(Minghui.org) Mr. Li Hongzhi, founder of Falun Dafa, said on January 15 that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been covering up the true pandemic situation ever since the pandemic broke out three years ago. He said that more than 400 million people in China have died of COVID and that the total death toll will reach 500 million by the time this wave of positive cases ends. 

Mr. Li said that over 200 million people in China died during the SARS epidemic between 2002 and 2004. Years later when the CCP noticed the dwindling population, it abandoned its one-child policy and started encouraging couples to have a second or even a third child.

VOA (Voice of America) reported on January 11, 2023, that a Beijing native currently living in the United States lost five family members to COVID in 8 days. 

Many high-ranking CCP officials have recently died of COVID as well. They include Qi Shan (former deputy director of the Standing Committee of the Yunnan Provincial People's Congress, deputy secretary of the party group), Hu Xuming (former secretary of the party group and chief prosecutor of the Procuratorate of Ningxia), Jiang Xuefu (retired major general, former commander of the 25th Experimental Training Base), and Feng Binglin (former deputy general manager of China State Shipbuilding Corporation). 

Ben Lowsen, a specialist in Chinese political and security affairs and advisor to the U.S. Air Force, believes the CCP’s policy has been to “protect its legitimacy, even at the expense of public health.” “Despite their government’s insistence on costly restrictions for the past three years, China’s citizens face what could become their country’s largest mass-death event since the Great Leap Forward,” he wrote in an article titled “Xi Jinping’s Great Leap” on January 5, 2023.

Despite the authorities’ low-ball figure on infections and deaths, and propaganda depicting a prosperous society, many Chinese citizens have learned the truth simply by observing what has happened to themselves, their family members, relatives, friends, and communities. 

One official in charge of local crematories in Langfang City, Hebei Province, said that Beijing residents had recently contacted his agency to help find cremation spots for their family members who have died of COVID. They said that the number of deaths is so high in Beijing that crematories there have been booked all the way to the second half of 2023. They also requested that the official not publicize the information. 

This official explained that the crematories in Langfang could not even meet the need of their local residents, much less out-of-towners. In fact, many people in the countryside under the administration of Langfang are burying the bodies of their family members who died of COVID instead of cremating them, due to the high cremation cost, long wait times, and culture. Because of the large number of recent deaths, however, the waiting time for holding funerals is up to five days in some areas.