re: Behind the scenes of #China's "zero case" act. THIS IS WHY THEIR NUMBERS HAVE DROPPED!!!

I’m thinking Bernie Sanders and his wife will schedule an anniversary trip there soon.

Hmm. The only surprising thing about that video was that there was no karate involved in that fight.

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Can you imagine that scene ANYWHERE in America? That was insane.

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Looks like something you'd find from a world star video at a Popeye's after they ran out of the spicy chicken sandwiches

Terrible

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Oh and the other amazing thing is that he said shortly before the lockdown of Wuhan 5 million people evacuated the city and they will not say where they went...

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This doesn't sound believable. Do you know how hard it would be to hide 5 million people? In this day and age of cell phones and satellites, this would be nearly impossible. How many soldiers would it take to transport 5 million people? There would be some kind of a trail. It's as unbelievable as people saying China was cremating thousands of bodies. The logistics are just inconceivable.

The cell phone cancellations are interesting though. They can somewhat be explained.

1. Migrant workers leaving China and cancelling subscriptions
2. Businesses cancelling subscriptions because they aren't open
3. Financial difficulties causing personal lines to be cancelled

There are also other potential factors:

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If the trend is nothing new, as the total subs have been going down for a while, the magnitude may be a surprise. A number of factors have contributed to the fall and the size of it.

Another possible factor related to the pandemic is that, facing weak earning prospects, operators can be more active in clearing the inactive accounts on their networks, as a means to shore up ARPU by reducing the denominator. This is a normal “trick” used by operators everywhere.

A positive angle to read the numbers is to realised that the operators’ focus of investment has shifted to 5G. This has reflected in both strong 5G growth: China Mobile has clocked up over 15 million 5G subscribers four months after launch, including 8.7 million in February alone. China Telecom has signed up 10.7 million 5G subs, including close to 3 million in February. Such shift of focus has also reflected in fast reduction of subs on legacy networks. China Mobile lost 12.5 million 4G subs and close to 11 million 2G subs. China Telecom has stopped reporting its 4G subs numbers altogether.

Another recent contributing factor to the fast reduction and slow increase of subscriptions could be related to a new policy that came into effect on 1 December 2019. Facial recognition was added on top of photo ID when a new mobile account is opened, to ensure that the one opening the account is the same person as the legal ID cardholder. Operators may have also been retrospectively taking those subs that do not meet the new requirement off their database.

In general, we can expect to see continued reduction of total subs numbers reported by the Chinese mobile operators in the near future but the size of the reduction may become less drastic, as the effect of the new policy as well as investment focus shift will become normal business operations in the months and quarters to come.

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I would in no way take the total loss of phone subscriptions to be any indication of the actual death count.

LINK

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Are we back to not believing China's numbers? I can't keep up.

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Did you ever believe them?