China’s Global Times propaganda newspaper on Wednesday accused those in the West noting mounting evidence of the Communist Party reporting false numbers of Wuhan coronavirus cases of possessing a “sour grapes mentality.”

China, which claims without evidence that the virus originated in a Maryland U.S. Army laboratory, has documented 82,361 cases of coronavirus nationwide and 3,316 deaths. Following Wuhan officials allowing relatives to pick up urns holding the remains of their loved ones this weekend, multiple reports noted that these funeral homes handed out somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000 sets of remains, putting Wuhan’s death count at between ten and 12 times the number of people China claims died in the entire country.

China dismissed these claims in multiple propaganda articles on Tuesday and Wednesday by claiming that they were the product of envious forces attempting to smear China’s success at containing the virus.

“The groundless accusations reflected a ‘sour grape’ mentality long existing in some Westerners,” the Global Times concluded. “This was amplified by the stark contrast between China’s announcement of a phased victory of the hard-fought battle and Western countries’ harrowing struggle in battling the global pandemic.”

The communist publication specifically targeted the United States, claiming that, “ever since the US undertook China as the country with most recorded COVID-19 cases, its politicians have been heaping criticism on China’s data transparency.”

As it typically does, the Global Times cited Party-approved “experts” who claimed that politicians in free countries were “poisoned by this ‘unhealthy mentality'” of “Western supremacy” that prevents them from believing good news out of China.

“They previously criticized China’s lockdown measures and its building of makeshift hospitals, which later proved be the only effective solution, and was like a slap in their faces. So they have shifted their attack on China on data transparency,” one of the so-called “experts” claimed.

The newspaper acknowledged reports of “long queues and stacks of urns at funeral homes in Wuhan” but called reasonable questions about the number of dead at the funeral homes simply “new ammunition” and quoted an alleged Wuhan healthcare worker denying that the dead had died of coronavirus. Instead, the worker said, Wuhan hospitals failed to treat many others sick with other illnesses, inflating the death count. The Global Times presented this argument as exonerating the Chinese regime of having mishandled the crisis.

The funeral home reports began to surface in February. The Epoch Times, a U.S.-based anti-communist newspaper, cited Wuhan funeral home and crematoria managers to conclude that Wuhan was cremating hundreds of bodies a day, an impossible figure to maintain using official Chinese estimates.

The Epoch Times was among the publications that questioned the official counts using the number of urns handed out at these funeral homes this weekend, alongside publications like Radio Free Asia (RFA).

The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, appeared to use the fact that the Epoch Times had been on the forefront of the coverage of its unreliable coronavirus case numbers to dismiss investigations on the data generally as a conspiracy by the “Falun Gong cult,” targeting organizations like the newspaper who refer to the Chinese coronavirus as CCP or CPC virus, a reference to the Communist Party.

While not mentioning the Epoch Times by name, the newspaper is the most prominent publication in the west affiliated with the Falun Gong, or Falun Dafa, spiritual movement. It denies being officially owned by any Falun Gong organization but was founded by Falun Gong members and still employs many. As China severely persecutes Falun Gong practitioners through human rights atrocities such as live organ harvesting, followers of the spiritual discipline tend to be stridently anti-communist.

“Anti-China media outlets set up by the Falun Gong cult outside China recently collaborated with various forces such as Taiwan and Hong Kong separatists to change the previously declared ‘Wuhan Virus’ and ‘China Virus’ into ‘CPC (Communist Party of China) Virus’ and performed a farce in naming the virus,” the People’s Daily complained. “The so-called ‘virus of the Communist Party of China’ is a farce directed and staged by the Falun Gong, a cult organization banned by China in 1999, to link up with anti-China forces.”

One scientific study estimated that as many as 95 percent of Chinese coronavirus cases would not have happened if the Communist Party had followed the advice of the Wuhan doctors it imprisoned in the early days of the outbreak to keep it a secret.

“China’s great achievements over the coronavirus outbreak is not easy for the world to digest,” the People’s Daily declared.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made the stances of state media regarding accusations against Beijing official during her briefings on Tuesday and Wednesday.

“Now so many days have passed, and some in the U.S. still claim China should be held responsible for the COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] in the U.S. Don’t they feel guilty or ashamed?” Hua asked reporters on Tuesday. “They are trying to shift the biggest blame of the century to China and make it the biggest scapegoat. However, such an attempt is just impossible as the blame is too heavy to be shifted. Sorry, it won’t work.”

On Wednesday, Hua directly accused Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of “lying” and “cheating” for condemning China’s decision to expel American journalists, just at a time when the regime is being accused of providing false information that may have led to thousands of deaths.

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