But I think you are confusing China for North Korea a bit here. Loads of people (including people who have basically zero interactions with foreigners) have VPNs, and access to outside information (if only just to have access to certain websites including just for work or cuz they want to look at Youtube). I'm not talking about activist types, just people who want to use the internet without too many issues.
And locals do post about what is going on, protests and the like, for various things all the time! Now it's stuff that gets deleted pretty quickly in many cases, but it's how information travels! And people save videos, it gets passed around on the open web...
There are also, of course, all the Chinese natives living outside of China, who all have contact with relatives and can be discussing things constantly. Of course people within the country might have a skewed vision, but at one point you would have enough people connecting the dots to have a real story.
China is not sitting around listening to every video call happening between relatives, holding the finger over the "cut communications" button like they are with CNN! I would not be surprised at them applying a lot of evil stuff at all outbound communications for their reasons, but it's not 1984-style magic!
I don't want to be too definitive about this because everything can be surprising, but at the end of the day if a bunch of people around you are dying that will affect you in a material way and I doubt you would keep it secret.
I wouldn't be surprised about a bunch of people having minor cases, and maybe hospitalizations can be kept more under wrap if there is a recovery there. But the idea that "we lock down entire areas when we find cases" works feels almost like a null hypothesis to me.
You live in a village. You are a regular guy or girl strongly interested in your life not becoming suddenly worse. You know a friend whose old grandpa recently died. He smoked, like almost all grandpas do. Are you seriously going to press your friend as to whether her grandpa was infected with COVID? Do you think grandpa chose to go get tested, knowing they could possibly undermine the entire village if their case gets reported up? And if your friend confides in you that her grandpa might have had COVID, would you go around posting how your village deceived the authorities?
Now scale this according to China’s population and territory. This can plausibly be happening all over outside of big cities and no one on the ground would notice anything out of ordinary. Add to that people existing entirely outside of the system, without access to healthcare and so on.
In a country with freedoms, democratically elected government as opposed to vengeful dictatorship, and a culture of openness rather than culture of pervasive lying to cover oneself and one’s relatives, the incentives for misreporting are much weaker.
> The idea that there was a secret pandemic that had a bunch of deaths in China is very hard to square with the reality that everyone has a camera and messaging apps to talk to your neighbors.
1) Outside of cities, a.k.a. everywhere the famed one child policy was also ignored and no one cared. Locals who know would not be foolish enough to complain upwards and risk their lives upended. 2) You would not go around messaging others about this sensitive matter. You would not film (as another comment reported, your phone may be confiscated). Like with OCP, you would very much keep on the low, and those you tell out of necessity would do the same for you. 3) How many of those people with outside connection disagree with and are willing to violate the party line?