Washington Examiner

When apportioning blame for the spread of the coronavirus, it’s important to avoid letting accusations of cultural insensitivity allow China to escape its share of the responsibility for the current pandemic that has ground life to a halt throughout the world.

At the outset, there’s an important distinction to be made between mocking the eating practices of foreigners, looking scornfully at Chinese Americans, and criticizing the Chinese government’s handling of the outbreak of the virus.

The understandable desire to avoid unfairly scapegoating a particular group of people should not be used to shield the totalitarian government of China from criticism for the lies and cover-ups that made the coronavirus much worse than it needed to be. The record of China’s leaders especially requires more scrutiny now that their propaganda machine is trying to push the conspiracy that the U.S. Army brought the disease to China.

Our attention to this concern matters for another reason: because it speaks to the nature of an increasingly ardent U.S. enemy and a truly despicable regime.

There are two specific catastrophes in China's coronavirus response.

First, Beijing's stubborn refusal to confront the crisis when it emerged. The testament to Chinese President Xi Jinping's failure here is measured most obviously and tragically in the bodies of thousands of Chinese civilians.

As coronavirus took hold in the sprawling metropolis of Wuhan, Xi's Communist Party sat idle. Actually, we're wrong about that. It did do something. It harassed courageous doctors and threw them in prison. Such was the fate of Dr. Li Wenliang, who rose the alarm about the novel virus. Dr. Li is now dead, succumbed to the virus he so nobly sought to stop.

There was also the refusal of China's paranoid leadership to allow scientists into Wuhan to study the virus at its outset. What China had to hide here is not clear. It may well be nothing. Perhaps it was simply Beijing's obsessive need to shield itself from any criticism? Or perhaps the virus is a consequence of bioweapons research gone wrong. We don't know.

Again, we must mention these things and not simply because they are the truth but also because they testify to a regime that has no regard for anything but its narrow band of inner-party elites. To be clear, there is a sustained theme in the Chinese Communist Party's handling of the coronavirus, its rapacious theft of international waters, and its throwing of millions of Uighurs into reeducation camps. That theme is evil.

Xi may parade around Wuhan claiming his Chinese dream is restored after draconian steps to slow down the virus, but the reality is clear. It's a living global nightmare of his making.