Gordon Chang on Virus Explosion in China, Xi Jinping Losing Control, and CCP Gearing Up for War
Updated: Feb 7
Is Omicron the COVID-19 variant spreading in China? Or is it something else? And what does the explosion of the virus—and the associated real death toll in China—mean for Chinese leader Xi Jinping, the author of China’s draconian “zero-COVID” policies? We sit down again with China analyst Gordon Chang to discuss the complicated realities the Chinese regime is facing.
“I don’t know what’s going on in Xi Jinping’s head, but I do know that he’s engaged in the most rapid military buildup since the Second World War,” Chang says.
Why is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) collecting DNA profiles of Americans? Why are CCP-linked companies buying up land next to U.S. military bases? And is an attack on Taiwan imminent?
Interview trailer:
Watch the full interview:https://www.theepochtimes.com/gordon-chang-on-virus-explosion-in-china-xi-jinping-losing-control-and-ccp-gearing-up-for-war_4967549.html
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Gordon Chang, such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders.
Gordon Chang:
Thank you Jan and Happy New Year.
Mr. Jekielek:
Happy New Year to you too, Gordon. It’s a very strange new year in communist China right now. CCP virus or SARS-CoV-2 is running rampant through China. I want to get your take on how we got here, because we didn’t really know about this until about a month ago.
Mr. Chang:
If we go all the way back, this does look like it was an engineered pathogen. But that is a long conversation. But we do know something, and it does set a context for where we are today, and that is whether this was an engineered pathogen or not, China turned it into a biological weapon. They lied about contagiousness. They knew that it was highly transmissible human to human. But for three weeks in January 2020 and maybe even the last week of December of 2019, they told the world it was not.
And then, while they were locking down their own country later in January, they were pressuring other countries to take arrivals from China without travel restrictions or quarantines. You put those two things together and it means they deliberately spread this disease beyond its borders. The reason why we need that context is because we’re seeing something similar today.
As this disease is ripping through China, they are now opening up the doors to Chinese leaving the country for tourism, and they are not sharing sequencing. They’re not telling the world what’s actually going on in China right now. Yes, we think it’s some sort of Omicron variant, but what we are reduced to doing is taking the wastewater out of planes that arrive in our country and in others, and then trying to get the genetic material out of that. That’s entirely wrong. If China is doing this again, and it’s clear that they are, then we should not be allowing arrivals in from China until we know what the devil is going on.
Mr. Jekielek:
That makes a lot of sense. But again, it would seem so odd to the typical lay person when we know this virus is ripping through. There was this long, long period of various forms of lockdown policies. We saw Australia try to do it. We saw New Zealand try to do it, but as they say, virus is going to virus, and the virus basically has to go through the population.
From what we understood this, the virus was already starting to really build and start going through the population before the CCP officially lifted the lockdowns, and then also there were these protests. There are multiple things going on. Maybe you can shed light on how these things interact.
Mr. Chang:
From about the last week in October and especially after the November 24th fire in Urumqi, the Chinese people participated in these extraordinary protests. It was in the central part of China in Zhengzhou at what is known as iPhone City, a factory which builds more than half the world’s iPhones.
Workers just wouldn’t put up with it. They were scrambling over fences, and they were escaping through fields. What was really important was that the people who lived around there helped the workers flee. And by helping the workers flee, they put themselves at great risk.
But what was really fascinating was after the November 24th fire, it was clear from the videos that fire trucks couldn’t get to the scene of the apartment building, because of barriers that had been put in the streets because of COVID. Also, people couldn’t get out of their apartments in the burning building, because they had been shut in from the outside for quarantine purposes.
And then, you had those protests across China—north, south, east, west—these were spontaneous. There was no organization, no coordination, and no leadership. What really frightened the Communist Party was that people were of course saying they didn’t like the COVID lockdowns. But they were also saying, “Down with Xi Jinping, down with the CCP.” That means that the mood was revolutionary.
In the face of that, it was one of four reasons that the Chinese leadership on December 7th just abandoned zero-COVID, which was the most draconian set of lockdowns in the world. Suddenly, just like that, they disappeared. That’s because the Chinese people wouldn’t put up with it. But there were other reasons.
Mr. Jekielek:
A second reason is that the virus was already getting out of control despite these lockdowns, as many epidemiologists that I’ve spoken with have said. It’s something inevitable, especially with a respiratory virus, a coronavirus. It’s almost like they had no choice. But tell me what you think.
