My bet is that even in China (which is not monolithic) different stakeholders are not so sure and there's major CYA between the scientists, the local managers, the Beijing-based leadership, senior leadership at all levels. Nothing good can come for any of these people if they allow the investigation to proceed smoothly. What if it's discovered that some totally unrelated incident happened years ago or that somebody was embezzling or did shady land deals with Wuhan lab accounts? The truth only helps people who are not involved. Everybody involved is best served by keeping their mouth shut and blocking any investigation.
Local officials are highly corrupt and also are terrified something they are responsible for will come to the attention of the central leadership in a bad way. Thus they will bodge things for personal gain against the policies of the central leadership, and will try to ensure the central leadership don’t hear about things they very much want to hear about.
This is a terribly high risk strategy, but it’s the only one that actually works. That’s the problem with corrupt bureaucracies.
Of course once central leadership is aware of a situation they can mobilise vast resources and have absolute power to impose whatever strategy they choose. Anything or anyone in the way gets flattened. This is now happening in Hong Kong.
> The CCP had an incredibly tight control over the entire country.
And your comment below really disagree with one another?
> Of course once central leadership is aware of a situation they can mobilise vast resources and have absolute power to impose whatever strategy they choose. Anything or anyone in the way gets flattened.
I'm totally ignorant on this matter but to my reading there seems to be more in common between your two viewpoints than not.
Here is a report titled "Understanding china's political system"
Which doesn't really square up with the extensive border smuggling operations into and out of China, the defusion of illegal portable media players and thumbdrives carrying outside news, or the methamphetamine epidemic they're suffering.
And yet somehow even the most ill-informed Americans hear all about things the CCP doesn't want anyone to hear about. Doesn't sound like very tight control.
In the zoological scenario, they wouldn't have any idea where it came from and might suspect it could be a lab leek simply based on the origin. It's very likely they would engage in cover-up behaviour anyway, just out of caution.
And then there are other reasons why they might decide to cover things up.
Ironically, a Chinese cover-up is absolutely useless evidence towards a lab leak hypothesis.
The only reason we know is that this is pre Xi China.
And pretty much the moment it was developed, a new coronavirus in the midst of jumping species was found in hospitalized patients with pnuemonia-like symptoms [1].
Basically once they went looking, in 2% of the sample group they found people who were infected with a canine coronavirus, but who did not seem to be able to infect other people with it.
The likely scenario is that viruses are jumping species all the time, but rarely succeed in causing illness we don't simply write off as "a bout of pneuomonia from a seasonal something" due to lack of severity or lack of ability to spread human to human.
[1] https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/05/another-...
It's estimated that dozens of viruses jump to humans every year, it's just unlikely that they survive long enough to mutate to adapt to the human body.