(Minghui.org) The COVID cases are still exploding in China with many dead. Some netizens said they have been busy attending funerals lately instead of celebrating the Chinese New Year (January 22). The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however, is still misleading the public by covering up the actual infections and death tolls. 

On January 15, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, part of China’s National Health Commission) announced that 59,938 people had died of COVID in hospitals between December 8, 2022, and January 12, 2023. Such an absurdly low number immediately triggered anger from the general public. Several days later, the agency said another 12,658 citizens had lost their lives to COVID between January 13 and 19. With a total deaths of 72,596 in 43 days, the agency claimed that the peak of the latest COVID wave had passed. 

High Death Toll of CCP Members

A large amount of evidence soon emerged to refute the CDC figures. Cheng, a resident in the United States, shared some inside information with The Epoch Times on January 22. “I have a friend who works at the National Health Commission and is responsible for monitoring population size and birthrates. He told me that 10% of the CCP members have died of COVID,” he said. “They run a population monitoring model so they and the top CCP officials know what is going on.” Citing information from an exit and entry administration official, Cheng said there were at least 200,000 bodies in Beijing that had yet to be cremated. 

The CCP is notorious for telling lies, meaning even the inside information might not be totally trustworthy. But it could at least give us a glimpse of what the CCP tries to hide. According to the CCP’s Central Organization Department, there were 96.71 million CCP members as of December 31, 2021. If we use that number as a baseline, 10% of the CCP members would be 9.671 million, 133 times the CDC figure of 72,596. And note that many non-CCP members have also died of COVID. 

About 19.42 million of the 96,71 million CCP members have retired from their jobs. About one-half of the retired members would have been dead if the majority of the 9.671 million deaths came from them. In fact, there were some younger CCP members who had also died in the pandemic. So we can’t really give an accurate estimate of the COVID mortality rate of the CCP members due to lack of data, but the above highly simplified math exercise can at least give us some idea of the fatalities among CCP members. 

Xinhua News Agency reported on December 28, 2022, that the Central Organization Department earmarked 336.6 million yuan in “visitation fees” for the 2023 Chinese New Year. Such fees are usually spent on visiting elderly or lower-income CCP members. The news specifically pointed out that the households visited also included family members of some who had joined the Party before 1949, as well as families who had loved ones who died in the line of duty. It is worth noting that these officials who joined the Party before 1949 were at least 90 and they had been hard hit by COVID, while many of the “in the line of duty deaths” were caused by COVID.

These visitation fees were 111 million yuan in 2019 and 227 million yuan in 2020. Information on the fees was not available for 2021, but it remained about the same (220 million yuan) for 2022 and jumped 53% to 336.6 million yuan for 2023. While not all of the increase could be attributed to visiting families of deceased CCP members, the sharp increase from 2019 to 2020 (when COVID first broke out) and then 2022-2023 (the new COVID tsunami) corresponded to the two waves of the pandemic. 

Again, we do not have complete data and cannot make accurate estimates, but direct and circumstantial evidence should make us doubt the officially reported COVID death count.

When the Truth is Buried

Mr. Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong, said on January 15 that the CCP had been covering up the truth and that over 400 million people in China had lost their lives during the three-year pandemic. Almost everyone was shocked by this figure and some cast doubt on the death toll. 

Looking back in history, however, we could find many lessons of this kind. During World War II, when Polish diplomat Jan Karski told American officials including U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter his firsthand account of the Holocaust against Polish Jews, they dismissed it.“I am unable to believe you,” said Frankfurter, who was also Jewish.“Felix, you cannot tell this man to his face that he is lying,” said the Polish ambassador at the scene. “The authority of my government is behind him.”“Mr. Ambassador, I did not say that this young man is lying. I said that I am unable to believe him,” replied the justice. “There is a difference.”

Finding the truth is not difficult, assuming people have the courage to face pressure. Walter Duranty, Moscow Bureau Chief of The New York Times(1922–1936), received a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his many positive reports about the Soviet Union. 

Gareth Jones, a young journalist from the U.K., visited the Soviet Union and issued a press release upon coming back, detailing the dire situation over there. But Duranty wrote several articles denouncing Jones and denying the famine. As many facts surfaced years later, calls were made to revoke his Pulitzer. The New York Times, which submitted his works for the prize in 1932, also wrote in 1990 that Duranty’s later articles denying the famine constituted “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper.”

Seeing Truth When Tragedies Hit Home

Given the state-of-the-art censorship technology and strong global influence of the CCP, few people are courageous enough to challenge the regime. Although the CCP-sanctioned forced organ harvesting from living Falun Gong practitioners has been exposed as early as in 2006, many people in China did not believe it, much less take actions to stop the crime. It was not until a 15-year-old high school freshman disappeared on his way from his dorm to his classroom at his gated private school in October 2022 did many begin to suspect the existence of forced organ harvesting. 

Another example is the 23-year-long persecution of Falun Gong. Tens of millions of practitioners have been arrested, detained, and tortured for upholding their faith since the CCP began to persecute Falun Gong in July 1999. As a result of the CCP’s hate propaganda against Falun Gong, many Chinese citizens did not care about the suffering of practitioners at all. They, however, experienced firsthand the CCP’s ruthlessness when the pandemic hit and they were locked down and subjected to tight monitoring through health codes apps (which many likened to electronic handcuffs) on their phones. When police and Big White (health workers wearing white whole-body protective personal equipment) could break in private residences at will and take people away for quarantine, many began to realize that they did not have basic rights at all. 

A Blind Spot for Facts 

“If 400 million people have died in the pandemic, I would have noticed it, right?” pondered some Chinese citizens. They wondered why there are still so many people on the streets as if there were no change at all?

Here we would like to explore a few areas in which our eyes and thought process could fool us. 

