[Yep - hard to tell but the initial coverup probably let a lot of it loose...]
There’s a lot of deflection of blame towards local officials in the government’s narrative. Except in China, top level local leaders are not local. In order to retain central control and prevent local leaders from cultivating power bases that might feed separatist tendencies in times of turmoil, senior officials are not only helicoptered in from other provinces, they are also rotated periodically in order to prevent them from going native. This is how the Chinese empire has been held together for thousands of years. The regimes change, but the methods remain the same. These “local” leaders will quite literally call a deer a horse, if told to do so by Xi Jinping.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Gao#Calling_a_deer_a_horse
You can’t even call these “local” officials carpetbaggers, since carpetbaggers planned to set down roots.