On Jan. 21, a Chinese government agency issued a stark warning about the emerging novel coronavirus: “anyone who deliberately delays and hides the reporting of cases out of his or her own self-interest will be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity.”

We’re still waiting for Chinese President Xi Jinping and some officials in Wuhan to show up on that pillar.

That dramatic Jan. 21 warning came the day the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed the first case in the U.S.

It came seven days after the World Health Organization announced that Chinese authorities reported “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.”

It came 22 whole days after Wuhan doctors, including, Li Wenliang, were reprimanded as “rumormongers” for trying to warn about the virus.

It came long after the lies and secrets of China’s authoritarian government had allowed a mysterious illness infecting a couple dozen people to explode into a worldwide pandemic that has now sickened more than 723, 000 people, killed more than 34,000 and caused untold economic destruction.

China committed “one of the worst cover-ups in human history,” Texas Congressman Michael McCaul, the top Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Axios in an interview.

He’s right. There’s no question that China failed to learn from the deadly SARS outbreak 17 years ago. It seemed more interested in containing information than containing the virus.

So why are Chinese authorities earning praise in some quarters? Some are even suggesting that authoritarian governments, with their draconian lockdowns, are better suited to put down a pandemic than democracies, fraught with freedom of movement and independent thought.

The idea that China’s response bought the world time, which some countries squandered, has come from many corners: an epidemiologist in London, a Harvard economist on NPR. And curiously, President Trump has been crowing about China’s hard work at containing the spread. He stopped using the offensive term “Chinese virus,” and has managed only faint criticism lately of Chinese secrecy.

Last week, Trump tweeted that he and Xi Jinping “are working closely together” to fight the virus. “Much respect!” he wrote in a post liked more than 328,000 times.

Just because the U.S. government seriously botched its response, producing a test that didn’t work and then failing to make a functioning one widely available, China is not off the hook for causing the global crisis in the first place.

Each time the U.S. or another Western country messes up, it creates an opening for China’s propaganda machine to push its fanciful narrative: a skilled, orderly, high-tech response made possible only through the wonders of communism.

China is trying to play the hero in Italy and other hard-hit countries, touting its “donations” of ventilators and dispatching of experts. In truth, China is selling the ventilators and any good deed is a ploy to pave over its part in the bodies mounting around Milan, Madrid and Tehran. And now New York.

Authoritarianism is not a secret sauce for solving this pandemic. China may have an easier time controlling people, but the problem-solving abilities of authoritarian regimes are nothing compared the problem-making tenants of secrecy and oppression.

Who does appear to have a secret sauce?

South Korea, a flourishing democratic republic.

Although Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong have all had success limiting cases, South Korea is held up as a gold standard for flattening a steep coronavirus curve with transparency and public cooperation — and without draconian lock-downs or economy-crushing shutdowns.

South Korea has an intricate system developed after SARS in 2003 that involves quick response, frequent testing, tracing contacts of the infected, enforced quarantines, temperature checks and screening passengers.

It’s clear that countries seeing the most deaths are those that downplayed the threat in the beginning and reacted late. China was one. The United States is another.

Rather than hopping aboard China’s propaganda wagon, Americans should demand that our leaders learn from their dire mistakes so that, unlike the Chinese, we are not doomed to repeat them.