Given the infectivity of SARS-CoV-2, this was an absolutely urgent threat that brooked no delay. Beijing grasped that. The West did not. In China, a public health failure on the scale of that which occurred in Italy, the UK, or the United States would have cost millions of lives. If the political management of the crisis had been as cack-handed in Beijing as it was in Washington or in London, it might well have rocked Xi’s iron grip on power. But this is not what happened. Not only did China not suffer a Soviet-style collapse, but it turned the tables on its foreign critics.
