> The problem is that this is Standard Operating Procedure(tm) for China
When you say "China", do you mean the Department of Health, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of Trade, or the Chinese government, or the Chinese people, or some Chinese guy?
It makes as much sense to attribute a Standard Operating Procedure to "China" as it does to attribute something like that to "America", or to say "Americans think...", which is not very much at all, because America, like all societies of more than one person, is a pluralist society.
China is 1.3 billion people. If you treat it as a collection of different interests and points of view, your analyses and predictions will have more cogency.
What you said does not make sense at all. All Chinese government branches are directly under the command of the CCP. Even China's top court rejects the idea of juridical independence [1]. To say China is equivalent to U.S is totally ignorant.
On paper they're directly under the command of the CCP, but Xi Jinping only has so many hours in his day like any other human and can't personally monitor everything that's happening in a billion-person country. That seems to leave plenty of room for government branches to have their own internal politics and interests in practice.
As far as I can tell from the outside, there were actually multiple overlapping cover-ups within China by different organisations with different interests that resulted in doctors, nurses and medical researchers being silenced - starting with local-level coverups that tried to keep the national government from knowing there was a problem, and ending with multiple national-level coverups, including attempts to cover up the fact the local government had covered stuff up because that in itself was embarrassing to China as a country.
That's what you get with authoritarianism. Both the carrots (political advancement) and the sticks (punishment from above) encourage underlings to obey what they think their superiors would command, even when those superiors are not involved.
The pithiest example is the death of Li Wenliang. The doctor who was threatened and silenced for warning others of a SARS outbreak, himself died of the disease when it spread due to inaction.
China is more monolithic than the USA because uniformity is what their culture is structured to establish.
In the West, we have an underlying belief that dissent and debate result in better decisions and more circumspect awareness of complicated situations. We tolerate insolence, dissent, and other unpleasant behaviors specifically because we know they serve a purpose.
That doesn't happen with a top-down ("democratic centralist") system. The vast majority of people have absolutely no power to change the course of decisions. Political offices do not turn over from party to party in a way that shakes up underlying corruption. The police enforce political assertions in addition to the laws of the land.
Your argument boils down to "there are many many people in China, so they must be ideologically and behaviorally diverse." Or, "as X approaches infinity, the number of viewpoints also approaches infinity." It's just not true for human behavior in an authoritarian collectivist society.
Have you ever been to China? There are rich kids there with Lamborghinis and polo shirts. And families with iPads at MacDonalds. And peasants on bikes pulling rickshaws. And an amazing variety of vegetables. And steak Dianne. And lobster Thermidor. And aluminium siding salesmen. And scientists trying to cure malaria. And clerks who commute on Vespas. And gorgeous 18 year old women with legs as long as giraffes dancing in discos. And grandmothers who do Tai Chi in the park at dawn. And violin players. There are even people a lot like you there. And trains. And theatres. And fireplaces and haystacks. And poodles. And nurses who stay up all night. And newlyweds, optimistic for the future who are already saving to send their not yet new born babies to college. And industrial designers. And floor polishers. And bums who want a cigarette. And guys who think they are Bruce Lee. And pretzels. And red wine.
The fundamental underpinnings of China's government and way of life are entirely different from what we Westerners are accustomed to. The simple fact that there are more individuals involved does not prove plurality of thought, because the organizational structure actively punishes dissent and silences critics.
Not every society of more than one person is pluralistic. Extrinsic forces and incentives make a major impact on human behavior.
> When you say "China", do you mean the Department of Health, or the Department of Defense, or the Department of Trade, or the Chinese government, or the Chinese people, or some Chinese guy?
We call this deflecting. And it's a rhetorical device used when you are on the wrong side of the argument.
And the answer is "All Of The Above". All parts of the Chinese government leaders see very little problem with executing those who might upset their status quo.
Trying to predict what China will execute people for is like reading entrails.