mao lied that Russian intransigence caused the famine of the Great Leap Forward, Xi happily lies to the Chinese people that the Chinese virus is really everyone else’s fault. Unable – on threat of arrest, torture and death-by-organ-harvesting – to criticise the Xi regime, the Chinese people will direct their anger outwards.
Which is the only thing Xi cares about.
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