Guy Sorman of City Journal blames one man in communist China for the world’s current health scare.
I hold Xi Jinping guilty of starting the coronavirus pandemic, which began in the Chinese city of Wuhan and has now caused thousands of deaths around the world and an economic recession that will ravage all of us for years. My accusation is well-founded and well-documented. Early last December, a young doctor at a Wuhan hospital discovered the first case of illness caused by a heretofore unknown virus. He immediately established the link with an earlier epidemic that had begun in the same place and under the same circumstances, in 2002–2003: SARS, a viral pneumonia. The doctor, Li Wenliang, 37 years old, who died in February from exposure to the patients whom he cared for, had immediately posted his diagnosis on the hospital’s internal website in order to inform his colleagues. He was called before a disciplinary council of the local Communist Party and forced to repent and confess, in writing, that he had spread rumors harmful to the glory of the Party. A month later—a month too late—after further suppressing evidence from brave medical professionals, the Party recognized the explosive nature of the epidemic, which could have been confined to Wuhan but was now spreading throughout China, and then the world.
What is Xi Jinping guilty of? Though he did not invent the ideology of the lie, which is the true Constitution of China’s Communist Party, he has considerably reinforced it since taking power. We must therefore consider that the Party bureaucrats, driven by fear and ambition, are chiefly servile agents. In a regime as centralized as China’s, there is only one undeniably guilty party—the president.