The one issue is that making “mad dollar” as you say is a purely short term imperative. I’ve heard “China is playing the long game” and “China has a 100 year plan”. That couldn’t be further from the truth. The sole reason for China being what it is today is to ensure that the billion and a half potential counterrevolutionaries are placated just enough so that the communist vanguard can retain power. It is bread and circuses on the macro-level.
However, China has become a global pariah almost overnight and this rapid destruction of image has torpedoed any idea that the Beijing consensus is a viable alternative to Washington, or that China is a viable alternative to the US in general.
Which leads back to the bioweapon: if this was an intentional attack, we would’ve known about it very quickly. Intelligence agencies would identify such an action, and it would be a source of intense public outrage many orders of magnitude higher than what we’re experiencing now. Furthermore, it would be indiscriminate attack and as such, would invite a wide range of retaliation from a number of parties, some of whom would be placing differences aside in order to punish the Chinese.
The most likely possibility was that lax safety measures at the BSL-4 allowed for the conditions where someone improperly disposed of contaminated test subjects, either by failing to maintain protocol when dealing with biohazards like medical waste.
Or the more damning, and more likely scenario: someone from the lab itself sold an infected bat to the wet market directly, not thinking that selling a diseased bat carcass could be incredibly dangerous. Either not thinking or not caring. But in any event, we’re now where we are today because of deliberate human action and not due to a random mutation in a pangolin.
