Top Wuhan Official Blamed for COVID Pandemic Makes High-Profile Appearance

Jiang Chaoliang, the former Party boss of Hubei Province who was sacked at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, was named as the deputy head of the Hubei delegation to the CCP’s rubber-stamp Congress. He was blamed for the first COVID outbreak in late 2019 in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China. Jiang worked with provincial government leadership to conceal the facts about the outbreak in Wuhan at its earliest stages. The lies spread at the start of the pandemic plunged China into an unprecedented credibility crisis on the international stage. In February 2020, Jiang and several other provincial officials became scapegoats and were removed from their posts without warning. It is common practice for the CCP to blame lower-level officials for large-scale systematic failures in the Communist regime. The day before Jiang’s dismissal, on Feb. 12, 2020, Sina, a Chinese state-controlled media outlet, published an article telling Wuhan residents to support and “warm up” to their mayor as the pandemic was ravaging the city. The article revealed that Wuhan officials had reported the situation to the central government in December 2019, long before the pandemic got out of control, and that Wuhan officials then followed the guidance given by the “experts” sent by the CCP’s central government to prevent the spread of the virus. On Jan. 27, 2020, in an interview with the CCP’s state media half a month earlier, then-Wuhan Mayor Zhou Xianwang suggested that the central government was mainly responsible for the initial cover-up of the COVID-19 outbreak. He suggested that the local government was not allowed to release data and info on the pandemic without explicit authorization from the CCP’s central government. So the local government followed the central government’s instructions on covering up the pandemic outbreak. On Dec. 31, 2019, Wuhan’s health authorities reported that there was no obvious human-to-human transmission and that no medical staff was infected. According to the report, the Wuhan Institute of Virology was also involved in the investigation, and it is currently the main target for international investigations into the origins of COVID-19. Just before the Chinese New Year in January 2020, Wuhan’s municipal government still hosted celebrations attracting hundreds of thousands of people. Some municipal leaders called for such events to be canceled due to the outbreak, however, they were overruled by higher-level CCP officials. Jiang’s Promotion for Covering Up SARS In September 2002, when Jiang became vice governor of Hubei Province, the SARS pandemic broke out in Guangdong Province in November and later spread throughout China. Although the World Health Organization (WHO) data showed that SARS caused more than 8,000 illnesses and nearly 800 deaths worldwide, it is important to understand that the CCP provided grossly falsified data. The CCP’s central and local governments worked together to cover up the pandemic, and officials who “controlled” the pandemic in this manner all received promotions in the CCP’s hierarchy. When Jiang was vice governor of Hubei Province, he was in charge of culture, health, and sports. During that time, only six cases of SARS were announced in Hubei, and with his “outstanding” pandemic prevention achievements, he was promoted to Chairman and Party Secretary of the Bank of Communications in China in May 2004. Eventually, in October 2016, Jiang became the Party Secretary of Hubei Province, which was one of the highest-ranked positions on a provincial level. After the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, in February 2020, Xi Jinping assigned three allies from the CCP’s political and judicial branches to take over the pandemic prevention efforts in Hubei Province and in Wuhan. The reason Xi Jinping appointed political cronies instead of health professionals was to prevent the pandemic from turning into a political crisis.