Andrea Widburg of the American Thinker documents China’s frightening approach to COVID.

For some time now, China has presented itself as a rapidly ascending nation that is completely in charge of its destiny and one that escaped COVID with little harm. However, that appearance may be illusory and China may be more unstable than the image it promotes to the world.

China, with a bit of help from Fauci’s NIH, gave the world the gift of COVID. Even if it didn’t create the virus in a Wuhan lab (although I believe it did), China’s policy was to hide the virus, and then, even as it locked down its own people, it put Chinese citizens on airplanes to spread the virus throughout the world.

Whether this was simply because the communist Chinese government doesn’t care about the outside world or because it had a nefarious plan, the effect was the same: A pandemic began that had crippling effects on the world at large. And, in a special blessing to China, the West chose to embrace policies that destroyed Western economies while heightening the Wests’ drift to totalitarianism.

All the while, China insisted that it had COVID under control. According to the government, its early, aggressive measures meant that the virus wasn’t spreading throughout China. Its “Zero COVID” plan, it claimed, was working. And with that alleged success at its back, China continued to expand its reach with the Belt and Road initiative, building and seizing seaports and airports in poor countries around the world, and its man-made islands allowing it to push further into the South China Sea.

It turns out, though, that things may not be quite so good for China after all. You don’t have an effective Zero COVID policy when your largest city (Shanghai) has such an aggressive COVID outbreak that you lockdown all 26 million people. And you don’t have a stable regime when those 26 million people claim that, in service to that draconian lockdown, they’re beginning to starve to death.