[lmilcin]

I find this focus on CCP not healthy for the learning process. Certainly something to take into account but your preoccupation with it seems to be excessive.

There seems to be no reason currently to disbelieve Chinese numbers. They are encumbered by unknown, possibly very significant measurement errors, for sure, but so are european or american ones.

Due to nature of exponential growth I think it is unrealistic to believe that the virus grows rampant. All signals point to Chinese economy coming back from the nap and I find it difficult to believe that would be happening if internally Chinese state was still struggling to get the virus under control.

Just use Occam's razor. The simplest explanation, given no facts to point otherwise, is that Chinese state used its power and control over population to actually successfully push back the spread of the virus.