In castigating Beijing for its failure to contain the outbreak, senior Trump administration officials have gone out of their way to portray the crisis as a deadly illustration of the threat that Communist party rule poses the Chinese people – and the world beyond. In a speech delivered on Monday morning in fluent Mandarin, the deputy national security adviser, Matthew Pottinger, warned Beijing that its efforts to suppress internal criticism were doomed to backfire.
“When small acts of bravery are stamped out by governments, big acts of bravery follow,” Pottinger said in the remarks delivered by video to a University of Virginia webinar, to commemorate China’s May the Fourth movement, a student-led populist uprising in the wake of the first world war.
