Hot Topics – Page 5

Hu Xijin Boldly Interpreted Why Xi Jinping Was not on the CCP’s Core Media

Recently there have been many discussions on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) infight. One hot discussion was the fight between Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the CCP, and the faction of Jiang Zemin, former CCP head; and another one is the fight between Xi and Li Keqiang, China’s Premier. Chinascope is not able to verify the validity of these reports.

The Epoch Times reported that on May 17 and 18, People’s Daily, one of the CCP’s main mouthpiece, listed Li Keqiang, Wang Yang, and Li Zhanshu, one after the other, on its front page but didn’t cover Xi Jinping. That was unusual, since Xi usually receives the most coverage on the media. In the CCP’s internal factions, Li Keqiang and Wang Yang, ranked number 2 and 4 of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee members, are in the Communist Youth League faction; Li Zhanshu, ranked number 3 of the Politburo Standing Committee member, is Xi’s ally.

Hu Xijin, the former chief editor of the CCP’s mouthpiece Global Times, made an comment on his Weibo account. He highlighted in a red box an article on promoting China’s economy (which is Li Keqiang’s position) on the front page of the May 17 People’s Daily, and commented, “This is a very important signal. Follow this signal, put aside your doubts and uncertainties, and embrace new opportunities. Then you will be proved to be real business heroes and a hero of these times.” Next to Hu’s red box, were two other articles reporting Li Keqiang’s and Wang Yang’s activities. So Hu’s comments could be interpreted as having double meaning.

There are other reports on the power balancing as well. On May 11, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled, “Li Keqiang steps out of Xi Jinping’s shadow.”

On May 14, both Xinhua News Agency and the People’s Daily published the full text of Li Keqiang’s 9,000-word speech given on April 25. It is not very common to report something 20 days ago, especially publishing the full text.

On the other hand, the front pages of People’s Daily on May 15 and 16 reported Xi Jinping, without the appearance of any other senior CCP leaders.

No article about Xi Jinping appeared on the front page of the Xinhua website on May 18. Nor did the PLA Daily have one on May 18 either.

Source: Epoch Times, May 18, 2022.
https://www.epochtimes.com/b5/22/5/17/n13739454.htm

Hot Topics | | May 18, 2022 | Grapevine

Leadership: “Unwaveringly Adhere to the Zero-COVID Policy”

Xi Jinping hosted the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) Politburo Standing Committee meeting on May 5, 2022, to discuss the COVID strategy. People’s Daily reported that the meeting called for continuing Xi Jinping’s “Zero-COVID” strategy, unswervingly adhering to the general policy of “dynamically zeroing out” and resolutely fighting against words and deeds that distort, doubt, and deny our epidemic prevention policies.

The article said, “Practice has proved that our prevention and control policy is determined by the Party’s nature and purpose, our prevention and control policy has stood up in history, and our prevention and control measures are scientific and effective. We have won the Wuhan battle and we will definitely win the battle of Shanghai.” (Editor’s note: It might be a stretch to say that the COVID policy is determined by “the Party’s nature and purpose.” However, it indicates that whether to follow the “Zero-COVID” policy is whether to align oneself with the party. Thus the people who suggest to stop “Zero-COVID” and switch to coexisting with the virus are taking a wrong path from the Party.)

On May 7, The CCP Central Commission on Discipline Inspections supported this decision by publishing a commentary titled, “Deeply, Completely, and Comprehensively Understand the COVID Prevention and Control Policies Set by the Party Central Committee.”

The military also supported Xi’s position. On May 7, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily also published a commentary, titled “Unwaveringly adhere to the ‘dynamic zeroing out’ general policy.”

Government: Shanghai Volunteers Found Someone Took Their Identifies and their Compensation

Recently, when people in Shanghai tried to register themselves as volunteers, they found their names had already been registered. Someone had taken their identities, completed the registration process, and collected the compensation meant for volunteers.

For example, a woman found from the official volunteer website that she did 26 hours of volunteer work in 2017, but she was pregnant at that time and never did that work. An elementary student found she “was registered” in November 2019 when she was seven; a son found that his aging father did 16 hours of volunteer work in 2018 though his father had been sick and had mobility problems.

There were also many fake volunteer identities and fake incidents of participation in work during the COVID lockdown. A man reported to the authorities that he found out that he “was registered” as a volunteer in two groups. One was with the Huangpu District Yuyuan Street Neighborhood Volunteer Service Center, which pays each volunteer at least 50 Yuan (US $7.5) for each event. He had never received any money. Another man said volunteers in his neighborhood receive 120 Yuan each day and some other regions are even paid 400 Yuan.

On March 3, Xinhua reported that 5.2 million people in Shanghai, or over 21 percent of the permanent population there, had registered volunteer accounts.

Editor’s note: Obviously in Shanghai, someone has stolen people’s identities to register volunteer accounts and then collected money based on their fake registration. Since this involves repeated payment distributions from the government, it is unlikely that the authorities knew nothing about it.

Sources:
1. Epoch Times, April 27, 2022
https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/4/27/n13721701.htm
2. Xinhua, March 3, 2022
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-03/03/c_139781116.htm

Hot Topics | | May 2, 2022 | Government/Politics Social Stability

Government: Beijing Plans to Keep the “Zero-COVID” Policy Until the 20th Party Congress

Two sources indicate that Beijing plans to continue its “Zero-COVID” policy and not switch to the coexistence approach at least until after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) holds its 20^th National Congress later this year. The “Zero-COVID” policy has created mounting humanitarian crises in China, especially during the ongoing Shanghai lockdown.

