The problem with the Chinese pitch that Covid-19 came from bats is that they can't produce any bats with the unique characteristics of SARS-CoV-2. If they could produce a variant and then infect some bats they could at least point to them as the missing link. And from there it's just a question of sticking to your story and bluffing/blustering your way out. See Governors Cuomo or Northam vs Senator Franken for winning and losing strategies.
From Strategy Page:
China's Bio-Economic War on the World Has Begun to Backfire
In May 2014, I quit kidding myself and admitted China was at war with the United States. I realized China intended to dominate the world by mandating the terms of international engagement. This meant China was at war with the world -- moderating treaties, legal notions and productive trust be damned.
May 2014's triggering event: 70 or so Chinese vessels escorted an oil-drilling ship into waters claimed by both Vietnam and China --with Vietnam's claim being more credible and diplomatically defensible. Vietnam reported the Chinese flotilla included seven armed coast guard and navy ships -- seven warships. The inclusion of warships makes a case that the incursion was an act of war.
The invading drill ship anchored 120 miles off the Vietnamese coast, inside Vietnam's 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone as defined by the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. China signed that treaty and promised to respect it.
The war-making bottom line: China violated Vietnam's territorial sovereignty and broke an international treaty by encroaching on Vietnam's EEZ. Deploying a state-owned billion-dollar drilling ship is a calculated political action that demonstrated Beijing intended to steal Vietnamese natural resources.
On May 13, 2014, I wrote a column analyzing the clash. The column connected China's aggression to Russia's spring 2014 invasion and annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula. Russia's "Crimean Precedent" -- the brazen military invasion and political annexation of sovereign territory -- shredded several post-Cold War diplomatic agreements. But like Vladimir Putin's Kremlin, communist Beijing didn't give a damn about legalities.
Russia's strategically revealing Crimean crime reprised fascist aggression in Europe (Germany and Italy), Africa (Italy) and Asia (Imperial Japan) in the 1930s. And communism is fascism wrapped in faculty club jargon, so include Stalin's Russia in that aggressor list....
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I had a similar road to Damascus moment, though later, maybe 2015, 2016.
In 2012 I was still pro-China and immensely pro Deng :
Deng Xiaoping Smiles: Peoples Daily Online is Doing an IPO
Peoples Daily Online is the website of the flagship newspaper of the Communist Party of China.
Deng Xiaoping helped lift 1,000,000,000 Chinese out of subsistence poverty* with his pragmatic market reforms:
1980 $ 531.41
2009 $6,309.15
