Coronavirus, which originated in China, has killed more than 310,000 Americans and more than 140,000 Indians. But less than 5,000 Chinese citizens have died due to the Chinese virus. We are not saying this. China’s statistics reveal this fact. The Chinese numbers are, of course, unreliable given that it was China which gave birth to the deadly pathogen. Hundreds of lakhs of body bags, excessively low fatality rates, mysterious funeral home offices explain the discrepancies in Chinese numbers.
However, till now we were only guessing as to why China was hiding its numbers. An editorial by the Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), however tacitly explains the motives behind the big Chinese concealment. The editorial is titled, “If 300,000 died from COVID-19 in China, how would West react?” And the key words explaining China’s thinking process are ‘Western public opinion’, ‘pressure on China’, ‘man-made’ disaster, ‘Chernobyl nuclear accident’ and ‘sign of unrest’.
So, what we can gather from the Global Times editorial is that either the CCP is worried about a Western assault if the true numbers come out or it is simply sensing signs of an internal unrest/ rebellion which might end up fragmenting the People’s Republic of China (PRC) into several countries like Tibet, Hong Kong, East Turkestan, Inner Mongolia, so on and so forth.
Within Chinese strategic circles, there is persistent insecurity regarding how the Soviet Union had got divided owing to the Chernobyl nuclear ‘accident’ and coverup. The Western world was able to prove the futility of the Soviet experiment and break it down into several independent Republics. The CCP fears that its judgment day could be similar to the one that the Soviet elites had to face.
Therefore, China decided to keep its official numbers down. This way the Communist nation wanted to avoid the fury of the Western public opinion and also avoid internal rebellion over how the CCP created a virus, killing hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens.
Global Times itself seemed furious about why there was no internal tumult in the United States of America, even as the death toll in the country surpassed 300,000. Of course, the CCP mouthpiece doesn’t understand that there isn’t much outrage in the US, because Americans understand that their President didn’t create the pathogen. Also, US citizens know that the White House is not lying.
Anyhow, the CCP feels that the world is unfair. Not because an authoritarian country is harvesting organs of minority communities, but because China feels that it is criticised over creating a Pandemic that has killed more than 1.5 million people across the world.
Global Times seems to think that if true numbers were released by China, it would “become an absolute target of Western public opinion.” It added, “they (West) would rigorously investigate the “underlying political causes” of such a large-scale public health crisis in China, and China’s inability to stop it from spreading.”
China also fears that if the real numbers are released the West “would stress that this is a huge humanitarian disaster in China – not a natural disaster, but a man-made one.” After all, Global Times also considers the Chernobyl nuclear accident a natural catastrophe without any human negligence and also blames the West for using the innocuous incident to accelerate the Soviet collapse.
What the CCP mouthpiece ended up admitting was that if real numbers are released by Beijing, then there would be a popular uprising in the Communist nation. Global Times stated, “Once any sign of unrest occurs in China, they (West) will openly endorse the rioters at the official level, and tout the unrest as an “uprising of people who are in desperation.”
So, the Global Times editorial really exposes the Chinese mindset. And we finally know why China concealed its Coronavirus deaths. Two factors played heavily upon the Communist administration’s mind – one, the risk of a health emergency taking the shape of a popular uprising and two, a brutal Western opinion assault proving how the “Beijing Consensus” is inferior to the “Washington Consensus”.