China´s political elites dropped the ball in the coronavirus outbreak
(WorldNews China)

In an emergency, the good thing about a dictatorship is that it can respond very fast. The bad thing is that it won´t respond at all until the dictator in chief says that it should. All the little dictators who flourish in this sort of system won´t risk their positions by passing bad news up the line until the risk of being blamed for delay outweighs the risk of being blamed for the emergency in the first place. You can see how this works if you consider China´s response to the emergence of nCov-2019 (novel coronavirus 2019), a new viral threat potentially as serious as the SARS virus of 2003. Some things it has done well, but others it did very badly,...