The cliché is that the Chinese ideogram for “crisis” combines “danger” and “opportunity.” (This is not entirely true.) It’s widely believed that the “real” infection and death rates in China are five to ten times higher than the official rates. (And the official rates jumped from around 45,000 to over 60,000 yesterday.) Much has been written about how the pandemic is a grave threat to China’s Communist leadership. Slow growth was already threatening the nation’s house-of-cards banking system, and the pandemic.

But Xi Jinping may also be thinking of it as an opportunity. Remember that Xi is part of political party that killed an estimated 65 million of its own people, and was happy to put a couple of million Uighers in concentration camps in order to reeducate them about their racial inferiority to the Chinese. They had to hold off tiananmening a few thousand Hong Kong activists only because too much of the world was watching and too much money is at stake.

But now? Now they’ve got tens of millions of people under quarantine, they’re reportedly burning thousands of bodies that died from the virus without reporting them, so many that they’re showing up on satellite photos mapping particulates. With the quarantine and even heavier than usual censorship, the communist government has ideal circumstances for score-settling and purging “subversive” elements.

Imagine how many activists and “agitators” they can make disappear in that chaos, not to mention people with low “social credit” scores. And the need to cremate bodies quickly means no one needs ever know that their actual cause of death was acute lead poisoning. The plague ensures it will be a while before their relatives come looking for them. Maybe they can’t get away with it in Hong Kong, but they can certainly get away with it in the “hot zone.”

Given that they’re boarding up houses with people trapped inside, would you really put it past them?

Tags: China, Communism, coronavirus, Foreign Policy, Hong Kong, pandemic, Xi Jinping