(Clearwisdom.net)
In the afternoon of April 3, 2003, China's State Council Press Agency held a press reception; the then Health Minister, Zhang Wenkang, presented the situation of the "atypical pneumonia" epidemic to the media. He hosted the reception as a celebration of "Beijing is a safe place, and the epidemic is effectively under control" and downplayed the severe epidemic, with at least hundreds infected, as a mere "12 cases, with 3 deaths." His fate as a scapegoat was sealed should the actual number be revealed.
As more and more doctors in Mainland China leaked the truth to the outside world, WHO started to doubt the authenticity of the figures the Chinese authorities provided them, and asked to inspect more hospitals, especially the army hospitals. The dark curtain was thus parted.
On April 20, the State Council Press Agency again held a press reception, and Beijing City's "37 cases with 4 deaths" that was maintained for many days, suddenly jumped to "339 cases with 18 deaths." The number game triggered off a political earthquake in the Chinese Communist Party resulting in the removal of the health minister Zhang Wenkang and Mayor Meng Xuenong of Beijing, who had only been on the job for 3 months.
No matter how the Chinese government explained the change of the number, had the WHO not applied intense pressure and issued a rare global warning recommending that travelers not visit epidemic areas such as Mainland China and Hong Kong, and had so many foreign governments and organizations not successively cancelled and postponed their activities in China, and had the country's economy that is entirely propped up by the infusion of foreign capital not faced the desperation of that capital going elsewhere, the Chinese Government would have continued to play the number game. Even now, people still have doubts as to the credibility of the new figures issued by Beijing.
The Chinese love numbers games. In the 1950s, local officials outdid each other by exaggerating their output of crops. During the violent suppression of the pro-democracy movement in 1989, officials of the central government deliberately played down the number of deaths, and even claimed that the figure was zero in Tiananmen Square. No matter how the world economy changes, the Chinese GDP growth rate is always reported as 7-8%. On July 20, 1999 when Jiang Zemin launched his campaign to suppress Falun Gong, "1400 deaths attributed" was the number used as justification.
The numbers game in the hands of the Chinese Communists is a surefire tool, whatever the need. The numbers can be increased, decreased, kept unchanged, created from nothing or reduced to nothing according to the political needs at the time.
However, those playing the number games are usually politicians, not scientists, the figures produced often fail to stand up to scrutiny. An output of 100 tons per acre is a joke to experts and farmers; how could the number put out for the June 4 massacre in Beijing fool the watchful foreign satellites; and how could the number of SARS infections before April 20 in Hong Kong, where strict preventive measures had been adopted, be higher than that in the mainland, where little if any precaution was taken, and with the government even encouraging travel between cities?
More noteworthy is the "1400 deaths attributed to Falun Gong" to be conjured up by the officials throughout the country as a nation-wide political mandate to slander Falun Gong; its credibility or lack thereof is obvious. To the architects of the suppression, it was a sizable enough number to convict Falun Gong, and a lot of people were fooled. Unfortunately, however, the architects forgot that it is a fact of life that human beings do, in fact, die naturally. With this number, statisticians calculated, using the authorities' published figures of 2 million practitioners, that the mortality rate of Falun Gong practitioners in the 7 years from 1992 to 1999 was only 1,400/2 million/7 = 1/10,000. This rate is much lower than the normal death rate of 65/10,000 in China. The figure pronounced by the government effectively became an advertisement for Falun Gong's health improvement benefits. This is not what the architects of the suppression had intended.
In the past, the CCP's numbers games were played behind closed doors, and at will. This time, however, the SARS impact world wide enabled people to witness this embarrassing predicament resulting from the fabricated figures. It also gave people an opportunity to see how the CCP employs similar tactics to deceive people in other matters.
(To be continued)
