Release a plague you can’t control through the wet market next to your virology lab, knowing that it will spread among your own people and those of your allies first, and then also probably circle back, hoping that it will be worse for the other guys, sure (somehow) that the war that you started out of nowhere is to your own net benefit.

Interesting strategy!

I doubt it. It was almost immediately clear that the world’s reliance on China for some things was a problem. I think this was a pretty clear outcome, because before COVID there were people already harping on that single point of failure.

This is going to hurt China’s long term influence. Countries are diversifying their strategic supply chains, on shoring capacity for thinks like chip fabs. This weakens China’s geopolitical clout because they won’t be able to control the bottleneck.

Well, as the poster said, it backfired on them lol

(I do not believe in the intentional malicious leak theory, to be clear)

It’s so fascinating to me to see someone formulate a hypothesis based on nothing “I think they did[purposely leak a global pandemic-causing virus]”, and then immediately turn around and relish in China’s failure at the thing you claimed they did. Like, do I do this too, and I’m just not aware of it?

* * *

> I think they did thinking the West wouldn’t have developed a vaccine so fast.

I’m curious. What motivation for purposefully leaking such a virus would ‘they’ have?

Note: Wuhan was closed to interprovincial traffic very early on. The International Airport, however, was left open.

There's a hanful of ways you can look at that:

Wuhan International couldn't be closed without consent from Beijing.

Beijing didn't grant it because

A) Poor information propagation Or B) Someone made a weighty geopolitical decision that in order to best serve China's interests, it was time to make this everyone's problem, leaving the International Airport open as a result. Or C) some combo of the two.

I don't know your particular balance in regards to the actual Overton Window as extended to humanity as a whole, but I damn well know where it registers on mine.

> Beijing didn't grant it

If we recall, initially China downplayed how widespread the virus was and made it out as if it were contained. Perhaps they did not know how widespread the issue was either. Further, at that time there was complete uncertainty regarding Covid-19's virulence (it was after all, a completely brand new virus; and there was a ton of uncertainty around in January 2020).

Regarding to the communication from the US government of how contained the issue was, as a reference, the president at the time wrote:

"Jan. 24, Twitter:

“China has been working very hard to contain the Coronavirus. The United States greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency. It will all work out well. In particular, on behalf of the American People, I want to thank President Xi!”"

- https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/15/trump-china-coronav...

Basically, the entire world needed to start quarantine in early January of 2020 to effectively nip this in the bud (shutting down international travel, regional travel, etc). Perhaps that needed to have even started in December. I would suggest then that Beijing didn't shut down international travel at that time for the same reasons that the rest of the international community did not. In part they were still downplaying it as was the public oration from the US government was downplaying it as well. It wasn't until late February and into March that it became well known publicly that this was a new pandemic.

Hence, by March China was fully shut down, and at that point there is no hiding the issue (why is all of China locked down?), and at that time it was everyone's problem.

> A) Poor information propagation

There was some info released that the CIA assessed the virulence opportunity to easily be a pandemic as early as November 2019. That poor information propagation wasn't necessarily just a problem with the Chinese government.

Citation: "Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources" - https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intelligence-report-warned-c...

C) Trapping foreign citizens in their country would have caused an international incident when very little was yet known.

Every country understands the concept of Quarantine. There would not have been even a blink of an eye within diplomatic channels. At least I don't think so. It also doesn't jibe with the tight lipped behavior of the Chinese Government, and the iron fist they dropped on their academic establishment that under no circumstances were virological materials to be widely published without Party approval.

The clamp down on information exchange does not strike me as the actions of a group with everyone else's best interests in mind. And given that we have hitherto been pretty chill with China on the whole, I really think if they had gone "screw it, international travel lockdown"; you'd have seen materials and humanitarian relief being flown in in order to help out with citizens stranded overseas. We may not even be having this conversation, because to be frank, how China did decide to react just doesn't make any sense except in the context of someone with something to hide.

> It spectacularly backfired on them.

Because it's a virus that doesn't discriminate based on race or geography? Yeah, I have doubts (to put it mildly.)

In my opinion, the simplest explanation of this is: a worker at the Wuhan facility was accidentally infected (mistakes happen) and it was able to spread. It was not intentional.

An intentional leak would be an attack. I don’t recall that being on the table during the early part of the pandemic. I’m sure there was a least one person suggesting it but I recall the lab leak theory being the most ridiculed was some kind of accident or mistake at the lab resulting in an infected worker. …probably asymptomatic to boot.