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They might just want to protect other secrets about the lab and keep everyone at arms length.

My bet is that even in China (which is not monolithic) different stakeholders are not so sure and there's major CYA between the scientists, the local managers, the Beijing-based leadership, senior leadership at all levels. Nothing good can come for any of these people if they allow the investigation to proceed smoothly. What if it's discovered that some totally unrelated incident happened years ago or that somebody was embezzling or did shady land deals with Wuhan lab accounts? The truth only helps people who are not involved. Everybody involved is best served by keeping their mouth shut and blocking any investigation.

2 comments

When it's about the biggest event on the planet for at least a year, the highest central powers are surely in complete control.

Sorry but China is about as monolithic as you can get. The CCP had an incredibly tight control over the entire country. It doesn’t allow anything except for a monolithic view.

That’s not how China works. Source, my Wife is Chinese and her father is a retired CCP member.

Local officials are highly corrupt and also are terrified something they are responsible for will come to the attention of the central leadership in a bad way. Thus they will bodge things for personal gain against the policies of the central leadership, and will try to ensure the central leadership don’t hear about things they very much want to hear about.

This is a terribly high risk strategy, but it’s the only one that actually works. That’s the problem with corrupt bureaucracies.

Of course once central leadership is aware of a situation they can mobilise vast resources and have absolute power to impose whatever strategy they choose. Anything or anyone in the way gets flattened. This is now happening in Hong Kong.

I'm not sure how this statement from the parent:

> The CCP had an incredibly tight control over the entire country.

And your comment below really disagree with one another?

> Of course once central leadership is aware of a situation they can mobilise vast resources and have absolute power to impose whatever strategy they choose. Anything or anyone in the way gets flattened.

I'm totally ignorant on this matter but to my reading there seems to be more in common between your two viewpoints than not.

The point is there are different stakeholders with mutually incompatible interests in China. It’s not monolithic and no one centre of power knows and directs everything all the time. That’s why when the central authorities come across local officials doing stuff that hurts it embarrasses them, they impose such harsh penalties, including death. You don’t have to punish behaviour that doesn’t happen.

It's funny you should say this because the truth is different, it's a lot less monolithic and centralized than you think.

Here is a report titled "Understanding china's political system"

https://fas.org/sgp/crs/row/R41007.pdf

This is just classic American black-and-white national morality thinking. You see the same thing applied all the time to the citizenry of North Korea - "they're all brainwashed and totally absolutely follow the leader" - the unstated subtext being "so when the US military invades and kills a whole lot of them, really we had no choice and this was the right and just thing to do for our defense".

Which doesn't really square up with the extensive border smuggling operations into and out of China, the defusion of illegal portable media players and thumbdrives carrying outside news, or the methamphetamine epidemic they're suffering.

> It doesn’t allow anything except for a monolithic view.

And yet somehow even the most ill-informed Americans hear all about things the CCP doesn't want anyone to hear about. Doesn't sound like very tight control.