Stop Wishful Thinking and Save Ourselves

(Minghui.org) The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recently abandoned its zero-Covid policy and lifted all restrictions. Soon, positive cases surged across China and the medical system became overwhelmed. What happened in Cangzhou City, Hebei Province from late October to mid-December provides a glimpse into the tremendous harm caused by the regime’s going from one extreme to another to serve its own agenda, not the well-being of the people.

Drastic Change and Continued Lies

The urban area of Cangzhou was under lockdown starting in late October. The lockdown lasted about three weeks and was lifted on November 12. When positive cases were detected, however, the city imposed lockdown again on November 21 and didn’t lift it until November 30.

The authorities never presented scientific data or evidence to justify a lockdown or no-lockdown decision, since everything they did served only political purposes. The names of the draconian measures also changed over time, from feng cheng (lockdown) to jing mo (silence) and lin shi guan kong (temporary control). But they were enforced in the same way… All public places were closed, including supermarkets, grocery stores, restaurants, retail stores, farmer’s markets, seafood markets, and others. With schools and factories shut down, traffic (both vehicles and pedestrians) was stopped. Only personnel with a special permit were allowed to move around.

The entire city came to a halt, and even basic needs such as medical treatment could not be met. It was like a dead city. Out of frustration and boredom, people came up with all kinds of limericks and jokes. One example was, “The rest of the world is watching FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 or doing other fun stuff, but we Chinese are still lining up for nucleic acid testing.”

The number of infected cases announced by the local authorities was very low, or zero. But people knew there were actully many cases. One poem circulated online was, “Busy with [nucleic acid] testing during the day, busy with transporting [patients for quarantine] at night, busy reporting zero cases and things are all right.”

Because of the zero-Covid policy, officials who dared to report cases were criticized and even removed from office, while those who covered up cases were rewarded. So officials at all levels lied about the Covid cases. The CCP only cares about holding onto its power, not about people’s lives. In fact, the regime has always been lying since it took power in 1949. Especially during this pandemic, the real number of cases became top secret. When government officials were infected, even coworkers in the same department may not have known.

The real numbers were very high however. Among the over 6,000 employees at Cangzhou Central Hospital, for example, one third tested positive during nucleic acid testing in early November. This hospital opened a quarantine ward in late November and more than 800 patients who tested positive were admitted on the first day. It was said that Xiang Hui, the mayor of Cangzhou, was also infected. Because of the high infection rate, some government agencies had to either shut down or reduce services.

A Sudden, Unexpected U-Turn

Now let us look at the situation in Huanghua, a county-level city under the administration of Cangzhou. After a five-day lockdown in November, it imposed another one from November 25 to 29.

The officially reported infection cases in Huanghua were always zero. But this was far from reality. Numerous hotels were designated for quarantine, and one of them had about 170 patients who had tested positive. There were also many such patients who quarantined at home. During a city-wide nucleic acid testing campaign, at least 40 positive cases were detected on November 25 and more than 100 positive cases were detected on December 5.

Also on December 5, the CCP announced the end of the pandemic and classified the omicron variant as a common flu. The nucleic acid testing requirement was canceled in Huanghua and all restrictions were removed on December 7. The expansion of Huanghua Fangcang (makeshift) hospital also stopped even before it got started.

The three-year-long zero-Covid campaign (from December 8, 2019 to December 7, 2022) ended like this. From extreme control measures (mandatory testing, mandatory at-home or Fangcang quarantine) to extreme no-control-at-all, everything happened so quickly and with no explanation, making people feel like they were living in a dream: is this real? Is the zero-Covid policy indeed no more? It was also like watching a movie, where you are still fully absorbed in the story, and the movie suddenly ends with lights turning on in the theater.

The CCP’s 180-degree-turn on its pandemic response was hard for people to believe. The slogan of “Insist on zero-Covid without wavering!” is still fresh in people’s minds. Right as we are ready to fight a life and death annihilation war against the virus, suddenly everything is over. The day before, whoever defied the lockdown or refused to take Covid tests would be punished; one day after, whoever insists on lockdown or enforces testing would be punished.

