Report: Top Chinese leaders told to prepare for 'armed confrontation' with US over coronavirus lies

China's top leaders, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, were recently told to prepare for "armed confrontation" with the United States.

Chinese intelligence presented the Chinese Communist Party's top leadership with a report last month detailing surging anti-Chinese sentiment around the world for unleashing the coronavirus, according to Reuters.

Sources familiar with the report told Reuters that global anti-Chinese sentiment has risen to the highest levels in more than three decades. Not since the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, and subsequent massacre, has the world so disliked China, the report indicates.

According to Reuters, the breakdown in U.S.-China relations is akin to the fragile U.S.-Soviet Union relationship in the aftermath of World War II.

From Reuters:

One of those with knowledge of the report said it was regarded by some in the Chinese intelligence community as China's version of the "Novikov Telegram", a 1946 dispatch by the Soviet ambassador to Washington, Nikolai Novikov, that stressed the dangers of U.S. economic and military ambition in the wake of World War Two.

Novikov's missive was a response to U.S. diplomat George Kennan's "Long Telegram" from Moscow that said the Soviet Union did not see the possibility for peaceful coexistence with the West, and that containment was the best long-term strategy. The two documents helped set the stage for the strategic thinking that defined both sides of the Cold War.

China's culpability for the COVID-19 outbreak is being increasingly uncovered.

Although there are doubts about where COVID-19 originated, what is clear is that China misled the international community about the severity of the virus.

An intelligence dossier from Five Eyes — an intelligence alliance between the U.S., England, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — claims that China suppressed the truth about the virus by destroying evidence, "disappearing" scientists and doctors who knew the seriousness of COVID-19, lied about the virus being transmittable by humans, and refused to provide international scientists working on a vaccine with a live strain of the virus.

Meanwhile, an internal Homeland Security report said China dramatically increased its imports of medical supplies and substantially decreased exports of personal protective equipment to hoard the value materials for themselves knowing the severity of the unknown virus.

And it's still not clear where the virus originated.

Beijing claims it originated in China's infamous wet markets. However, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said last week it is "rigorously" investigating whether the virus accidentally leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan.