Will COVID-19 Help Sink Communism in China?

When I was in college, many moons ago, I had a charismatic, likable, political science professor who repeatedly and adamantly proclaimed that communism was destined to fail because it was a non-transparent system, unlike how democracy usually works.

At that time, 1961, the U.S. and the communistic Soviet Union–which had its roots in the Russian Revolution by the Bolshevik Party in 1917–were getting seriously involved against each other in the Cold War, which went on for decades. And China had gone communistic with the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949 that was led by Chairman Mao Zedong. It resulted in the formation of the Peoples Republic of China which exists today.

So, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 proved my professor partly correct, that is, in that part of the world. Now I’m wondering if the turmoil in Hong Kong, and China’s debacle in its mishandling of the early stages of the origin of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, could lead to the downfall of the Communist Party in China and thereby prove my professor correct regarding communism in just about all of the world.

An article in today’s New York Times, entitled “Local Officials Hid Dangers from Beijing, Says U.S. Report,” reveals the lack of governing transparency under communism in China concerning this coronavirus called COVID-19. Interestingly, it was a similar lack of governing transparency–the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl–that was the final straw in causing the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This Times article relates that the U.S. intelligence community created and released to appropriate officials in government a classified report about the origin of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, and Beijing’s response to it. The Times article is based on its authors having private discussions with many former and current U.S. officials who are aware of the contents of the report. The Times article says of China’s government, “Local officials often withhold information from Beijing for fear of reprisal.” Yet the article says the intelligence report “still supports the overall notion that Communist Party officials hid important information from the world” regarding COVID-19.

The article continues, “The report says senior officials in Beijing, even as they were scrambling to pry data from officials in central China, played a role in obscuring the outbreak by withholding information from the world Health Organization.

“But the report adds to the body of evidence that shows how the malfeasance of local Chinese officials appeared to be a decisive factor in the spread of the virus within Wuhan and beyond.”

The authors of the article continue by saying of their sources, “Communist Party leaders oversee an authoritarian system that inhibits local officials from freely sharing information with national-level officials, they said, and this has had deadly consequences for the world. It is a version of the so-called Chernobyl effect, where local officials avoid telling central authorities about a catastrophic event until it is far too late, American officials said.”

I state in my new book, just released, Moses Predicted COVID-19 (pp. 11-12), “On January 1, 2o20, China’s government announced that this coronavirus originated from a bat being sold as meat along with other live, wild animals at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China. . . . Yet China remained non-transparent and uncooperative with nations seeking further information and documentation as to how COVID-19 originated and spread. . . . . The secretive response by China’s government raises questions of a coverup. China quickly blamed the wet market without offering any evidence. And the government has not provided results of its testing of virus samples it professedly obtained from the market. Plus, the market was soon cleaned, as if destroying evidence.”

This is how catastrophic events can operate under communistic rule, in which authorities scramble to cover up the evidence. I’m sure my political science professor would have a whole lot to tells us about such workings under communism.