China’s coronavirus cover-up shows it can’t be trusted

‘Hide your capacities, bide your time’, China’s former leader, Deng Xiaoping, famously once said. Few in the West understood what he meant then. But they understand it today.

The coronavirus outbreak has brought home the reality that China does not play by global rules. It’s time for countries committed to open, liberal democracy, free trade and free markets to accept the reality that China is not a partner but a strategic competitor.

The coronavirus cover-up of the emergence of the disease might even have included lax standards in laboratories as the US Embassy had complained of. These are the actions you would expect from the Chinese Communist Party, a crony political monopoly that brooks no dissent, seeks to assert complete control and whose officials are too terrorised to confess to error.

China has also long ignored global norms on trade, distorting its market to favour state owned companies and privileged firms allowing them to undercut foreign rivals, harming producers in developing countries and in the developed West.