China has an incredibly poor record of human rights and also a strong reputation for withholding, misleading and false information. So, yes on the one hand, it is very likely that the virus spread may have been contained by very severely enforced lockdown rules with none of the flouting seen in the West. However, news coverage of this new virus was initially actively suppressed in China and those who leaked the information did not fare well. Another confusing aspect is that tests on tissues taken from patients in the west, for example in France, showed Covid infection months before it supposedly spread to the West. A great number of people reported extreme flu like symptoms as far back as last November, clouding the supposed timeline and start of this pandemic. There are also doubts about the scale of the number of deaths in China. In order to access any kind of public service in China and be officially registered or acquire a health code requires a mobile phone. Records showed that the number of active phone accounts in spring 2020 dropped by almost 21 million compared to the end of 2019. Even if some of the drop can be explained by the closure of some telecom companies, there is still a huge unexplained number of phone account holders vanishing. Another report showed huge numbers of coffins for cremation being ordered and dispatched in spring in the most affected regions that far surpass the official death toll reported by China. So, I expect the real figure to be en par with that of other countries or possibly even higher.