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It would be optimistic to think Beijing isn’t continuing its deceit

The Chinese government’s coverups and lies are clearly driven by fear and it would be optimistic to think Beijing isn’t continuing its deceit in its claims about the miraculous success of its containment efforts and improving mortality rates. Xi Jinping and his cohorts have every reason to believe that this pandemic could badly weaken their grip on power. Their economy has been in freefall, with January’s industrial output at its lowest since 1990. All governments worry how they’ll survive this plague, but for a one-party authoritarian government, the fears are existential. “The Party’s social contract with the people — ensuring the people’s well-being and providing ever-increasing economic prosperity — is being stressed on a nationwide level in ways I don’t recall in the past several decades,” wrote Bill Bishop, a respected authority on China, on his Sinocism blog last month.

Xi has long boasted that his communist model of governance is superior to liberal democracy. If it takes suppressing news of scores of new deaths to preserve that belief, who doubts he would do it? Beijing’s recent redoubling of censorship and state-media propaganda efforts, while ordering the deportation of reporters from several major American outlets last week, even as it claims it has conquered the outbreak, certainly provides grounds for suspicion.

Not that anything is necessary to prove Beijing’s readiness to deceive the world no matter the cost to human lives beyond its handling of the initial outbreak. The first cases from Wuhan reportedly began arriving as early as mid-November. When doctors there began raising alarms in December about a new deadly virus, they were charged by the government with spreading “lies” and forced into false confessions. As the virus spread further in December, the government still played down the danger, insisting the virus was not anything like SARS — which, of course it is — and maintaining it had been contained and there had been no human transmission. As the toll mounted into January, any discussion on the internet that contradicted the bogus official line was prohibited, wiped out, deleted. For critical weeks the Chinese government lied and denied, rather than undertake serious containment efforts, as the virus spread, uncontrolled, around the world.