since the criticisms of the Chinese numbers tend to be wild derivations from urns or anonymously sourced US propaganda, yes I am inclined to believe the numbers.
If you are seeing these articles "pop up" then you read fake news btw
Given the number of times the Chinese government has been shown to lie and actively try to hide dissenting people/information when it tells a story they don't want told... I think it's fair to start from a point of distrust. Sure, it doesn't mean they're lying about the numbers here, but they started out this whole thing by lying about it, by throwing someone (a doctor?) that did speak out in jail.
My apologies, I was mis-remembering. Dr. Li Wenliang was arrested, questioned, and officially reprimanded for warning about the Corona virus outbreak. Looking now, I don't see that he was actually thrown in jail.
That being said, it does still speak to the point of the Chinese government and their attempts to control the narrative. At least for me, that makes me start from a point of distrust over anything they say.
I would suggest that you look at the region-level data for China, and just see if it looks anything like the European data.
For my money, I don't trust the US intelligence community but I still think that the Chinese numbers are somewhat implausible.
The charts show an identical dropoff in almost every region at the same time. We can see, from the European experience, that there's a lag between lockdown and case saturation. This does not appear in the Chinese data, which makes me somewhat sceptical.
Note that I'm not an epidemiologist, so it's possible that there's something else driving those numbers that I'm missing.
If you are seeing these articles "pop up" then you read fake news btw