Mr. Chang:
The World Health Organization said that the virus was surging through China before the lockdowns were lifted on December 7th. They were saying the lifting of the lockdowns didn’t cause the surge, because it was already there. When you start looking at the data, which we’re starting to get, we’re seeing that they really were infections.
Now, it is just completely out of control. On December 20 from those leaked minutes of China’s National Health Commission, almost 37 million people were infected in one day. That’s 2.6 per cent of the Chinese population, in one day. People estimate somewhere between 5,000 and 7,000 fatalities a day.
And this has not peaked, because the modeling suggests it will peak sometime in the third week of this month, and then there’ll be another wave in March. Just as you say, a virus has got to virus. The Communist Party’s draconian lockdown just could not stop this.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to mention one thing. Because the virus has gone through many populations in the West, in the U.S. the estimate is there’s about 90 per cent natural immunity. People have already been exposed, and that provides some level of protection.
You might get the virus again, but it’s not going to be nearly as severe. But in China I don’t for a second believe the official numbers that they had. Of course, there’s a lot more death. But at some level, they actually did stop it. But that created this huge immune deficit now. We are seeing again and again, and this is for the last three weeks, a steady pace of these huge lineups at crematorium. There’s significant death happening and there’s a lot of debate about whether this is real.
Mr. Chang:
Yes, it is real. We can see from those videos that in city after city, at the crematoria the lines are backed out a kilometer or so. In Shanghai, people were burning the corpses of their relatives on the street. That doesn’t happen unless this is absolutely real.
This means when you look at it, Communist Party policy was a failure. There’s this notion that goes back to Mao, and Xi Jinping shares it, that communism can do anything. Mao talked about conquering nature. Xi Jinping obviously thought he could conquer the disease and eventually the disease conquered communism. We saw the Communist Party, despite its great efforts, was not able to stop this. That’s why we’re having this unfolding tragedy in China right now.
Mr. Jekielek:
And not only that, but Xi put his personal seal of approval behind these lockdown policies. That is very significant. Please tell me about that.
Mr. Chang:
Yes. Xi Jinping is known to be the author of zero-COVID. When he gave his work report, that nearly two-hour speech on October 16th which opened the Communist Party’s 20th National Congress, he doubled down on zero-COVID. But he failed, because starting November 11th, you had that one announcement which people took to be a minor adjustment in zero-COVID, but it really wasn’t really implemented. It wasn’t until December 7th when there was a complete repudiation of Xi Jinping’s policies.
But what’s fascinating is that this occurs while we’re seeing his other domestic policies are now being repudiated. The Communist Party and the state council held its central economic work conference and they didn’t mention common prosperity, which is Xi Jinping’s signature program for the economy. It’s not just COVID, and it’s not just the economy, we are seeing the Communist Party move in a different direction from Xi Jinping.
This is striking, because remember at the 20th National Congress in the middle of October, Xi Jinping gets his precedent-breaking third term as general secretary, and everybody says, “He’s going to be president for life.”
I don’t think so, or his life’s going to be pretty short, one or the other. The problem is that even in the middle of October, we could see that as Xi Jinping was cementing his control over at the top of the Communist Party, the Communist Party was losing control over Chinese society. Now, Xi Jinping is losing his control over the party, and you have to conclude that the country looks a little volatile and looks unstable.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to catch up a bit. You mentioned there were four reasons. We have, of course, the lockdown policies themselves and the virus basically surging despite that. And you also have these protests. What were the other two?
Mr. Chang:
Okay. The other two were that municipalities were financially responsible for zero-COVID, which was extremely expensive to implement, because we have these lockdowns, we have the contract tracing, we have daily testing, and sometimes more than once a day testing for COVID-19.
Municipalities had to pay for it. Even Beijing as rich as it was running out of money to implement zero-COVID. They just didn’t have the cash. But you also have the Chinese economy starting to contract or going deeper into contraction. There you have those two other reasons. It was just not possible anymore for the party. They just didn’t have the resources to do it, and they could see the country’s economy was failing.
When you add the policy wasn’t working, as we talked about and the protests were occurring, as we talked about, those are essentially the four reasons. The Communist Party didn’t change its policies on December 7th. It just capitulated to the disease. This is the collapse of Communist Party policy.
Mr. Jekielek:
I really want to talk more about the economy. We’ve certainly seen in the West the devastating consequences of these types of policies. We know that even communist China, who has all sorts of tricks up its sleeves, can’t escape this.
