Coronavirus: China’s great wall of silence
China deliberately concealed information about the coronavirus, and it has fought for weeks against calls for an inquiry. So what is Beijing hiding?
This is the first part of a five-part investigation by Cameron Stewart and Will Glasgow on China and the coronavirus. Read part two here; part three here; part four here; and part five here
On January 3, Robert Redfield, head of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, picked up the phone to his counterpart in China to ask him about rumours of a new and potentially deadly virus. Gao Fu, head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, did not hold back. He burst into tears as he told Redfield about the mysterious new disease that had emerged in Wuhan.
Redfield was surprised. The Chinese government had yet to report its first death. While China had told the World Health Organisation’s Beijing office that a mysterious pneumonia had been found in Wuhan, it had not given any outward indication that things were serious.
Redfield rang US Health Secretary Alex Azar, who contacted the White House’s National Security Council, and within days, on January 6, the Trump administration had offered to send a team of America’s best disease experts to China.
“We made the offer to send the CDC experts in to assist their Chinese colleagues to get to the bottom of key scientific questions like, how transmissible is this disease? What is the severity? What is the incubation period? And can there be asymptomatic transmission?” says Azar.
But Beijing said no.
“China nice-talked it for a month,” says Kenneth Cuccinelli, a top US Homeland Security official. “ ‘Oh, well, thank you for the offer. Blah, blah.’ ”
What the White House did not know at that moment was that China was concealing from the world what it knew of a disease that was about to turn life as we know it upside down.
As an angry US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it this week: “This is an enormous crisis created by the fact that the Chinese Communist Party reverted to form, reverted to the kinds of disinformation, the kinds of concealment that authoritarian regimes do. The Chinese Communist Party had the opportunity to prevent all of the calamity that has befallen the world, and here we find ourselves today.”
Now, with the Chinese-born virus cutting a swath of death and economic destruction across the globe, Beijing is being asked to explain.
Specifically, it is being asked to explain exactly how the virus began and why China underplayed to the world the disease’s ability to spread and kill.
Beijing stands accused of robbing the rest of the world of valuable time to prepare for the pandemic that was about to be unleashed.
For weeks, China kept to itself what would become the world’s deadliest secret. It concealed what it knew even from its own people. It buried the truth and punished doctors and reporters who tried to tell it. It let its own people travel across the world, knowing they could be carrying a highly contagious killer virus. In short, Beijing’s lies helped to infect the rest of the world.
The Trump administration says China’s bad behaviour has cost hundreds of thousands of lives around the world, and nowhere more than in the US where upwards of 75,000 people have died in just over two months — a toll greater than the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
China is confronting the biggest blow to its international reputation since Tiananmen Square, but it has hit back, denying that it deceived the world over the coronavirus. Its Foreign Ministry this week accused the US of attacking it for its own political motives.
“(The US has) only one objective: to try to shirk responsibility for their own epidemic and prevention and control measures and divert public attention,” said a spokesman.
‘Who in the world wouldn’t want an investigation of how this happened to the world?’
China’s ambassador to the US, Cui Tiankai, said the US in particular had fallen into “the absurd mindset of ‘always blame China’. Simply put, for some people China has to be wrong, regardless of the facts.”
Such is Beijing’s sensitivity that when Scott Morrison called for an independent and impartial international inquiry into the origins of the pandemic, China threatened blunt economic retaliation.
“Who in the world wouldn’t want an investigation of how this happened to the world,” Pompeo said as he backed Australia’s call.
So what is China trying to hide?
Part two: China’s great wall of silence: ‘You are the sinner’