(Minghui.org) Jiang Yong never thought he would have to run away from his car. Coming to Zhengzhou City, Henan Province, for an in-province business trip, he was ready to start the 125-mile drive home to Zhoukou City on July 21, 2021.
Jiang left early enough in the afternoon to beat the rush hour in Zhengzhou. The initial drive was smooth. But at 3:30 p.m., he was caught in a traffic jam at the Beijing-Guangzhou Highway tunnel, a main north-south corridor in China.
It had been raining heavily in Zhengzhou, Henan’s capital city, for a few days. Despite a little water that had accumulated at the bottom of the tunnel, the drivers were not worried. After all, media reports said the city had recently spent 50 billion yuan (US $7.7 billion) improving its drainage system. Authorities even boasted that the city was a “sponge city,” meaning it could absorb and disperse water easily.
It was 4:30 p.m. and Jiang was still stuck in the tunnel. Traffic barely moved, but everything else was fine.
However, at around 5:00 p.m., water suddenly flowed down into the tunnel like a river. The water level was rising rapidly. Jiang got out of his SUV and saw the car behind him start to float. Since the water was up to his knees, Jiang went back and pulled his friend out of the passenger door. The water kept rushing down and rising. The two of them held onto each other and waded through the water. They managed to get to the center median and walked out of the tunnel. In two minutes, his SUV disappeared – it was completely underwater.
It took only five minutes for the flood to claim the entire tunnel. Jiang and his friend were the last ones to get out of the tunnel. How many people were trapped in the rising water? Jiang didn’t know. All he knew was that there had been many cars stuck in front of him.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced that six people died due to the flood in the Beijing-Guangzhou Highway Tunnel. Many doubt the accuracy of that number. The tunnel has three lanes in each direction and is over a mile long. Cars were packed next to each other at the time of the flooding. Besides, in only five minutes, how many people could make the quick decision to escape and manage to walk through the water to get out of the tunnel?
A similar flood occurred at the subway stations in Zhengzhou around the same time. The water rose and filled most parts of the train cars. Many people died through lack of oxygen. Again, the total death count was unknown.
This tragedy could have been prevented if the authorities had issued the right directions. In fact, the day before the disaster, the Weather Bureau issued five red alerts about rainstorms, but the Zhengzhou government issued instructions that all major transportation systems, including tunnels and subways, were to be kept running.
To make things worse, earlier on the day of the tragedy, the government authorized a release of water from the Changzhuang Reservoir next to Zhengzhou, because its water level exceeded the alert level. The surge of water that Jiang and others in tunnels and subways saw was not caused by the rain but rather the release of water from the reservoir.
Very few people in China knew the true cause of the tragedy, though. For local residents, the CCP falsely claimed Zhengzhou had an unprecedented rainfall that occurred once in a thousand years, thus shirking its responsibilities. Outside that region, hardly anyone knew any details of the tragedies due to the CCP’s massive censorship.
Lying about Disasters
There are many similarities between how the CCP handled the Zhengzhou flooding disaster and the initial stage of the Wuhan virus outbreak. The main tactic was to cover up the disaster and control public opinion, including shifting people’s attention elsewhere. By doing that, the regime essentially focuses on securing its own power and control, instead of on people’s lives and well-being.
One example is another rainstorm – a bigger one, also in Henan Province, that occurred in August 1975. At that time, 58 major and minor dams collapsed due to poor construction. Seven counties were flooded with water several yards deep. Over 12 million people in 29 counties and cities were impacted and 6.8 million houses were ruined. The flood also destroyed over 60 miles of the Beijing-Guangzhou railway, halting train transportation for 18 days and resulting in a direct economic loss of 10 billion yuan (US $1.5 billion).
Eight members of the National Committee of the People’s Political Consultative Conference wrote articles putting the death toll of the 1975 flood at more than 230,000. However, the CCP muffled almost all reports about this disaster.
Another example is the SARS virus, which was first reported in Guangdong Province in November 2002. At that time, the CCP was having its Sixteenth National Party Congress. Then-CCP leader Jiang Zemin ordered the media not to report on this disease to avoid ruining the public’s “happy” mood for the Party’s National Congress.
It was not until March 2003 when a Guangdong doctor died of SARS in Hong Kong that the world learned that SARS had been spreading in China. It was too late by then.
Soon after that, the CCP media declared on April 2, 2003, that China had effectively controlled the SARS epidemic. China’s Health Minister Zhang Wenkang said at a press conference the next day, “I am saying responsibly that it is safe to work, live, and travel in China.”
However, Chinese people were continuing to come down with SARS at that very moment. Xiaotangshan, Beijing’s SARS isolation center, was busy burning people who had died of SARS. CCP head Jiang Zemin was riding his “special presidential train” all over China to avoid the infection.
In another example, two high-speed trains ran into each other near Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province, on July 23, 2011. Five hours later, the authorities announced the end of the rescue mission since there was no “sign of survivors.” It destroyed the train and carriages and buried them. However, 16 hours later, a two-and-half-year-old girl, Xiang Weiyi, was found alive in a remaining train carriage by her relatives.
