Commentary The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials on Dec. 27 placed the city of Xi’an under tight lockdown restrictions to suppress a new wave of COVID-19 outbreak in Shaanxi Province. Or did they? The CCP has been escalating lockdowns of its citizens throughout the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over the past year, imposing punitive levels of testing and constraint of movement of people, citing nominal infection rates among the citizens. But there is no scrutiny or plausibility of any CCP statistics of infections, hospitalization, or deaths, just as there is no capability to verify any statistics issued by the Chinese regime. By the end of 2021, an exhausted mainland Chinese populace no longer even bothered to question, even if it had the avenues to do so, the CCP’s insistence that it was attempting to protect the public health. In reality, the increasingly tight constraint on human movement and the …