Chinas actions following the event includes the destruction of evidence, refusal of access and using the WHO as their personal mouthpiece. Unless history is rewritten too, every textbook should clearly point to China.
The local government might know. They would have started a cover up reflexively.
But in either case, it could be that neither the local government nor central government wants to know or to find out. Ultimately, destroying the evidence and failing to cooperate with foreign investigators has cost China very little or nothing, even.
In short, I feel China should be admonished for covering things up, but not that the cover up proves the lab leak.
And that goes for western spy agencies too, by the way. Headless chickens all around.
Given the choice between blaming "the system" and all the ideologically unimaginable questions that would come with that and blaming some elderly Chinese guy who didn't cook his bat soup well enough, well that's not really a choice.
Imagine trying to tell some mid tier guy in the Taliban about the pros of educated women. It's just gonna bounce right off. That it could ever be worth it is just incomprehensibly foreign to him.
The lab leak theory bounced right off of a lot of people here for all the same reasons.
> blaming some elderly Chinese guy who didn't cook his bat soup well enough
that's also a bit racist. they just eat raccoon dogs, which we don't. and they bring live animals into the market, that people browse, which is the bigger problem.
and ask devoutly religious people what they think of americans eating pork and beef...
To me it is a difference, if a naturally mutated virus caused a global epidemic, than a lab made one.
Furthermore, within China, alternative conspiracy theories claiming that the virus came from the US were allowed to circulate. A significant number of people in China actually believe that theory.
A really easy knockdown for this kind of argument is - why did they close down, sanitize, and dispose of all animals and items at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market? If your argument is that a coverup points to the source, why wouldn't that mean the wet market was the origin?
But that's not at all enough evidence that they knew about the extent of the issue. Such institutions reflexively try to control information flow whether they themselves know what's going on or not.