Five more hours later, Ministry of Railroad spokesperson Wang Yongping was asked during a press conference why a girl was found alive after the government stopped its rescue efforts. “Maybe this can be called a miracle of life,” replied Wang.
As bad as the CCP’s cover-ups and lies are its misjudging of disasters, its inability to rescue, and its disdain for human life. Most importantly for the CCP is to secure its power at any cost.
Post-Disaster Management
Many disasters in China are caused by the authorities. However, regardless of the real cause, the CCP repeatedly tells the public that the reason the Chinese can survive is because of wise Party leadership. To that end, every natural or man-made disaster ends with “Thanking the Party.”
Wenchuan County in Sichuan Province had an 8.2-grade earthquake on May 12, 2008. The official count released on September 25 was 69,227 people dead; 374,643 injured; and 17,923 missing. A private organization’s investigation reported around 300,000 deaths, including over 30,000 students, many of them elementary students.
The CCP media only reported how great the Party was and that people joined the Party to help with rescue efforts. The Wenchuan government declared May 12, 2018, the tenth anniversary of the earthquake, as “Appreciation [to the CCP] Day.”
But the government did not mention the sub-standard school buildings that collapsed and killed the students inside, not to mention that it never investigated who was accountable for the poor construction.
Parents whose children died in the collapse of the school investigated on their own. They visited all levels of government to request justice for over ten years. Not only did they receive no response, they were also suppressed, beaten, and even arrested. Their memorials for the dead were not allowed. When they tried to file civil lawsuits against the school and construction companies, the authorities refused to accept them, saying the statute of limitations was eight years and that had passed.
The “CCP Virus,” or the COVID-19 virus, broke out in Wuhan, Hubei Province in early 2020. The CCP rolled out its routine of "cover-up, control the media, and suppress whistle-blowers."
While the pandemic was still spreading all over the world, the CCP published a book A Great Country Fighting the Pandemic, claiming it had won the battle over the “CCP Virus” under the leadership of the great Party. On September 8, 2020, the CCP also held a ceremony to give out medals to “heroes” who fought the virus. All these built a false sense of national pride and the illusion that the CCP had won over the virus while other countries were still suffering. Many young Chinese, in particular, worshipped Zhong Nanshan, a health expert known to promote the CCP’s narratives of fighting the virus.
This year, to distract the public from focusing on the Zhengzhou flood and discovering the true culprit, the CCP created a few “hot issues,” including a popular movie star being sued for multiple rapes and the authorities fining big companies. People then stopped paying attention to Zhengzhou and the victims.
Mistreating the Designated Victims
Some people may argue that the CCP did send soldiers to rescue flood victims and organize disaster relief work. Weren’t those soldiers truly the heroes who risked their own lives to save others?
Yes, they were indeed heroes, but the CCP has always managed to turn people’s attention to itself by boasting how great the Party is in its rescue efforts and what a savior it is to the Chinese people. Many other countries around the world do their best to save their citizens when disasters strike, but they treat such efforts as their governments’ obligations, not political capital to boast how great the government is.
The CCP has never cared about people’s lives. All it cares about is maintaining power. Therefore, it can justify sacrificing a smaller group of people for the loyalty of a larger group. It does not care about that smaller group much – even their deaths are not important. As long as the majority are being fooled by the CCP’s propaganda and believe that the CCP is their savior, the CCP keeps its power – that’s all that matters to the regime. Therefore, the CCP has always spent its energy on covering up one disaster after another so as not to dishearten or awaken those not directly hit by the disasters and even creating post-disaster ceremonies to “move” the non-victims to tears by the Party’s great leadership in beating the disasters.
So when the SARS or the CCP virus was spreading in China, the CCP’s main focus was not on the people who were infected or exposed to the danger, but on pacifying the rest of the people. When there was an earthquake or flood, the CCP’s main focus was not the victims but the general public in other parts of China.
On July 20, 2020, Wangjia Dam in Anhui Province opened the gates to release the Huai River water. It flooded two counties where 200,000 people lived. People there lost everything and had to rebuild their homes yet again. This was the 16th time the authorities had released water into this region since 1953.
People asked: Since Anhui has 15 designated regions where it can release floodwaters, why have the authorities never reallocated people there to other places? At a minimum, shouldn’t the government prepare tents, rescue supplies, and rescue funds every year? Why was there nothing for the victims when the water was released?
The answer was: The CCP does not care about those people at all – that’s a group that the CCP can write off at any time, as long as it can soothe the majority of the general public.
Conclusion
Traditional Chinese culture believes that when the authorities do wrong or lose righteousness, heaven will punish them with disasters.
The CCP, with its atheism, brainwashing, and no freedom of belief, has taken the Chinese people down a wrong path.
Many disasters, natural or caused by the CCP, have taken place in China. It is time for people to see through the CCP and stay away from it.
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Category: News Commentary