I want to talk about these. You were talking about the bureau, the top cadres. There seems to be a significant number. Let me qualify this. In case anyone isn’t aware, COVID has this huge gradient. The greatest risk by far from COVID is for people of older age or immunosuppressed situations.
Mr. Chang:
People like me.
Mr. Jekielek:
No, hardly. But to make a long story short, even knowing this, there’s a disproportionate number of high level cadres who have just simply passed away. We’ve actually been covering this, because we’re very interested in all those people here at Epoch Times. What are you seeing there?
Mr. Chang:
Yes, it’s true. You have a lot of senior officials succumbing to COVID and we don’t know. I have heard a lot of rumors. The rumor that makes most sense to me is that senior cadres get preferential access to organ transplants.
When you have an organ transplant, you have all sorts of drugs to suppress the immune system of the body. These people are immune-compromised, and we know that COVID attacks the immune-compromised. I can’t say this for sure, but it makes sense to me that this is what’s going on. But whatever it is, it does look like senior Chinese leaders are disproportionately dying from the disease.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s very interesting. I’ll frame this a bit. I’m remembering some of the first reporting I did on the organ industry in China back in 2006, when I realized there was this whole murder for organs reality happening which was unfathomable.
Mr. Chang:
Horrific.
Mr. Jekielek:
Absolutely horrific. I had interviewed David Kilgour, who had been doing research on this. He had interviewed a Taiwanese national who had gone to China, and had a rare antibody condition. The guy had gone on two trips and had been fitted with a total of eight kidneys across something like six months, because of this rare condition.
They kept being rejected. Finally the eighth one held. But you can just imagine the reality there. So, when you were talking about these cadres getting preferential treatment, this is the kind of stuff we’re talking about.
Mr. Chang:
Yes. We first heard about this going back 15 years or so, people were saying, “Oh no, no. It can’t be right.” But since that time, we’ve got more and more evidence that there is murder, people are being murdered for organs.
China has set up the infrastructure for that with mobile organ units and all the rest of it. It’s in China that you can get an organ on demand, whereas you have to wait years in the United States to get a match for a kidney. Yes, it’s happening, and it is one of the crimes against humanity that the Communist Party is committing.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to highlight that, this on-demand idea. If you’re a high level cadre in the Communist Party of China, there’s nothing that is off the table for you on this.
Mr. Chang:
Yes. The question is, why do they do all this DNA testing of everybody, especially Uyghurs and Kazakhs and other Turkic minorities? Why do they do this on prisoners? It is because people are being killed on demand for organs.
Mr. Jekielek:
And matched. I think that’s what you’re suggesting.
Mr. Chang:
And matched.
Mr. Jekielek:
Yes, exactly. It’s just an unbelievable reality. About two weeks ago we had the head of Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting on the show. I’ll recommend that our viewers check out that episode if you want to know more about this harsh reality.
Let’s jump to this. There’s been multiple reports from doctors that we have verified that show that some of these people are dying from white lung, which is reminiscent of the original or Delta strains of COVID.
It’s interesting. But as you pointed out earlier, there’s no good data coming out of China. We can’t trust any of it. You’re watching these patterns. Multiple doctors that we have verified are saying that people have died of what seems to be an earlier version of the virus. But we don’t know, of course.
Mr. Chang:
Because China’s health authorities are not sharing information. We don’t even know if COVID is the only disease that is going through China right now. We just do not know. We make assumptions, but we don’t know. That’s why the world needs to close its borders to China until they start sharing data. Because without sharing data, we can’t protect ourselves.
Mr. Jekielek:
And isn’t it so bizarre? I need you to speak on this, but they’re demanding that Chinese be let out to any country possible. They’re enforcing this reciprocity where if you don’t do that, we won’t let you in either. With this reality of COVID surging through China, what’s going on in their minds?
Mr. Chang:
This is just Chinese arrogance. What they’re saying is that they object to these testing requirements where Chinese travelers need to get a negative test before they board a plane. Do you need that to go to China? Yes. But nonetheless, just Tuesday the foreign ministry said, “We’re going to impose countermeasures on countries that impose travel restrictions on China arrivals.”
It’s just Chinese arrogance that they get to set what they want to do. You can’t defend yourselves. That’s why China is too dangerous to deal with. Whether we’re talking about COVID or talking about something else, we cannot have relations with China, as long as it’s ruled by the Communist Party. Because the Communist Party, just by its inherent nature, is malicious. We’ve got to defend ourselves and we’re not doing that.
