(Minghui.org) On March 10, 2020, Xi Jinping, the top leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), visited the virus-ravaged Wuhan City, five days after Vice Premier Sun Chunlan visited there and got heckled by several residents who called out to her, “Fake, fake! It’s all fake!”
Many see Xi’s surprise visit to Wuhan as a political show to promote himself, save the face for the Party, and push for the narrative that the coronavirus outbreak has died down and that people are safe to go back to work.
According to an article published by Forbes on March 17, titled “Coronavirus Causes A Dramatic Collapse Of China’s Economy,” China’s “industrial production, a gauge of manufacturing, mining and utilities activity, dropped 13.5% in January and February compared with the same period last year,” and it’s “the first major decline since the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976.”
Desperate to rescue the economy, the CCP is pushing hard to reopen factories and companies, despite that the epidemic is yet to subside. Meanwhile, it is also using state-run propaganda media to change the narrative about the coronavirus to glorify itself and its totalitarian system, as well as to shift the blame about the origin of the virus from Wuhan to outside of China.
During a conference on March 6, Wang Zhonglin, the Party secretary in Wuhan, called for “gratitude education” of local residents to the CCP for its efforts managing the outbreak. His remarks drew backlash from many Chinese people.
In “Our Life Is as Sweet as Honey,” a feature article published on People’s Daily on February 29, 2020, the Chinese state media are pushing for more stories to praise the CCP for its “successful efforts” to contain the virus, while hyping up the narrative of newly confirmed infection cases are all “imported” from countries such as Iran, Italy, and South Korea, where the epidemic is exploding.
In Shandong Province, many neighborhoods have been collecting information from residents in recent weeks and questioning whether they have relatives coming back from abroad recently. Some of the relatives were forced to go into quarantine. The health monitoring of locals, though, is much more lax. Some neighborhood staff no longer take people’s temperature when they go in and out.
According to The Epoch Times, in the past few weeks, many coronavirus patients were dismissed from the makeshift hospitals in Wuhan, without having CT scan or DNA tests to confirm whether they still carry the virus. One doctor called it “political recovery,” not “medical recovery.”
According to a Minghui correspondent, after most people in a village in Wuhan were infected with the coronavirus, instead of providing medical treatment to them, the government sealed off the entire village. Every few days, they sent officials to knock on the villagers’ doors. The officials would leave if they heard people talking inside. If no one answered the door, they would break in and check if the family have died. They would remove the dead bodies and directly throw them into the burial pits that they had dug beforehand.
In Jining Prison in Shandong Province, more than 200 inmates tested positive for the coronavirus in one day a few weeks ago, but the official infection cases before or after that were still zero.
In addition to the ramped up Internet censorship and propaganda news, the CCP continues to develop their mass surveillance system and collect big data for every citizen.
In many cities including Dalian (Liaoning Province), Hangzhou (Zhejiang Province), Xi’an (Shaanxi Province) and some parts in Hubei Province, the authorities have adopted an electronic permit for local residents.
Everyone that opts for the electronic permit has to register on WeChat, the one-for-all social media platform, and submit their personal information to the residential committee or property management for approval. After it’s approved, these people can freely visit any local neighborhood with the electronic permit. All of their location information would be tracked by the app.