Meet the Post-Covid China, Same as the Pre-Covid China

Western media largely dismissed the idea that the novel coronavirus came from a lab leak as a wild conspiracy theory, even a racist one. Some critics are now giving it a second look—including ProPublica and Vanity Fair, which last month published a joint report on the “complex and grave situation” at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in the months before the pandemic.

Lab leaks happen in democratic countries too. The last known smallpox death occurred in the U.K. in 1978, when photographer

Janet Parker,

whose office was one floor above a lab at Birmingham Medical School, contracted the disease and died. The British government moved swiftly to contain the outbreak, quarantining and vaccinating hundreds who might have been exposed. The government then conducted a thorough investigation, which confirmed the leak. The casualty count was one.

In communist countries, human errors are more frequent and likelier to have catastrophic results. In 1979 at least 66 people died after anthrax bacteria were released from a military lab in Yekaterinburg, Russia. In 2004 the Chinese Institute of Virology in Beijing was temporarily closed for an investigation after some lab employees contracted SARS. In 2020 more than 6,600 people in Lanzhou, China, tested positive for brucellosis, a bacterial disease, after a leak from a vaccine factory the previous year.

The danger is heightened by the nature of a communist regime. Laws are applied selectively, courtroom verdicts are dictated by party fiat, and China’s totalitarian social-credit system metes out extralegal punishment. In the absence of due process, doing the right thing is imprudent. People who make mistakes fear that if they report them, they’ll be scapegoated and persecuted, endangering themselves and their families. Even those who’ve done nothing wrong can face that fate. In the early days of the pandemic,

Li Wenliang,

an ophthalmologist who warned colleagues about early coronavirus infections, found himself denounced as a “rumor monger” by Wuhan police. Li died of Covid on Feb. 7, 2020, at 33.

And when there’s an accident, scientists don’t decide what to do about it. The party decides. Local officials, primarily concerned with their advancement and survival in a brutal and punitive political system, are unlikely to report dangerous problems that reach their desks. Their instinct is to cover up what happened so their central party overlords don’t hold them to account for a disruption or failure.

Every level of government is invested in keeping a lid on any incident, hoping it disappears or can be covered up. And even if local officials want to warn the public, they don’t have the final say. On Jan. 18, 2020, with the epidemic clearly under way, Wuhan’s city government kept it a strict secret and encouraged the residents of the Baibuting community to participate in the “Ten Thousand Family Banquet,” a Chinese New Year celebration, which 40,000 families joined. The real number of infections and deaths in the area has never been released.

Zhou Xianwang,

who was mayor of Wuhan at the pandemic’s outset, said later that month that he didn’t have the authority to disclose the outbreak to the public without authorization from the central government. By the time Beijing finally decided to do something about the disease, it was too late. Communist obfuscation had made it possible for Covid-19 to begin its journey around the world.

Such deadly coverups occur after all sorts of disasters. China’s high-speed rail system is a source of national pride. In July 2011 two trains collided in Wenzhou. Four of the six derailed cars plunged into a viaduct. Within hours, in an apparent effort to conceal evidence, authorities tried to dismantle and bury the wreckage. The next day, excavators clearing debris found a 2-year-old girl alive. Officials blamed the accident on a lightning strike, but leaked propaganda directives ordered journalists not to investigate the crash. Railways Ministry spokesman

Wang Yongping

told a news conference that burying the wreckage was necessary for rescue vehicles to reach the scene. “This is their explanation, whether you believe it or not,” he said. “I believe it anyway.”

Living in a society without the rule of law, with no transparency, with a paranoid political class that is willing to sacrifice human life to preserve its rule, the Chinese people are left to fend for themselves in calamities the government makes worse. My family lives three hours from Wuhan. When news of the epidemic appeared on social media in January 2020, I called to warn them about it, since information in China is strictly censored. There was nothing they could do to protect themselves other than stay indoors, and then they had to comply with the draconian restrictions that followed and that persist to this day.

When human error is covered up rather than acknowledged and addressed, and where totalitarian fear prevails, catastrophe is never far behind. Sometimes, as with Covid, international borders can’t contain the damage. When zero-Covid finally ends and travel and business resume, will the world remember the pandemic’s lesson about the Chinese Communist Party?

Ms. Lin, an actress, is the Macdonald Laurier Institute’s ambassador for China policy and a senior fellow at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights. She is the wife of James Taranto, the Journal’s editorial features editor.