Government in China is completely foreign to our ideas. The city government wields great power, and each Chinese citizen has a “city card” that identifies their hometown. This card also controls your travel ability, where you can live, your rate of pension, and when you can retire. Shoot, you can’t even buy a train or bus fare without showing your city card. If you’re not allowed to go to the destination you request, you are denied travel by the kiosk. Your photo is taken, do not attempt the travel.
Provincial government takes all economic data from their cities, and reports to Beijing. I have little experience with this level of Chinese government.
Then there is the PLA. The PLA is controlled by Beijing ONLY, and they answer directly to XiJinping. Provincial governors are powerless against them.
At the top of the food chain in the PLA is their secret police - loosely called WuJing. These soldiers and assassins are above the PLA as our Delta force in some ways - they are the best trained, the best equipped, and are feared even by Politburo members. They are the final arbiter in China. Think KGB on steroids with some PCP on the side.
It is impossible to equate our system of military/police/National Guard with China. When you’re in China, you seldom see police or PLA. But when neighbors or relatives disappear, that is where they went. Good luck finding them. Ever.
Beijing relaxed the travel codes on Hubei, and 3 million of them fled almost overnight. Given that their tests are woefully inaccurate, their neighbors don’t want them to be leaving and starting the infections again.
Yeah, it’s different there.
But provincial borders still matter.
Before the lockdown, in early January, 5-7 million left wuhan and Hubei. They returned to their families in the provinces. That’s why there factories there have had a hard time getting back up and running. Factories around Shanghai are back up. So is Shenzhen and Suzhou. But demand is way way down. Exports are off by 50%. Nothing to do, people go back to their original provinces.
The central government is aware of this and periodically cracks down on "excessive" enthusiasm for this form of corruption. So the PLA commanders use these for social ranking competition with each other a la French aristocrats as depicted in the 1988 movie, Dangerous Liaisons.
I can't emphasize enough that social class and social competition are incredibly important in nominally classless "Communist" China. China has very much reverted to its past millennia of social ranking competition, but now with a Communist veneer on it.
One of the ways these regional and local PLA commanders conduct their social competition with each other is with use of their discretionary funds. Fear of anti-corruption crackdowns pushes this competition into use of these discretionary funds for things which might nominally benefit the state, as opposed to lavish lifestyles.
Among those things is biological weapons research. Which the central government doesn’t know about. When General Wang brags privately about his pet biowar researchers making some breakthrough, Generals Wing, Wong, Wu and Wung in his area get jealous and order their minions to develop something similar.
One of the attractions of secret (from the central government) biowar research as a means of social competition among Chinese potentates is possible use of the stuff by Chinese factions against each other in the event the central government collapses. The latter is never far from the minds of Chinese potentates, not because there is any visible immediate change of it, but because they are all steeped in Chinese history and know it can happen pretty quick and without much warning.
Again, China is weird and some familiarity with Chinese history and culture is necessary to understand just how weird the place is.
AFAIK, there are hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, of itty-bitty ramshackle unofficial biowar labs all over China. With no standards and no oversight.
I am informed that a typical one will have maybe two researchers with appropriate degrees in charge (but neither with any real competence beyond their education), some technicians who know their way around a lab, one (1) security guy who is an idiot wastrel relative of the potentate funding the lab, and some minimally paid custodial minions. The lab itself has minimal security – at best it’s a converted jewelry store in a strip mall with one room having real security walls and a sturdy (nominally thief-proof) lockable door.
So the Wuhan Virus might have originated in one of these. It is almost certain that, whether the Virus originated in an unofficial biowar lab, the official high-level security biological research lab in Wuhan (which almost certainly did bioweapon research), or the two known low-security biological research labs in Wuhan, the Virus was released by some poorly paid minions selling infected lab animals to the Wuhan exotic animals meat market rather than incinerating them as ordered.
China is so class-ridden that security guys rarely pay attention to the lowest paid minions.
I mention these unofficial biowar labs only to show just how dangerous Communist China is to the entire world as a source of pandemics like the Wuhan Virus. It isn't just of random mutations among exotic animals in meat markets. The latter are just the means of lab viruses escaping. China's Communist system of government, and its Communist Party, are inherent threats to the whole world.
We can EXPECT more pandemics from China to get out as long as China's Communist Party exists. The only question is how we can minimize that threat.