China is on Earth, not in some other solar system. If their excess deaths per capita were a fraction of the numbers in the West, there would be no way to hide it.
The easiest way to hide it is to report death was caused for another reason. If someone like yourself is going to take their numbers at face value they have already hidden it.
Whether out of malice or just the difficulty of testing corpses with inadequate supplies s, I thought it was widely assumed all countries were underreporting in at least 2020 and probably further. Therefore, everyone serious looked at excess deaths.
People are still arguing how many people died in the Great Chinese Famine of 1959-1961. Some say as low as 15 million others as high as 50 million. It's easy to hide millions of deaths in authoritarian regimes.
2000: ~ 40million unregistered woman in china https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3830941/