Jialun Deng Wuhan’s mayor blamed higher-ups. A senior disease control official blamed layers of bureaucracy. A top government expert blamed the public: The people, he said, simply didn’t understand what he told them. As China grapples with a mysterious coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 420 people and sickened thousands , the country’s 1.4 billion people are asking what went wrong. Senior officials are engaging in an unusually blunt display of finger pointing. So many officials have denied responsibility that some online users joke that they are watching a passing-the-buck competition. (It’s “tossing the wok” in Chinese.) The Chinese people are getting a rare glimpse of how China’s giant, opaque bureaucratic system works — or, rather, how it fails to work. Too many of its officials have become political apparatchiks, fearful of making decisions that anger their superiors and too removed and haughty when dealing with the public […]