My backstory is that I used to live in SF for 10 years before this pandemic. We moved to a rural western area because of the pandemic. I need the diesel truck to tow trailers.
This logic works on the average. There are plenty of nuances between the two countries. This is my reduced experience from spending lots of time in China from the early 2000's.
I think you need to look up what "deontological" means. It's putting a means before an end. America does this with spreading freedom. Colonial Spain did this with spreading christianity. Russia did this with spreading communism.
The Chinese also don't talk about a lot of the bad things that happened in the great leap forward, which could have a case made that it was worse than slavery.
This is just an example of the different ethics between China and America. America is very deontological in terms of FREEDOM. We love freedom above everything else. China is very consequentialist, they care about prosperity and success over everything else. I'm a pretty red blooded American (I drive a black smoke diesel truck and have enough firearms and ammo to make it pretty far in the apocalypse). I wonder what ethical system will be more successful in the future. We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics. The Chinese know that Tiananmen Square was a bad thing, but they want to forget about it and move on (consequentialism). In America our Tiananmen Square is probably slavery and we apparently don't want to forget about it even if it rips our county apart (deontological). What system will succeed in the next 100 years? The pandemic really showed me some of the issues of Western deontological ethics.
I don't see good enough evidence to show the zoological origin yet. I don't see good enough evidence of a lab leak origin yet either. I do see good enough evidence for a Chinese coverup. I can say for 100% certainly the Chinese are not being upfront with their data. What scenario would hiding data benefit? Cui bono?
The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think everyone had the best of intentions and either they found something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd... is the papers done by a NIH grant to Eco Health Alliance. This shows they were looking for new variants of Coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114... This shows they were artificially synthesizing Coronaviruses and incubating them in monkey cells. Dr. Peter Daszak seems to be in the center of a lot of this and IMO had a conflict of interest being on the WHO COVID-19 origins report.
The origin of COVID-19 is going to be one of the biggest news stories in 2021-22 IMO. China's global reputation is going to take a hit. I don't think they did this intentionally. I think everyone had the best of intentions and either they found something deep in a bat cave or there was a lab mishap. I've gone down the rabbit hole on this issue. Here are some interesting links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd... is the papers done by a NIH grant to Eco Health Alliance. This shows they were looking for new variants of Coronavirus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114... This shows they were artificially synthesizing Coronaviruses and incubating them in monkey cells. Dr. Peter Daszak seems to be in the center of a lot of this and IMO had a conflict of interest being on the WHO COVID-19 origins report.
I've been looking into the research that was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. There is an NIH grant that was doing interesting research around bat coronavirus. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=R01AI110964&hl=en&as_sd... . I would encourage you to read into their research methods. This one is pretty scary in retrospect https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7089274/pdf/114.... Research methods included synthesizing new Coronavirus variants with specific genes. It's not a smoking gun but it's definitely a loaded gun.
We are declining because we are becoming more like China. More censorship, larger control of central government, currency manipulation. I actually see this as inevitable as you get a larger and larger population freedoms need to get reduced to maintain a stable society.