Mr. Jekielek:
I had Dr. Aseem Malhotra on this program not too long ago and he had a phrase, and I immediately thought of the Communist Party when he said it. He was talking about a psychopathic entity. And I think I know the original psychopathic entity. Or maybe not the original, but one that’s been around for quite a while, and I don’t think people grasp this.
Mr. Chang:
Yes. Look, the Communist Party is responsible for more deaths than any other organization in history. Mao Zedong, people don’t know exactly how many people he killed, but the minimum is 20 million. Most people say the minimum is 30 million. Other people say, “On the upside you’re talking 50, 60, or 70 million people.” Unnatural deaths. That’s from the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and other assorted murderous activities.
Take a look at Xi Jinping. Right now, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, you have 6.7 million deaths from COVID, worldwide. China counts for only 5,000 of those, because that’s their number. Obviously, it’s more, but what goes into the Johns Hopkins number is what China tells them.
Xi Jinping’s toll from Coronavirus alone, 6.669999 million deaths. Those are the deaths outside of China. This disease should have never left Central China. But Xi Jinping made sure that he would do it. So, each of those deaths is a murder.
This is more than just COVID, it’s fentanyl, and it’s all the other stuff that they’ve been doing. This is murderous activity. This is a psychopath. It’s a psychopathic regime. That’s the nature of the regime. You take a good person, you put them into it, and he becomes a psychopath or she becomes a psychopath.
Mr. Jekielek:
In this vein, there is this huge age gradient in risk in COVID. I’m not actually sure of the reality, because I’ve heard different numbers and I don’t know what to trust exactly. But it’s either that the elderly people in China have a much lower level of vaccination, or the Sinovac vaccine isn’t particularly effective. If they had it, it would have waned by now, because there’s been quite a bit of time.
There’s going to be a disproportionate number for a lot of assumptions. But there’s going to be a disproportionate number and there isn’t natural immunity nearly to the extent. So, there’s going to be a lot of older people dying. This is the terrible conclusion that I came to, and I’m curious what you think about this.
Because of the one child policy, and because of this huge demographic hole that the CCP has created for itself and its psychopathic nature, it’s almost convenient for the CCP to lose some of the older population. This is the kind of thing that they would be thinking.
Mr. Chang:
Now that you mention it, the most conspiratorial theories of what China did in 2019 and 2020 come from the Chinese themselves. One of those theories was that Xi Jinping wanted to test out his biological weapon. The other theory that you’ll hear is that they wanted to kill off old people, because it would be good for the age distribution in Chinese society.
I don’t agree with either of those. Those are too far along, but that’s what the Chinese people say. We have to be mindful that this is a society where obviously there’s no trust of the regime and that’s what people think. As I said, I don’t think so. I think this was an accidental leak from a biological weapons lab. The circumstantial evidence points to that.
The other theory is zoonotic transfer. No one’s been able to document the links from bat to intermediary mammal to humans, even after all this time. You can go back to the Black Death in Europe and see what happened after it. You have this flourishing of European society, because it killed off so many people.
Chinese leaders, they look at our histories, and who knows what they’re thinking. These guys are malicious in the extreme. I don’t think that they’re capable of that. But the point is, we know that they murdered a lot of people, almost 6.7 million people.
Mr. Jekielek:
Okay. So, you’re talking to this very high level CCP planner and he says, “Isn’t it interesting that this is killing all sorts of older people and we have this huge demographic problem.” My point is that in this view of the world, human beings are kind of protoplasm. They’re not seen as individual valuable beings.
Mr. Chang:
Communism believes that there is a dynamic to history, that there is an overarching purpose and that societies have to get there. Humans are not important in that, because it’s history, it’s determinism.
Also, in order to enforce equality, you have to kill people. It’s no coincidence that the Chinese flag is blood red. It is specifically meant to signify blood. That’s in the nature of the regime. Whether these crazy conspiratorial theories from the Chinese are right, which I don’t think they are, the point is communism kills a lot of people, and often kills intentionally.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s pivot to the economy. We were talking about the terrible impact of these rolling lockdowns for these last few years. The Chinese Communist Party is saying that there’s still significantly less than normal growth. You mentioned you think there’s a contraction happening. Please explain to me the reality around the Chinese economy right now.