Joerg Wuttke, President of the E.U. Chamber of Commerce in China, said during an interview with the Swiss, German-language daily newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), “(I)n closed meetings – especially in ministries that deal with the economy and businesses – I meet very well-informed and open-minded top politicians. They know what Zero Covid means for the economy. It’s just that they can’t use this knowledge to bring about policy change at the moment. Until the 20th Party Congress, which will take place later this year, they will stick to the Zero Covid policy. President Xi wants to be confirmed for a third term, so he cannot change his narrative this close to the finish line. The president has maneuvered himself into two dead ends at once: He can’t change his Covid policy, and he can’t change anything about his friendship with Vladimir Putin.”

A news commentator from Epoch Times stated that he had received the meeting minutes of an official COVID information meeting on April 25. The keynote speaker was Jiang Rongmeng, a member of the National Health Commission’s COVID Expert Group and Vice President of Beijing Ditan Hospital. Jiang is a real medical expert in the CCP inner cycle: he went to Wuhan during the lockdown, is an expert in the Beijing Emergency Management Bureau, and is one of the main authors of the “COVID Treatment Plan.”

Jiang listed five pre-conditions for China to change its Zero-COVID policy:

Medicines need to be available, which won’t be ready within six months.
80 percent of the elderly are vaccinated, which is possible to achieve in six months.
There are enough isolation beds, which is easy to do.
There is enough ICU capacity [throughout China], which is unlikely to happen. China lags far behind the United States and Europe on this and it is impossible to catch up in a short term. It is easy to buy equipment but it takes 5 years to train an ICU doctor.
Public opinion needs to be reset. Now people are scared of COVID and many will go to the hospital even if they have a low temperature when switching to the coexistence policy, which will deplete the hospital’s capacity.

These conditions indicates that Jiang does not think China is ready to change its COVID policy in the next six months due to its own situation.

Shanghai’s Infectious Disease Expert Calls on Authorities to Stop “Zero-COVID” Policy

On April 27, Epoch Times reported that Miao Xiaohui, a leading infectious disease expert in Shanghai, issued a post on April 23 calling on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) authorities to stop its “zero-COVID ” policy, so as to reduce the secondary disasters that the approach has caused.

Miao was the vice president of Changzheng Hospital, which is affiliated with the Second Military Medical University of China. Concurrently he was the director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University. He made it clear that the “zero-COVID ” approach was ineffective and lacked any scientific basis. He said that a number of neighborhoods in Shanghai had been locked down and controlled for nearly one month, that that period exceeds the three longest incubation periods for the Omicron virus and is “completely inconsistent with the basic laws of infectious disease epidemics.”

The “zero-COVID ” approach has triggered a large number of secondary disasters. One example is that many people’s deaths should not have occurred. “Let’s stop it!” He appealed.

As early as April 8, Miao even publicly pointed out that, under the strict lockdown, the “zero-COVID ” policy will lead to a run-on medical resources. He called for concern about the additional deaths and for settling the situation as soon as possible. He believed that, during the Shanghai lock-down period, because of the run-on medical resources, a number of chronic non-infectious diseases, infectious diseases, and acute diseases, plus a 66 percent increase in the suicide rate due to psychological stress, will result in a severe number of additional deaths that should not be ignored.

(Since the lockdown of Shanghai, many hospitals have been closed. This has led citizens to lose access to basic medical services and, as a result, many have lost their lives due to the lack of timely treatment. Some people spontaneously counted the list of dead persons in Shanghai who “died not from the COVID-19, but because of it.” By April 27, the number of deaths reached 176. For example, Yu Hongsan, a senior notary at the Shanghai Oriental Justice Office, suffered an asthma attack and passed away on March 19 because an ambulance could not get to him in time. By April 28, The total death toll from COVID-19 in Shanghai was 337 .)

The need for and the cost of the “zero-COVID ” approach and the lockdown of the city should be considered carefully, Miao stated. In order to reduce the crowding for the use medical resources, he suggested that asymptomatic infected people may be isolated at home; re-checked as to whether the universal nucleic acid testing is absolutely necessary; and hospitals should not be closed completely. It should be noted especially that nucleic acid testing can increase the problem of cross-infection.

On April 24, Ding Xian, former Party Secretary of the Jing’an Branch of the Shanghai Huashan Hospital, also pointed out the shortcomings of the “zero-COVID” strategy: “Repeated nucleic acid testing, overwhelming burdening of staff, and a most serious cross-infection pattern, where science has been thrown in the trash.”

Yin Youkuan, the former deputy director of the Department of Infectious Diseases at Huashan Hospital of Shanghai indicated in an April 22 post that the number of positive cases will increase by 3 to 4 percent for every full staff nucleic acid test done. He took a community in Shanghai as an example where originally there were no positive cases. However, after a few days of nucleic acid testing, 83 positive cases emerged. He pointed out,”That’s what the staff brought in.”

At present, Shanghai has implemented a so-called “Hard Quarantine” in a closed and controlled area. This means that the doors in the whole building are locked from the outside and residents can only move around inside their own apartments.

Source: Epoch Times, April 27, 2022. https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/22/4/27/n13721825.htm

Hot Topics | | April 29, 2022 | Social Stability

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Hu Xijin Boldly Interpreted Why Xi Jinping Was not on the CCP’s Core Media

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