After 'passing on' the pandemic, 'Zero' becomes Xi's new narrative of COVID-19 cases

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All countries around the globe today are reeling under coronavirus, with at least seven lakh people being infected and over 37,000 deaths due to the highly contagious bug. But China, among all the others, is the only one to have announced that no new cases of the infection have been reported since last week.

Catholic Answers Forum, a non-profit organisation, in one of its report, titled "China Is Pushing a 'Zero' Myth on COVID-19," said that "Zero" -- the goal of reducing the number of cases of the novel coronavirus to zero, officially known as COVID-19 and believed to have originated in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province in central China --has become a new narrative of President Xi Jinping.

"Reaching 'zero' is crucial to achieving his broader goal of global leadership and domination," the report said.

It added, "Xi must show the world that the totalitarian Chinese political system is vindicated by the defeat of the virus. The truth about COVID-19 inside China is the greatest obstacle to his ambition."

In order to hide the actual figures, China has also expelled reporters working for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. The regime has clamped down increasingly on independent journalists as its domestic practices have become increasingly inhumane, especially with respect to its repression of religious minorities, including Uighur Muslims, who have been subjected to mass internment, the report stated.

The 'Zero campaign' depends on censorship and makes it "a universal political obligation for Chinese citizens to collectively deny their own public-health crisis." That China's health statistics are manipulated for the Communist Party's political benefit is not news, the report added further.

The evidence they present about COVID-19 contradicts official narratives. Stories on Chinese social media, censored or removed almost as soon as they appear, reveal how local governments cover up new cases and how hospitals are ordered to report new cases as normal flu or pneumonia.

The stories indicate that Hubei Province, far from moving toward normality, is being locked down again by people and police in the surrounding provinces who know the real situation in Hubei.

One video showed a riot that occurred when Hubei police tried to open the border with Jiangxi -- people and police in Jiangxi revolted because they would be exposed to Hubei.

"The government brags about mass recoveries from the virus, but independent media have reported that up to 14 per cent of those have tested positive again. The regime appears to be cooking the books on epidemiological statistics, to be not counting cases in which tests indicate infection but people are asymptomatic. Censors almost immediately removed a photo from the Caixin website showing a truck delivering 2,500 urns filled with the ashes of cremated people. Censors removed as well as an accompanying report that a truck had made another such delivery the same day," the report said.

In the past, the Chinese Communist Party's restrictions on the free flow of information seemed to be a matter mainly concerning the freedom of the Chinese people. But the regime's distortions of the truth has now became more than abstract problems for the international community. They have become a threat to the global public health -- indeed, matters of life and death, the report stressed.