China’s cover up of Covid exposes a rotten regime built on deceit
Too often, conspiracy theories rest on the erroneous assumption that our enemies are both highly evil and highly competent. Most of the time, the opposite is true. The description of Watergate in the peerless thriller All the President’s Men, offers us a more accurate picture: “Forget the myths you’ve read about the White House, these aren’t very bright guys, and things got out of hand.”
So many of the far-fetched theories about Covid-19 have centered around master manipulators at work in every level of China’s bureaucracy. Beijing has repeatedly claimed it is only thanks to its authoritarian Government that they were able to bring the virus under control. This is looking at things back to front. Instead, it is because China is an authoritarian government that it allowed the spread of the coronavirus to every corner of the world.
As the prescient TV show Chernobyl makes clear, the patent inferiority of authoritarian regimes (compared with our flawed but serviceable democracies) is based on their constant need to lie in the face of failure, to cover it up in order to survive.
The structural reality of their draconian governments makes successful policy-making in a time of crisis almost impossible, as fault can never be admitted. As the famous saying goes: recognizing you have a problem is always the first step to solving it.
Say, as many have speculated, that a Chinese researcher – whether due to poor safety protocols or sheer incompetence – was infected in the Yunnan Caves doing field research for the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). Aware that he is sick when he returns to the city, he would have done and said nothing, in an effort to save his precious job, and not to get in trouble with overbearing local CCP authorities. His mini-cover up would not work, of course, and he became sicker, infecting those around him.
Say that the virus outbreak, through the researcher’s sickness, came to the attention of the head of the WIV. For exactly the same reasons, he too says nothing, hoping against hope the whole thing goes away. It, of course, does not.
Then the Wuhan Head of the CCP, aware of the citywide outbreak, and rightly fearful of the trouble he will get in, only slowly notifies Xi Jinping. By then the pandemic is raging. Fear of telling the truth at every level means acting quickly and decisively in the looming crisis is almost impossible. The rationale for each stage stage of the cover-up makes perfect sense and escalates out of control not by some grand design, but rather by a snowballing of fear of the truth.
However, it was then that President Xi had a profound choice. Aware that his country was going to take an almighty economic and geopolitical hit from the virus, Xi covered up proof of human-to-human transmissibility from the rest of the world. He pushed on the levers inside of the World Health Organisation that he had at his disposal as a result of leaning on the UN body in the 18 years following SARS. Duly, the WHO put out disastrous advice against border controls on China. President Xi locked down Wuhan even as he left international air travel open.
If China was going to get sick, the world was going to get sick. If China was going to suffer devastating economic consequences as a result of lockdowns, so would the rest of the world.
This is more than unconscionable; it is of the greatest geostrategic importance for the west. The key strategic question of the new age is deceptively simple: What is the true nature of the Chinese regime? If it is relatively benign, then a cooperative era of “Chimerica” is possible; Beijing can be co-opted by the West as a status quo power.
But China’s clear cover-up of the origins of Covid and its indifference to its spread to the rest of the world and the 4.2 million deaths that have followed—ought to remove any remaining confusion about the nature of the CCP. The Chinese government is far from benign. It is a revolutionary power, indifferent to global norms. Would any democratic country have covered Covid up? Not on its worst day. As such, China’s intentions are now clear.
This is the ultimate geopolitical lesson of the pandemic. Based on its real-world performance, China is not a country the rest of us should want running the world. The West must take note, and plan to balance against Beijing accordingly, and now.