People Keep Asking Questions

The CCP’s sudden rollback of the zero-Covid policy feels a like dream that ends too soon: Is it really open? Can we really skip the painful throat poking at nucleic acid testing site every day? No masking, no health pass scan, no facial recognition, no video surveillance, and no temperature checking at supermarkets and other public places? Can we really, really go out to eat?

All these may seem absurd in the eyes of the international community, but after being restrained for so long in communist China, people do not know how to lead a normal life. But when thinking it over, one may find two factors that may have led to the current situation.

The first factor is the CCP’s fear of people awakening to and protesting against its brutality and lies. Due to censorship and information control, few people in small cities such as Huanghua knew the White Paper Movement. Still some people who knew that laws could not stand the draconian lockdown measures and complained to local officials. It is true that the CCP does not care about people’s lives, but it also knows a pressure cooker would explode if all the vents were tightly sealed.

The second factor is the regime’s inability to beat the virus as it vowed to. Starting from the CCP’s doctrine of Marxism, instigating hatred, and fighting selected groups have been the fundamental forces that drive the CCP’s decisions. In the past three years, the regime exhausted all the resources, from people to money and infrastructure, but it could not defeat the small virus. The zero-Covid policy proved to be unenforceable and the CCP could not keep the police in force any longer, like the folktale of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Out of desperation and the totalitarian regime’s never caring about people’s lives anyway, it chose to abandon the policy and lift all restrictions. It now claims that every citizen is responsible for ensuring their own health, meaning that it has nothing to do with the regime if anyone catches the virus.

Harsh Reality

Amid confusion, people found themselves faced with a new wave of surging cases, unlike what the propaganda said about the end of the pandemic. Information came that hundreds of infected patients from universities in Hebei and Shandong Provinces were transferred elsewhere for isolation. During the Covid prevention and control press conference in Beijing on November 24, officials said that the number of infected cases was rising in Beijing. The same was said at the press conference on November 28. Beijing Health Commission also confirmed on December 4 that the Covid situation was still very serious.

But the officially reported number of new cases in Huanghua still remained at zero, even though people knew there were many newly infected cases in their friends circles already. The conflicting information made people try all means to stay safe. As a result, flu medicines were out of stock, as were medicines for fever, cough, and antivirus. Many people chose to wear N95 masks even though masking was no longer required. In addition, some avoided going out, leaving the streets deserted and stores nearly empty.

Nonetheless, people were still infected one after another, including newborns and the elderly. In Cangzhou Maternity and Child Health Care Hospital, the number of patients was too many to count. Many local workplaces experienced high infection rates, from the initial 20-50% to 70-100%. “We have achieved Covid clearance here,” one resident joked. “The Covid had cleared us all – everyone is infected.”

Other places have a similar situation. It was said that nearly everyone in Shijiazhuang, Baoding, and Xingtai of Hebei Province had been infected. As a result, more and more stores closed starting from mid-December or reduced business hours to 3.5 hours per day. One reason was fewer customers, and the other reason being that not enough employees showed up for work due to Covid infections. Especially food suppliers or deli restaurants, lots of places had empty shelves and seats.

According to a new policy on December 9, all hospitals with 100 beds or more needed to have fever clinics, regardless of hospital types. Any doctors, regardless of their specialty, could see patients at such clinics. The old requirements [before the end of the zero-Covid policy] for such clinics, to separate patients into three groups (no infection, suspected infection, and infection), and to have two hallways (one for doctors to enter/exit and another for patients) were both removed, which increased the chance of doctors getting infected. By December 21, the infection rate of doctors in some hospitals was as high as 90%. The rate was so high that many hospitals still required doctors who tested positive to see patients.

