Commentary
George Bernard Shaw once said, “Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.” He wasn’t exaggerating a bit. The swift end of Beijing’s zero-COVID policy brought the reported COVID-19 numbers in China closer to reality, but they are still far from commonsensical.
Even Hu Xijin, a pro-Beijing propagandist often mocked for his undecorated fawning, conceded via his Twitter account on Jan. 16 that “the actual COVID-19 death toll in China since early December is definitely more than 60,000 because the official data only counted deaths at hospitals.”
Perhaps not coincidentally, on the same day, Bloomberg published a story, “China’s Hospital COVID Death Data Just a Tenth of Total Toll.” With an abrupt ending of the zero-COVID policy in early December 2022, China saw an immediate outbreak of Omicron infections throughout the country, infecting at least some 900 million people—80 percent of which had severe symptoms—according to a recent study at Beijing University. Unsurprisingly, this study was censored by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities and was later deleted from all social media platforms….