On the menu today: Big mainstream-media institutions like the Washington Post and CNN offer some eye-opening accounts of the true consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic in China, as the country’s crematoria are now working around the clock to keep up with the steady stream of bodies. To hear the Chinese government tell it, the country has barely seen any increase in Covid deaths since society was reopened — yet another example of how the regime headed by Xi Jinping lies shamelessly and brazenly on the most critical matters. Every other government on Earth should recognize that in Beijing, they’re dealing with pathological liars.
China’s Crematoria Are Working 24/7
In China, the incinerators at crematoria are working 24/7. Simultaneously, the government says it isn’t seeing any increase in deaths from Covid-19, despite a big increase in the infection rate after ending the “zero Covid” policies. The Chinese government of Xi Jinping lies about everything, and oftentimes it seems like the more important and consequential the subject, the more shamelessly and brazenly the regime in Beijing will lie.
The investigative team over at the Washington Post understands how to write a lead paragraph that grabs you, showcasing China’s overwhelmed systems for handling the dead on a human scale:
An overwhelmed funeral home in Chengdu, China, stopped offering memorial services, budgeting just two minutes for each family to say goodbye to loved ones before cremation. A funeral parlor on the outskirts of Beijing quickly cleared space for a new parking lot. Scalpers in Shanghai sold places in line at funeral homes for $300 a pop to grieving relatives trying to get cremation slots.
Still, the Chinese government continues to insist that fewer than 40 people have died in China of covid since Dec. 7, when “zero covid” restrictions aimed at entirely eliminating the virus were suddenly dropped — and infection numbers exploded.
The BBC noticed that occasionally a local or state health office in China will release data that don’t square with the national figures: “Other local and provincial officials have also been providing very different data to that from the central government. On Christmas Eve, a senior health official in the port city of Qingdao reported that half a million people were being infected each day. Those case figures were swiftly removed from news reports.”
CNN reports that the situation is getting so bad that World Health Organization officials are more or less acknowledging that China’s official statistics are implausible nonsense and politely asking for more accurate figures:
As reports of overwhelmed hospitals and funeral homes roll in, China has faced accusations from the WHO and US that it is under-representing the severity of its current outbreak, with top global health officials urging Beijing to share more data about the explosive spread.
“We continue to ask China for more rapid, regular, reliable data on hospitalizations and deaths, as well as more comprehensive, real-time viral sequencing,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news briefing in Geneva last week.
“WHO is concerned about the risk to life in China and has reiterated the importance of vaccination, including booster doses, to protect against hospitalization, severe disease, and death,” he said.
Speaking in more detail, WHO executive director for health emergencies Mike Ryan said the numbers released by China “under-represent the true impact of the disease” in terms of hospital and ICU admissions, as well as deaths.
He acknowledged that many countries have seen lags in reporting hospital data, but pointed to China’s definition of a Covid death as part of the issue.
Is the politeness routinely shown by international organizations toward the Chinese government one of the reasons for the regime’s brazenness and shamelessness in lying? When’s the last time any Chinese government official was told, to his face, “No, that’s a lie, those figures are absolute garbage and we don’t believe them”? In other words, has a long, long era of reluctance to confront China enabled the regime’s habitual and systemic dishonesty?
The Chinese government had to end the three-year failed experiment of zero Covid, a policy of sweeping, draconian lockdowns enacted anytime anyone tested positive for the virus. While the rest of the world was putting the pandemic behind it and returning to something resembling normal, the Chinese economy was limping along. Ordinary people were starting to take to the streets in protest.
But because Chinese vaccines are less effective — and that’s putting it kindly — than those used in the West, most of China’s population lacks effective immunity against the virus. It’s also hard not to notice that China is demographically upside down because of decades of the one-child policy — lots of elderly, not enough young people, resulting in “one of the fastest growing aging populations in the world.”
