Fresh Evidence Devastates China's Claim that Wuhan Lockdown was Prompt

July 23, 2020

6 min read

It is now evident that two noteworthy reports about the virus were, in fact, issued in China as early as November 2019

Jianli Yang, a mathematician and human rights activist, survived China's Tiananmen Massacre in 1989, after which he left China for the United States. He returned in 2002 and was jailed between 2002 and 2007 for supporting the country's labor movement. He was intermittently held in solitary confinement for a total of 15 months – as detailed in a previous IranWire interview – and returned to the US after his release.

In a weekly series for IranWire, Jianli Yang analyses Chinese disinformation around the origin of coronavirus and its handling to date, and other recent affairs.

Public perception of China’s (mis)handling of the coronavirus outbreak in early stages is posing a serious challenge for the Chinese Communist Party, both at home and abroad. Some scholars in China, including the recently purged law professor Xu Zhangrun, have gone so far as to say the public health crisis had exposed the bankruptcy of the regime at large.

Sustained unrest has been visible across Chinese domestic social media. It mirrors allegations in the international community that the CCP did not do enough to contain the epidemic. The Chinese state has scrambled from the get-go to manage this PR crisis, lately issuing a few documents that try to entrench its official narrative of events.

The most recent of these was the government’s white paper, entitled Various fallacies and facts about human rights issues related to China, which was issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on July 2. Among the 37 “falsehoods” enumerated in the document, one of them, at number 11, sticks in the craw for those of us dedicated to the truth.

The “falsehood”, as we touched on last week, was the claim: “China tried to cover up Covid-19, resulting in its spread across the world with over 10 million infections.”

The “truth” the white paper sought to correct this "falsehood" with was as follows:

The Chinese government adopted the most comprehensive, stringent and thorough measures in the shortest possible time. The infections were largely kept within Wuhan with the chain of transmission effectively cut off.

As in other places, the white paper tried to prove this by citing measures provably taken by China, like shutting down Wuhan, the municipality where the virus is believed to have originated. But this move came as late as January 23, 2020: a whole 23 days since Wuhan’s public health officials first formally announced the outbreak of the virus on New Year’s Eve.

On July 1, my organization, Citizen Power Initiatives for China, launched a 100,000-Chinese character research report entitled China and the Pandemic. By carefully analysing all the data and first-hand Chinese sources available, we have been able to produce a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of the outbreak. It is now evident that two noteworthy reports about the virus were, in fact, issued in China as early as November 2019.

What happened between then and January 23, 2020? It is beyond the scope of this article to list them all, but by means of a handful of telling incidents:

In December 2019, several Chinese laboratories identified a mystery infectious virus.

On January 1, 2020 the authorities demanded the destruction of the lab samples and a halt to testing for the virus. Despite multiple cases of transmission, they denied human-to-human transmission of the virus until three weeks later.

China first discovered the genome sequence of the virus on December 27, 2019. But it did not report the epidemic to the World Health Organization within 24 hours as required by the International Health Regulations. Instead, it did so on January 3, 2020: and then only after being pressed by WHO, which had already learned the outbreak from other sources.

China refused to share with WHO the most important data including the genome sequence until January 12, 2020, the day after that information had become public in an international academic domain. ( https://apnews.com/3c061794970661042b18d5aeaaed9fae)

On December 31, 2019, the eye doctor Li Wenliang and seven other doctors from Wuhan Central Hospital, started blowing the whistle. They were reprimanded by the authorities for “propagating rumors.” The state-controlled media doubled down by publicly humiliating them, claiming the doctors were stirring up trouble and deserved punishment.

Our research finds China’s ruler, Xi Jinping, became aware of the epidemic on the night of December 30, 2019 at the latest. Even according to a Chinese state-run journal, Xi Jinping had known about it by January 7, 2020 – and on that day at the politburo meeting, Xi Jinping gave a comprehensive order for the government’s response.

We don’t know what exactly the order was, but from the government’s actions in the next two weeks, we can probably assume that at the core of his order was an extensive cover-up or downplaying for the sake of stability. Otherwise, given the leader’s power in China, the delay would be unthinkable.

During that time, in Wuhan, both the city government and the provincial government convened meetings of up to 1,200 people. The local government organized a 40,000-family banquet to celebrate Chinese New Year. On January 23, the day when the Wuhan lockdown was declared, the top state-run media outlet People’s Daily did not mention the lockdown at all, but instead headlined the news that Xi Jinping had hosted a grand new year party – during which he did not say a word about Wuhan or the outbreak.

What did not happen during that time, when the virus wildly spread, is also very telling. The People’s Daily had zero reports on the virus outbreak in the first 20 days of 2020. If this is not a cover-up, nothing is.

On June 8, China’s foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying was questioned in her regular press briefing about a recent State Council Information Office white paper that had provided a glowing account of Beijing’s coronavirus response that also defended against criticism of a cover-up. Hua said: “China issued the white paper not to defend itself, but to keep a record. The history of the fight against the pandemic should not be tainted by lies and misleading information; it should be recorded with the right collective memory of all mankind.”

There is no such a thing as the right collective memory. A memory, collective or individual, can only be true or false. Might is not right.

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