Before being handed over to China’s tender mercies in 1997, Hong Kong’s people feared that reunification would kill the colony’s wealth-generating boom. A foreboding joke went, “China has had 5,000 years to screw up its economy … and it hasn’t wasted a second.” The dark humor was wrong about prosperity, but right about China playing a long game.

That’s worth remembering now, as we look at the devastation wrought by the tyranny’s export of a global pandemic, its manipulation of the World Health Organization to deceive the world, and the consequent and perhaps intentional economic damage, which is unprecedented in scale and speed.