Optical illusions

Müller-Lyer illusion

One example is Müller-Lyer illusion. The three line segments shown above have equal lengths, but we may perceive the middle line segment between two inward-pointing arrows as longer than the top and bottom segments. The perceived length of the middle segment is up to 20% more of the actual length.

Ebbinghaus illusion

Another example is Ebbinghaus illusion. Although the two orange circles in the above picture are of the same size, the one on the left looks smaller than the one on the right. 

There are many other types of optical illusions as well, such as Munker-White Illusion, Hering illusion, Hermann Grid, and rubber hand illusion. Interested readers can look them up on the internet. The bottom line is, if you are standing on a street in Beijing, you cannot tell if China has 1.4 billion people or 700 million people. 

Dunbar’s number - the law of 150

British anthologist Robin Dunbar proposed in early 1990 that, due to our brain structure, one can only interact with 150 people “beyond which member of any social group lose their ability to function effectively in social relationships.” Even among these 150 people, there are normally 5 intimate friends, 15 good friends (including 5 intimate ones), 50 friends (including about 20 good friends), and 150 acquaintances (all-encompassing). 

Such a phenomenon is often seen in one’s contact list, Facebook friends, Christmas card recipients, military units, online gambling, class size, and residence community size. As long as people in our close circle do not have major changes, we may not realize changes outside the circle. 

Of course, the law of 150 is a model in a free society. In communist China, people may have even smaller circles (with fewer than 150 acquaintances) from which we form opinions about our surroundings and society as a whole, especially given the state-of-the-art censorship and the propaganda from the government-controlled media and the pro-CCP agents (also known as 50-Cent Party members who were paid to praise the CCP on social media platforms). 

Survivorship bias

Survivorship bias, also known as survival bias, is a logic error of focusing on entities that passed a selection process but ignoring those that failed the selection. For example, if financial performance data were collected by excluding failed companies that no longer existed, the average result would skew higher. Similarly, when we investigate the reason for a car accident, we may only obtain incomplete information by interviewing the survivors, since the dead would no longer be able to provide any insights into the accident. 

In the same vein, if no one or very few people in one’s circle have died of COVID, one may not notice the families outside their circle who have lost loved ones to COVID. 

Zhao Lanjian, former media professional who was once targeted by the CCP for seeking truth about a woman who was sold as a sex slave and chained all day long, recently commented on the pandemic on Twitter. “After this pandemic, I think China’s population would be below one billion, or even lower,” he wrote. “You can find evidence from the vacant houses, deserted places, and barren land in towns and villages.”

Under the CCP’s advanced, comprehensive censorship and brutality, few people dare to risk their life seeking the truth and suffer from Stockholm syndrome (people developing positive feelings toward their captors or abusers over time), choosing to remain silent or even side with the CCP to parrot lies to get over the traumatic experiences. 

Additional Evidence

Still, facts are facts and the evidence will surface sooner or later.

Another inference can be made by looking at the leaked information from police in Shanghai. A hacker, identified as “ChinaDan,” posted on hacker forum Breach Forum in late June 2022, soliciting buyers for 970 million Chinese citizens’ confidential information, including their name, address, birthplace, national ID number, mobile phone number, and so on. This leaked figure (970 million) is believed to represent the adult population in China. 

Further evidence can be found in the cremation industry. Although many other industries have withered during the pandemic, the nucleic acid testing business was in high demand until the lifting of the zero-COVID policy. The funeral and cremation industry then took over to become the next hot industry. Crematories across China have been overwhelmed in the past few months. As a matter of fact, the same happened during the 2003 SARS. Tencent.com reported on April 3, 2021, that “The funeral industry has entered the ‘Top 10 Profitable Industries in China’ for several years since 2003.” In fact, 2003 was the time when SARS killed many Chinese citizens. 

Public data shows that there were 2,706 businesses in the funeral and cremation industry in 2015. The number increased steadily in the next few years, with 7,789 companies in 2019, 10,123 in 2020, and 13,879 in 2021. Such a sharp increase corresponded to the high number of COVID deaths during the pandemic.

Staying Safe

Atypical phenomena were often seen preceding or accompanying major manmade or natural disasters. Seven-colored cloud was seen before an earthquake in Sichuan Province in June 2022, a meteorite fell in Zhejiang Province in December 2022, and a four-planet alignment occurred during this Chinese New Year. In addition, residents in Sichuan and Xinjiang saw a green sun on January 26, while three suns were seen in Tieling City of Liaoning Province the day before. 

Chinese traditional culture emphasizes harmony between heaven, earth, and mankind. All these abnormal phenomena could be hints of uncertainties in our society. With the ongoing pandemic and the recent surge of infections and deaths in China, it is even more important for people to know how to stay safe.

Falun Gong’s founder Mr. Li Hongzhi, wrote in March 2020, “...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.” (“Stay Rational”)

In the same article, Mr. Li also wrote, “People should distance themselves from the CCP and stop siding with the Party. Behind it is the red Devil, while outwardly it looks and acts like a thug who stops at no evil. So now that the divine is starting to eradicate it, all who still stand by it shall perish. Those who doubt this can wait and see.” “What people should do, instead, is to repent to the divine with all due sincerity, admit to their faults, and pray for a chance to change their ways. That is the way to go, and that is the magic cure.”

Mr. Li also wrote on January 20, 2023, “With a human body they could reduce their karma and sins by enduring hardship. And in this place that is devoid of truth they could, by holding fast to the higher truths taught by God and persevering in goodness and kindness, achieve the elevation of their souls. The end times are now upon us, and the Heavenly Gate that leads out of the Three Realms has been opened. The Creator has been selecting for deliverance those who have done as I describe.” (“How Humankind Came To Be”)