Gordon Chang: China’s coronavirus crisis is far from over

Gordon Chang, The Daily Beast contributor and author of Losing South Korea (2019), joins Secure Freedom Radio to discuss the latest news surrounding the coronavirus outbreak.

“Beijing says that the virus is subsiding outside of Hubei province, Wuhan. That may be true but there is information that there are clusters and spreading of the virus in places like Beijing itself. I think that Xi Jinping has been managing the statistics because he wants workers to return to their job sites. There is a lot of information that shows China in one way or another is undercounting cases and creating information showing a recovery. In many places, there is no recovery or very little recovery. But what we do know is that people are now going out in public because they have been encouraged from the information from the Communist Party. Therefore, I think this is going to prolong the epidemic as people re-infect each other. There is some evidence of re-infection and infections that are caused by this back to work order, so this is going to be a much longer story for China than it had to be.”

Chang later explains why China withheld critical information about the virus from the international community:

“Secretary of State Pompeo talked about this (the withholding of critical information) in an indirect fashion about three or four days ago when he discussed his incredible frustration with Beijing in terms of getting information about the coronavirus. We know that a WHO team did visit Wuhan but they arrived many, many weeks late, didn’t stay very long, and we know China did its best to prevent the virologists from studying the origin of the outbreak. This has led to rumors about what Beijing is trying to hide, which we don’t know yet with any degree of certainty, but we can suspect pretty much the worst in some cases.”

Listen to the full show here