US agencies: Local officials hid dangers from Beijing
WASHINGTON — Trump administration officials have tried taking a political sledgehammer to China over the coronavirus pandemic, asserting that the Chinese Communist Party covered up the initial outbreak and allowed the virus to spread around the globe.
But within the U.S. government, intelligence officials have arrived at a more nuanced and complex finding of what Chinese officials did wrong in January.
Officials in Beijing were kept in the dark for weeks about the potential devastation of the virus by local officials in central China, according to American officials familiar with a new internal report by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The report concluded that officials in the city of Wuhan and in Hubei province, where the outbreak began late last year, tried to hide information from China’s central leadership.
The finding is consistent with reporting by news organizations and with assessments by China experts of the country’s opaque governance system.
Local officials often withhold information from Beijing for fear of reprisal, current and former American officials say.
The new assessment does not contradict the Trump administration’s criticism of China but adds perspective and context to actions — and inactions — that created the global crisis.
President Donald Trump said in a July 4 speech at the White House that “China’s secrecy, deceptions and cover-up” enabled the pandemic. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted the administration was “telling the truth every day” about “the Communist cover-up of that virus.” Peter Navarro, a White House trade adviser, said Saturday that the pandemic was “perpetrated on America” by the Chinese Communist Party.
The accusations dovetail with advice from Trump campaign strategists to look tough on China to try to shift the spotlight from the president’s failures on the pandemic and the U.S. economy, and to paper over his constant praise of Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader.
But the broad political messaging leaves an impression that Xi and other top officials knew of the dangers of the new coronavirus in the early days and went to great lengths to hide them.
The report still supports the overall notion that Communist Party officials hid important information from the world, U.S. officials said. 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.
“It makes a huge difference if it was Wuhan or Beijing,” said Michael Pillsbury, a China scholar at the Hudson Institute who informally advises Trump.
If Xi was not the main person at fault, he said, then that meant that top Chinese officials had not engaged in total deceit on the coronavirus, and American officials had some basis for still trying to engage in good-faith negotiations with Beijing on issues of mutual interest.