The Chinese Communist Party’s anti-corruption “Central Commission for Discipline Inspection” announced on Tuesday it had launched an investigation into Zhou Xianwang, a longtime Party stooge who served as mayor of Wuhan during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Zhou is facing accusations of “serious violations of discipline and law,” the Committee offered vaguely in its announcement of the investigation. The government did not explicitly state that Zhou has been arrested or is in police custody, instead stating only that he is “under disciplinary review and supervisory investigation.”
The South China Morning Post, citing local Chinese reports, suggested on Tuesday that Zhou is facing accusations of corruption, potentially bribery. The local reports indicated that the investigation into his behavior may be linked to another probe into a local politician from Hubei province, Jiang Chaoliang, accused of corruption in February.
Zhou was serving as vice chairman of the Hubei Provincial Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) before the announcement of the “disciplinary” investigation. The CPPCC is the less powerful of two federal-level legislative bodies in the country, alongside the National People’s Congress (NPC). Unlike the NPC, which drafts and approves laws at the bidding of genocidal dictator Xi Jinping, the CPPCC cannot actually create law and rather serves as a symbolic “advisory” body featuring over 2,000 members. Many are high-profile communists and celebrities, rather than trained statesmen. Among its most famous members is action movie star Jackie Chan, a loyal Party mouthpiece.
Yao Ming and Zhou Xianwang Mayor of Wuhan share the hand during 2020 Yao Foundation Charity tournament on October 4, 2020 in Wuhan, Hubei province, China. (Photo by Getty Images)
According to his profile with the Communist Party, Zhou joined the Party in 1980, at age 18, and served as a leader for the local Communist Youth League in Hunan province before ultimately reaching his most powerful position, mayor of Wuhan, in 2018.
Zhou’s tenure as mayor coincided with the emergency of a novel respiratory infection in the city, which houses one of the country’s most sophisticated biological laboratories, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Wuhan officials, and federal-level Chinese officials, made baffling decisions in late 2019 and early 2020 that turned a local novel disease outbreak into the deadliest pandemic of the past century, killing over 7 million people and counting. The city failed to warn locals about the spread of the disease, which had begun overwhelming hospitals in early January, and held massive “superspreader” events despite the threat of spreading the virus. Among the most notorious was a Lunar New Year feast in late January 2020 that attempted to break the world record for largest banquet, bringing together 130,000 people, most of them elderly “empty nesters,” to eat family-style.
Zhou’s police force also persecuted and brutalized individuals who discussed the spread of respiratory disease, detaining them and accusing them of “spreading rumors” needless. At least eight people were detained and forced into humiliating apologies on January 1, including Dr. Li Wenliang, famous for having recommended to other doctors in a group chat that they wear protective gear because he was seeing cases of an infectious disease. The Wuhan government accused Li of “severely disturbing public order” and apparently inflicted severe abuse on the doctor, as he died in February 2020, shortly after his release, at age 34.
By the end of January, Wuhan local officials could no longer hide the devastating impact of the deadly pathogen. Zhou held a press conference to address his government’s response to the outbreak in which he admitted that he did not warn locals about the spread of the disease and allowed 5 million people – out of 20 million typically living in the Wuhan metro area – to leave the city and spread the virus around the world.
“Maybe Wuhan officials will be nailed by history with a bad reputation for doing so and locking up the virus inside the city,” Zhou told reporters, “but as long as it helps contain the coronavirus, we are willing to take whatever responsibility … including the resignation of Wuhan Party Secretary Ma Guoqiang and myself.”
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Zhou graded his coronavirus response an “80 out of 100″ and blamed federal-level officials for keeping the disease a secret, telling reporters, “as a local government official, I can only disclose information after receiving it and being authorised.” This comment outraged the leadership of the Party, which used state media outlets to declare Zhou’s press conference a “disaster” and his blame at Beijing especially “disturbing.”
“It has to be pointed out that it is very regrettable that the city failed to take necessary emergency measures to prevent that many people from traveling across the country as this makes it especially difficult for the country to prevent and control the epidemic,” the state-run outlet Global Times condemned at the time. “The city should face the fact that the public is strongly dissatisfied with this.”
Xi dispatched a delegation of “Central Committee” federal officials to take over the disease response after the press conference, led by then-Vice Premier Sun Chunlan, Xi’s toughest henchwoman. A massive city-wide lockdown followed in which local reports indicated police were trapping people in their homes, often without sufficient food or medicine – in some cases welding them shut in their homes.
During her first in-person visit to Wuhan, Sun was greeted with angry, trapped residents heckling her from their windows, shouting insults. When Xi Jinping visited the city in March 2020, police reportedly trapped everyone in their homes and threatened them at gunpoint to keep them silent.
The government ultimately relieved Zhou of his duties in 2021, moving him to CPPCC duty.
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