At the outset of the pandemic, as Chinese Communist Party officials at all levels of government failed to provide trustworthy information, the rest of the world underestimated the disease.
But those who had witnessed or otherwise studied the Party’s cagey response to the 2003 SARS epidemic knew immediately what they were dealing with. The Taiwanese government sprang into action, crafting its famously successful pandemic response. And in the U.S., one Trump official — a former journalist who while based in China challenged the Chinese government’s SARS-era deceptions — started warning about the virus well before many realized that an outbreak could occur in the United States. People like him understood the lengths to which the Party-state would go to cover up the emergence of a deadly disease, a tendency that persists to this day even though its aggressive measures have brought the virus down from its early 2020 peak.
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