This authoritarian government capable of forcing almost any policy choice on its population somehow managed to not vaccinate a significant portion of its elderly citizens: One-third of those 80 or older are not vaccinated. It is hard to believe that failure is due to some snafu or oversight. If you’re an ambitious and aggressive rising superpower with grand plans of expanding your “sphere of influence,” you’d want to avoid having your country look like a giant retirement home, while you spend all your resources on health care for grandparents who tended to be heavy smokers. It’s enough of a problem for the Chinese government that there are 110 to 116 young Chinese men for every 100 young Chinese women. An excess number of young men is almost always a destabilizing force in a society; Xi Jinping is just going to have to find some sort of endeavor to occupy those frustrated, hotheaded young men.
As for the satellite photos of China’s crematoria, this is not the first time the outside world has seen such images and concluded that Beijing is hiding something.
Way back at the beginning of the pandemic, people outside of China looked at the government’s official Covid figures and concluded they couldn’t possibly be right. The governments of the city of Wuhan and of China as a whole spent the first three to six weeks of the pandemic insisting there was no evidence that the virus was spreading from one human to another, despite doctors’ catching it from their patients. Perhaps most ominously for the rest of the world, the local and national governments’ “we have everything under control” message impeded an honest accounting of how deadly the virus was.
The death toll in Wuhan rose unnervingly rapidly to about 2,400, and then suddenly and inexplicably slowed. This was long before the development of vaccines, and at a time when the world’s medical communities were just figuring out how SARS-CoV-2 worked and how to best treat it.
One of the ways outside observers could tell that the official figures on deaths weren’t true was a sudden surge in the number of death-related actions China was taking. As I wrote back in spring of 2020, the official death toll in Wuhan was 2,571 as of April 7, 2020, “but separate calculations of the number of urns purchased by funeral homes and the cremation capacity and use of the cremation ovens put the death toll somewhere between 42,000 and 46,800.”
China’s effort to fool the world found some very credulous Westerners. Back in October 2021, James Palmer of Foreign Policy magazine called me out for not acknowledging the success of China’s approach: “China’s *total* covid casualties (officially) are two or three days of American covid deaths right now. Even allowing for very likely lies and underestimates, they’re a week or two’s worth of American covid deaths.”
Since the start of the pandemic, the Economist has been running an ongoing calculation of each country’s “excess deaths” — that is, how many deaths the country has experienced above its normal rate before Covid. For China, it calculates anywhere from 21,000 to 2.2 million excess deaths.
China’s not alone in this. Russia exhibits the same dishonesty and similarly implausible data: “At least 300,000 more people died last year during the coronavirus pandemic than were reported in Russia’s most widely cited official statistics.”
Authoritarian regimes run on lies; we do no one any favors when we choose to play along in the name of smoother relations.
ADDENDUM: As I write this, all flights across the United States are on hold until at least 9 a.m. eastern owing to a Federal Aviation Administration system failure.
We were destined to have some transportation and logistics snafus coming out of the pandemic, but boy, there sure seem to have been a lot of them over the last two years, huh? The congestion at the ports, supply-chain issues, record gas prices, empty shelves, trucker shortages, all the flight issues last summer and the shortage of pilots, the narrowly averted freight-rail strike, the Southwest debacle, and now this.
No, not all of this is Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s fault. But whenever it hits the fan, he always seems to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — either on paternity leave or acting like a presidential candidate or flying on private jets.
Several online progressives absolutely loathe Buttigieg and are willing to dump a healthy share of the blame on him; what’s more, they’ll intermittently point out that he never had any particular qualifications for the job of transportation secretary. Maybe Buttigieg really is a relatively unaccomplished small-city major with some exceptional presentation skills, honed at McKinsey Consulting.
I’m not a fan of Buttigieg, in part because at Harvard he apparently stood out for being insufferably ambitious in a crowd known for being insufferably ambitious — making it difficult to muster much sympathy for the claim that he’s getting unfairly scapegoated for problems he couldn’t have averted. When you ask for the responsibility, you accept the accountability that goes along with it.