The Government has been uncritically using the Chinese Communist Party’s coronavirus data in its presentations for days. The numbers, which come from a regime that has expelled and disappeared journalists who questioned them, appear to show a dramatic leveling off of Coronavirus cases. Information obtained by the CIA, first reported in the Mail on Sunday and now followed up in the New York Times, reveals that:

• The regime is incentivising, perhaps inadvertently, nil-reporting of new cases by district governments in Wuhan by announcing plans to give cash rewards to areas that report no new cases of infection.
• Mid level bureaucrats in China have been lying about infection rates, testing and death counts, frightened that if they report numbers that are too high they will be punished, lose their position or be jailed.

China has form on this – silencing the doctors who initially tried to raise the alarm about Coronavirus. Now the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is seemingly using carrot and stick approaches encouraging no reporting of new cases. Not that the cases have actually gone away…

Downing Street is aware that the figures are suspect yet still includes them in the data presentation charts. This seems to only be muddying the international comparisons.

On the wider point of Chinese integration with the global economy, you don’t have to be a Trump supporter to think that relying on China for strategically important goods is no longer going to be considered a great idea. In recent years China has made great play of it being a force for good in international affairs. Pundits even started comparing it favourably to the Trump administration when it came to the global rules based order. No longer.

Since President Xi extended his term of office the signs are that China is reversing liberalisation and becoming more of a technology-enabled totalitarian state, with increasing repression of minorities and continuing suppression of human rights of dissidents. On the international front it is becoming increasingly belligerent in the region, not forgetting it is North Korea’s protector.

Hong Kong fears that it will end up as under the leash of Beijing as Tibet. The Chinese communists are waging a cold war on Taiwan, which has been cold shouldered by other nations under economic pressure from Beijing. After this crisis is over Western countries are going to re-evaluate relying on China for strategically important technology like 5G. It goes without saying that production of critical medical materials and technology will be repatriated. Predictions of globalisation being reversed are overblown, de-Sinofication of the global economy however is a given.