In a Covid treatment video conference on December 21, the Chinese National Health Commission (NHC) said that the number of new cases was surging. The Chinese CDC gave an update of the nationwide Covid situation at the conference. It was very severe in Sichuan, Anhui, Hubei, Shanghai, and Hunan. Among them, the infection rate in Sichuan exceeded 50%. Many cases had broken out in Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei, among which Beijing had passed peak time. Although the infection was relatively slow in downstream Yangtze River area and Northeast China, it was rampant in Henan Province, especially near the capital city of Zhengzhou. Overall, the disease was spreading from provincial capital cities to other cities, and from urban areas to the countryside. One week after the peak time ended, another peak of severe illnesses was expected.

Awakening from Lies

Countless Chinese people are now suffering from Covid with symptoms of fever, headache, dizziness, coughing, sore throat, fatigue, irregular heartbeat, and breathing difficulty. Many infants went into comas, had difficulty eating, or vomited. But the CCP did not include them in Covid statistics because it deemed them “asymptomatic cases.”

A leaked document from the NHC on December 21 showed 248 million new cases in the first three weeks of December. But the authorities still said the disease was almost over. The officially reported new infections for Hebei Province on December 20 was only 15.

But this is not the first time that Chinese citizens have lost their lives to the CCP’s brutality and lies. As the general public followed the Party in the maniac Great Leap Forward in 1958, few expected the absurdity would claim over 45 million lives in the years that followed, according historian Frank Dikotter in his book Mao’s Great Famine.

But the bloody history was quickly forgotten thanks to the CCP’s massive propaganda and brainwashing. Once again, people experienced the pain of Cultural Revolution, only to forget about it and have the Tiananmen Square Massacre happen. While people were shocked to see students killed, they soon forgot about it. By the time when the CCP started the persecution of Falun Gong in 1999, however, the Party’s well-oiled propaganda machine was so efficient that many people lost the ability to tell right from wrong. Many followed the persecution policy.

China has a rich history of about 5,000 years, during which time virtue, honesty, and loyalty were always valued. In merely several decades since the CCP took power in 1949, it has nearly wiped out the traditional values, and instilled hatred and distorted history in people’s minds. After Falun Gong, a meditation system based on Truthfulness-Compassion-Forbearance, was introduced to the public in 1992 to bring Chinese society and citizens back on track, the CCP tried all means to defame the practice.

In addition to launching the nationwide suppression of Falun Gong in July 1999, former top CCP leader Jiang Zemin also established the extrajudicial agency, the 610 Office, to fully implement the persecution policy. As a result, the justice system (police, courts, procuratorates), news media, government agencies, businesses, education, and nearly all functions of society were mobilized to defame innocent Falun Gong practitioners.

Tens of millions of Falun Gong practitioners and their families have been discriminated against. A large number of practitioners were also detained, imprisoned, and tortured. Such severe human rights abuses continued during the pandemic. Some practitioners in Huanghua said that even when going out shopping, they were followed by police, or personnel paid by police.

Ms. Liu Zaiyun and three other Falun Gong practitioners were arrested for their belief in January 11, 2022, and have been kept at Cangzhou Detention Center since then. Although the Yunhe Procuratorate returned their cases twice citing insufficient evidence, the Xinhu Police Department did not give up, and continued to fabricate information to frame the practitioners. In the end, these four practitioners were indicted and are facing trial by the Yunhe Court.

Jiang, the initiator of the persecution against Falun Gong, has died, but the 23-year-long suppression still continues. The CCP may enforce military-style lockdowns, lift the zero-Covid policy, or other measures to temporarily ease the public anger. But as long as people live in the delusion of the CCP, the danger is always there, just like the countless tragedies the CCP has caused in the past few decades. The pandemic could be a chance for people to recognize the nature of the CCP and stop their wishful thinking that it will one day care about the people.

Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, wrote, “Pandemics and plagues are part of a divine plan and inevitable in the course of history. When people become immoral they generate karma, become sick, and experience disastrous things.” “But a pandemic like the current Chinese Communist Virus (or “Wuhan Virus”) comes with a purpose behind it, and it has targets. It is here to weed out members of the Party and those who have sided with it.” “The CCP is in its death throes and trying to harm people by causing pandemonium in the world.” (“Stay Rational”)

It is important for us to remain clear-headed, reject the CCP, and follow traditional values for a better future.