I’m not sold that this was a deliberate act on the part of Red China. Instead, I hew towards “Hanlon’s Razor”: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence. The People’s Republic of China is a nation that thrives on keeping an air of legitimacy both internally and externally, and a lot of their legitimacy from the times of Deng Xaioping to now has rested on their post-Mao wirtschaftswunder and seemingly rising from the ashes of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. They have a pathological need to be seen as the nation the world comes to for manufacturing prowess, and threats to that image seemingly need to be quashed as quickly as possible.
I believe that the Chinese government decided to try to downplay it until they couldn’t anymore (and are still bald-faced lying about the full extent of the pandemic in their borders) not to lull us into a false sense of complacency so they could export the virus maliciously to the rest of the world, but to say to the world “nothing to see here, we’re still open for business, praise Xi”, and, not coincidentally for lower-level apparatchiks, that they wouldn’t catch the ire of the aforementioned dictator by reporting things going catastrophically wrong in Wuhan that would upset China’s economic apple cart.
It’s the same playbook they used in the Great Leap Forward when they peddled propaganda about how every Chinese province was producing bumper crops of grain and record production of steel, just so they could make themselves look good in front of Mao and Mao could project an image of strength to the world. All while millions of innocent Chinese citizens starved to death through bungled policies, and the economy suffered as everything iron was melted down to make worthless low-quality pseudo-steel.
Now do I believe that the People’s Republic of China should be let off the hook for this? Absolutely not. This is the third of fourth pandemic that can be traced back to them, and reputable scientists have said that 95% of it both inside China and internationally could have been nipped in the bud if they had just told the truth to begin with and started measures earlier. It’ll never happen, but the world ought to rectify a mistake it made in 1971 and switch its diplomatic recognition back from the People’s Republic of China to recognize the Republic of China again.