In their public statements, the Chinese Communist Party has maintained that their country is just as much a victim of the coronavirus as anyone else in the world, that China’s government did everything possible to contain the virus and assist the World Health Organization and other world leaders in containing the spread, and that anyone who says differently is deflecting from their own poor handling of the crisis.
But in private, China’s top leaders reportedly know they have a very bad situation on their hands. According to new reporting from Reuters, top Chinese officials – including President Xi Jinping – have been briefed on an internal report warning that “Beijing faces a rising wave of hostility in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak that could tip relations with the United States into confrontation.”
From Reuters:
The report, presented early last month by the Ministry of State Security to top Beijing leaders including President Xi Jinping, concluded that global anti-China sentiment is at its highest since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, the sources said.
As a result, Beijing faces a wave of anti-China sentiment led by the United States in the aftermath of the pandemic and needs to be prepared in a worst-case scenario for armed confrontation between the two global powers, according to people familiar with the report’s content, who declined to be identified given the sensitivity of the matter.
The report was drawn up by the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), a think tank affiliated with the Ministry of State Security, China’s top intelligence body.
It’s not easy to know what exactly to make of this report. From one perspective, it could be said that China is preparing for the possibility that intense worldwide backlash against their coronavirus coverup will inevitably lead to military action against them. Another way of reading it: China refuses to take the blame for their inaction in the face of the pandemic, and they will not hesitate to use any tool – up to and including military action – against critics who try to sanction/punish them for unleashing this death on the world.
Either way, though, it shows you that Beijing knows that their handling of the coronavirus will have major repercussions in the weeks, months, and years to come. These are repercussions they cannot avoid by blaming other world leaders like President Trump, whining about racism, or insisting that they did everything they could to stop the outbreak. The facts are too clear, and they are becoming clearer by the day.
If China wants to avoid being branded as a pariah nation, they must embrace a new era of transparency, and they must take accountability for what they’ve done.
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