"President Trump has made clear that the United States will establish long-overdue reciprocity in our relations with China," a State Department spokesperson said. "We urge the Chinese Communist Party to immediately uphold its international commitments to respect freedom of expression, including for members of the press."

On Wednesday, Pompeo singled out China and a handful of other countries – Iran, Cuba and Venezuela – as he unveiled the State Department’s annual human rights report. China, Pompeo said, is imprisoning citizens because of their religious beliefs and “Chinese citizens who want a better future are met with violence.”

Former U.S. officials and analysts in the China and global health fields offered mixed reactions to the Trump administration’s handling of the diplomatic side of the crisis.

Some said that Pompeo and others’ tough commentary has been helpful by raising pressure on China to be more open about developments on its soil. In mid-February, China finally allowed in a team from the World Health Organization that included Americans.

“Clobbering the Chinese on some of the things they need to be clobbered on is not a bad thing at all,” said Stephen Morrison, director of the Global Health Policy Center at Center for Strategic and International Studies. The WHO “has been super deferential toward the Chinese, and we were getting stiffed and stonewalled for weeks and weeks.”

But Morrison and others agreed that other U.S. moves have probably done more to degrade trust than build it – including using labels like the “Wuhan coronavirus.”

“Naming a disease after a place stigmatizes that place and that’s why there’s been an intentional move away from that,” said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former Obama administration official who help lead the U.S. response to the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa. “Ultimately, diseases are about biology, not geography.”

Konyndyk added that initial U.S. offers to send specialists to China to examine the outbreak came across as demands more than genuine friendly offers, turning off Chinese officials already wary of any U.S. presence on the ground.

“The way that the administration [was] framing it and talking about it was really about us getting visibility on their situation rather than us helping them,” he said.

The analysts and former officials didn’t doubt the reasoning behind some of the U.S. moves – Chinese media outlets, for one, are widely considered propaganda operations. But the timing of the U.S. moves sent a poor signal, they argued.

That being said, given the downturn in U.S.-Chinese relations in recent years – predating Trump – there’s no guarantee that China would have reacted any differently on the coronavirus outbreak had the U.S. not been making such moves.

In a recent essay, Haenle and co-author Lucas Tcheyan noted that epidemics have typically been seen as “non-sensitive areas for U.S.-China cooperation.” One result of 2002-2003 outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome in China was more U.S.-Chinese collaboration in the field of global health, the authors said.

“In the nearly two decades following SARS, in which other global health crises involving the H1N1 influenza strain and the Ebola virus unfolded, Washington and Beijing demonstrated a growing willingness to manage threats to global health, stability, and economic growth together,” they wrote. “The coronavirus, however, has demonstrated just how low bilateral ties have sunk.”

State Department officials point out that the U.S. has delivered some 18 tons of supplies and pledged up to $100 million to help China and other countries battle the coronavirus. According to some media accounts, the Chinese have quietly accepted much of the aid.

In public, however, some Chinese officials are not showing much gratitude.

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Lijian Zhao, a spokesman for China’s Foreign Ministry, is among the most outspoken critics. On Friday, he used his Twitter account, which is infamous for its mean-spirited rhetoric, to link to clips of a recent Capitol Hill appearance by Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“When did patient zero begin in US?” Zhao asked in one tweet, implying without evidence that the outbreak began in the United States. “How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!”

Perhaps the most intriguing development on the geopolitical side of the coronavirus crisis is China’s attempt to capitalize on it diplomatically.

Thanks to quarantines, lockdowns of entire regions and other stringent measures, the Chinese appear to have brought the outbreak to heel -- albeit after it killed more than 3,000 of their citizens. Earlier this week, Xi, the Chinese leader, visited Wuhan in a show of confidence.

At the same time, China is increasingly offering expertise and aid to other countries struggling to contain the illness. A group of Chinese experts headed to Italy this week to help combat the virus in that badly hit European country; Italy has put its entire 60 million population under quarantine.

Chinese propaganda organs, meanwhile, have painted Xi as taking heroic steps to arrest the outbreak. The argument, pushed over and over in state-run media, is that China’s authoritarian system is uniquely capable of solving such crises.

The state-controlled outlets also paint the U.S. political system as incompetent in its response.

“Political virus puts US behind the curve of infection control,” read one headline in China's Global Times, a tabloid that often pushes the views of anti-U.S. voices within the Chinese system.

