From Rage (Bob Woodward, 2020) pp 333-5
National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien shared Trump’s suspicions about Xi and China. In a West Wing White House meeting more than two weeks later, June 11, O’Brien told an aide that China had concealed what was happening.
“They covered it up,” he said, referring to the government’s attempt to conceal the genetic sequencing on the virus. “One lab published it, and then it was immediately taken down and the lab was threatened.”
O’Brien continued, “It appears that they closed down travel all through China so that this disease couldn’t get to Shanghai or Beijing and other key cities. But at the same time they’re letting other folks travel from Wuhan to all over Europe and infected Europe and infected the United States. That’s not good. But whatever happened the Chinese have repurposed it into a bioweapon. And they’re using it, they’re attempting to take advantage of Covid to gain a geopolitical advantage over the United States and the free world, and to displace the United States as the leading power in the world.”
O’Brien considered Trump’s assertion that Xi “didn’t want to contain it from the rest of the world because it would’ve put him at a big disadvantage” as “an absolutely reasonable hypothesis.”
In 2020 an aggressive new approach to international relations called “wolf warrior” diplomacy had emerged from a defensive China.
O’Brien said since Covid “hit the whole world, they’re using it with what they call their wolf diplomacy and for a long time they were attempting to trade PPE to get access for Huawei into countries. They were bullying countries into thanking them. They were bullying countries into saying things about the U.S. But over. all, the theme is that they, as an authoritarian government, with all their surveillance state and their concentration camps and all that sort of thing, offer a better alternative for the world, a more efficient alternative, a kind of weird, nationalistic, technocratic alternative to the world that’s better than liberal democracy. And Covid is an example of why the world should embrace China and Chinese values, and the Chinese form of hybrid capitalist-mercantilist-communist government.”
O’Brien said, “they’re taking every measure possible during this crisis to displace the United States. And we’ve got a hell of a fight on our hands.
“They covered up a lot about this virus because they want to present this model of ruthless efficiency,” he said.
For example the Chinese have said that somewhere between 4,000 and 15,000 people in China died from the virus. O’Brien said he believed that the true number was in the 100,000 range, about the same as in the U.S. in late May.
O’Brien described an apocalyptic wasteland gleaned from social media, before it was removed by government censors. “They welded people into their apartments. They eventually came in a couple weeks later and pried open the doors and opened up, there were a lot of elderly people that died of dehydration and starvation. There were all kinds of people that hung themselves out their windows.”
O’Brien concluded the consequences were dire. “If we lose out economic edge and we lose our economic might and stay closed for too much longer, we might be in a position where we couldn’t stay ahead or maybe we’d get behind and couldn’t catch up.”
For CDC chief Redfield the Chinese failure to close down international flights was disastrous. He told colleagues the United States had silently filled with Covid-19 infections “from Italy, Spain, Germany, France, Great Britain, Belgium.” All this late winter travel brought clusters of Covid to the United States. “Also unknown to us that probably half of those clusters weren’t even symptomatic, so you couldn’t find them” with airport screening.
“It was difficult to understand how China had aggressive travel restrictions within China, and yet did not move to any travel restrictions” for people who wanted to leave China and go abroad, Redfield said.
“If there could have been one mayor, global action that could’ve really saved hundreds of thousands of lives, it’s if they had just shut down their out-of-China travel at the same time they shut down their intra-China travel.
“They really started moving in the latter part of January. That’s where they quarantined people. That’s where they shut down the city. That’s where they stopped the trains. They really locked down all of Wuhan at one point. I think they quarantined overt 11 million people. You couldn’t go from Wuhan to Beijing, but you could go Wuhan to London.”
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