Coronavirus: Can we trust the Chinese government's reporting?

Chinese authorities are well-known for fabricating news reports, so why should the world trust them now, asks Marco Respinti.
Photo credit: PA images

By Marco Respinti

08 Apr 2020

While the world is being quarantined because of the COVID-19 outbreak, it is quite staggering to see China held up as a model. China, tyrannically ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is in fact at the origin and heart of this unprecedented crisis.

The Chinese regime has hidden and delayed divulging important information on the new coronavirus and now is most likely lying about the real number of deaths. This is why it is totally correct to stop calling it a “Chinese virus” and start calling it the “CCP virus”.

Scientists now assert that the virus came naturally from animals. In the interests of transparency, the Chinese regime should therefore immediately release the research records of two facilities in Wuhan.


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Those being the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, located less than 300 meters from the now infamous Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, administered by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, about 12 kilometres from the market.

Both deal with coronaviruses and wild animals such as the horseshoe bats now believed to be the agents of the disease.

The world would very much like also to know why the doctors who tried to warn us have been censored and harassed. The most recent case is Dr Ai Fen, head of the emergency department of the Central Hospital of Wuhan.

In December, she discovered a patient affected with a SARS-like virus only to be accused of sabotaging security by the disciplinary committee of her facility.

"While the world is being quarantined because of the COVID-19 outbreak, it is quite staggering to see China held up as a model"

And what about clothing salesman Fang Bin and lawyer Chen Qiushi, both “citizen journalists” who leaked the truth about China’s death toll in Wuhan - the latter also documented police repression during last year’s revolt in Hong Kong. They have both disappeared into the void.

The CCP regime’s horrendous record of human rights violations is not news, though. It severely persecutes all religious groups and minorities.

The gruesome practice of human harvesting, targeting mainly Falun Gong followers, was documented on March 1 in a 500-page "black book" published by the “China Tribunal,” an independent people’s court based in London.

In Xinjiang up to three million Muslim Uyghurs, plus thousands of other Turkic people, suffer unlawfully in “re-education” camps”.

The new annual report by The Church of Almighty God, the single most persecuted religious movement in China, is a collection of hideous cases.

Tibetan Buddhists are repressed and harassed, alongside Protestants, even if they belong to the “patriotic” (that is, state-controlled) official church, as are dissident Catholics, Taoists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews and believers in traditional folk religions.

None of these crimes ceased during the worst days of the epidemic in Wuhan.

"The Chinese regime has hidden and delayed divulging important information on the new coronavirus and now is most likely lying about the real number of deaths"

This is why, on March 4, a bipartisan group of US senators called on the International Olympic Committee to move the 2022 Winter Olympics out of China and, on March 11.

Meanwhile the US State Department, in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2019, listed dozens of trespasses in its section on China.

So, why should the world believe more fake news from comrade Xi Jinping, the unlikely saviour?