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A new report from U.S. intelligence agencies says senior Beijing officials were unaware of the virus’s true risks in early January. This may be just U.S. policy toward China.
By Edward Wong, Julian E. Barnes and Zolan Kanno-Youngs
WASHINGTON – Trump administration officials have tried to bring a political hammer to China in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, saying the Chinese Communist Party covered the initial outbreak and allowed the virus to spread around the world.
But within the U.S. government, intelligence officials have come to a more complex and nuanced conclusion than Chinese officials did in January.
Beijing officials have been in the dark for weeks about the devastation of the virus through local officials in central China, according to U.S. officials familiar with a new internal report by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The report concluded that officials in Wuhan city and Hubei Province, where the outbreak began late last year, attempted to hide data from China’s central leadership. This location is consistent with media reports and tests by Chinese experts from the country’s opaque system of government.
Local officials hide data in Beijing for fear of reprisals, current and former U.S. officials say.
The new assessment does not contradict the Trump administration’s complaint about China, but it adds context to the movements, and freezes, that created the global crisis.
President Trump said in a Fourth of July speech at the White House that “China’s secrecy, deception, and cover-up” allowed for the pandemic. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo insisted that the management “tell the fact every day” about “the communist cover-up of this virus.” Peter Navarro, a White House industrial adviser, said Saturday that the pandemic had been “perpetrated in the United States” through the Chinese Communist Party.
The accusations go hand in hand with the recommendation of strategists in Trump’s crusade to look closely at China to divert the president’s attention to the U.S. pandemic and economy, and hide his constant compliment toward Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader.
But the broad political message leaves the impression that Mr. Xi and senior officials were aware of the risks of the new coronavirus at first and did their best to hide them.
The report, circulated in June, comprises classified and unclassified sections, and represents the C.I.A. Consensus. and other intelligence agencies. He still supports the general concept that Communist Party officials have withheld vital data from the world, American officials said. The report says senior officials in Beijing, even as they struggled to disdownload the knowledge of officials in central China, played a role in obfuscating the outbreak by hiding data from the World Health Organization.
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