The Chinese Communist Party deserves a lot of blame for the coronavirus crisis

quote:

---

Coronavirus crisis proves communism is still a grave threat to the entire world. If Beijing had just been honest, the pandemic could be preventable.

USA Today

Beijing’s culpability is the result of its oppression — its “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The only way to stop a spreading sickness is to spread information even faster, giving people and countries the facts and the time to prevent a pandemic. China’s rulers made that impossible. Starting in December, communist authorities cracked down on anyone talking about the coronavirus.

When a brave doctor warned his peers online, he was summoned by police in the middle of the night and forced to write a “self-criticism” — a classic communist method of silencing dissenters that forces them to confess supposed crimes. When Chinese journalists wrote about the sickness, their work was censored. When average citizens took to social media to share the facts, they were silenced. Beijing did everything in its power to prevent the outside world from figuring out what was really going on.

The truth was terrifying, although largely unknown beyond China’s borders. U.S. intelligence agencies have concluded that China systematically hid the real number of sick people, as well as the number of deaths. Sure enough, in mid-January, Beijing still claimed that only a few dozen people were infected with the coronavirus. The real totals of people infected and deaths were likely far higher, as my organization was already hearing from dissidents within China.

Beijing’s lies lulled the world into a false sense of security. By concealing the extent of the coronavirus, China caused other countries to assume the situation was under control, or at least that they had more time to prepare. A senior White House official pointed out that Chinese data caused the medical community in the United States to think “this was serious, but smaller than anyone expected… we were missing a significant amount of the data.”

---

quote:

---

Beijing denied until January 20th that human to human transmission was occurring. Yet at the same time, Chinese officials and state-owned companies were urgently acquiring bulk medical supplies —especially personal protective equipment like masks and gloves — from Australia, Europe, and around the world. Put simply, Beijing hoarded the world’s life-saving resources while falsely claiming that people’s lives weren’t at risk

---