China is mourning a growing number of public figures lost to Covid-19, from academics to opera singers, whose deaths have complicated government efforts to minimize the scale of the unfolding outbreak across the country.
Since authorities last month lifted most of the restrictions put in place to keep the virus in check, the coronavirus has swept through China’s vulnerable population at unprecedented speed, flooding hospitals with the sick and elderly and overwhelming crematoria with demand.
The chaos has left China’s propaganda organs struggling to articulate a coherent narrative and defend the rollback of President Xi Jinping’s signature zero-Covid strategy, particularly after he spent two years measuring the death toll in the West as hyping evidence of China’s superior governance.
In recent weeks, a series of obituaries released by businesses, institutes, schools and families have undermined the official narrative that the outbreak is under control and that variants prevailing in China are less severe, stating the human toll of the easing of limitations.
Shanghai Kehua Bio-Engineering announced last week that its founder Tang Weiguo, 66, who spent more than three decades building the group into one of the leading clinical trials companies in China, died of Covid-19 on December 25 and one lying illness had died.
“Old Boss Tang, safe onward journey,” wrote the company, which recently switched to producing millions of rapid Covid tests, in an obituary published on its website.
Covid-related complications also claimed the lives of opera singer Chu Lanlan, 39, and famous dancer and politician Zhao Qing, who died at the age of 87, according to friends and relatives in Beijing. Wang Tao, 52, vice dean of Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology, died of Covid on December 30, the school said.
At Nanjing University, alumni mourned the death of 87-year-old Hu Fuming, a philosopher and retired professor and author of a famous article that sparked criticism of former leader Mao Zedong after the Cultural Revolution.
“Changing history and leading people — that’s really what a great scholar should be,” one of Hu’s students wrote in a social media post.
Some of the tributes mentioned Covid, but most have attributed deaths to unspecified diseases, another source of controversy in the government’s effort to downplay the wave of exits.
Top health officials have narrowed the definition of Covid deaths sharply to those with respiratory failure or pneumonia, excluding those who died of other conditions despite testing positive for the virus.
China on Tuesday reported 5,258 Covid deaths nationwide, including just 25 since December 1, despite forecasts of up to 1 million deaths in the current wave. No deaths have been reported in Shanghai, Nanjing and Inner Mongolia since infection rates skyrocketed last month.
The National Health Commission later said the published death figures were for “research and study reference” only.
The implausible official statistics have led Chinese internet detectives to start independently recording deaths, with some online obituaries becoming virtual bulletin boards as users anonymously add messages about lost relatives.
Students at Beijing’s Tsinghua and Peking Universities and other academic institutions have counted deaths among retired professors, while other internet sniffer dogs have counted at least 16 deaths among the top 1,831 figures at China’s science and engineering academies.
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In response to the growing attention, on December 23, the Chinese Academy of Engineering deleted tributes it had posted on social media for five engineers who died.
“The academics who have died in the last few days have had obituaries. However, it’s unclear if there will be more,” commented one social media user. The Academy did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The noise has forced Chinese officials to qualify widely discredited public data.
Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said last week he will lead a team to calculate excess mortality data and “figure out what may have been underestimated.”
Excess mortality, or the number of deaths from all causes beyond ‘normal’ circumstances, is a relatively reliable measure of the number of Covid outbreaks.