MICHAEL BARONE: Contrast between China and its neighbors shows communist regime’s true character.

There’s no greater contrast between how countries have treated the COVID-19 pandemic than that between nations on both sides of what might be called the Asian Iron Curtain.

It’s a contrast that tells us much about how to handle the disease, and how events now in the distant past can determine the fates of hundreds of millions of people today.

On one side is the People’s Republic of China, where the novel coronavirus apparently transferred from animal to human hosts. There, the government deliberately lied about human-to-human transmission, persecuted to the point of death doctors who warned of its dangers, and is still almost certainly lying about its continued spread.

On the other side of this Iron Curtain — actually, a virtual barrier penetrated, until the virus appeared, by dozens of airline flights every day — are places which seem to have responded most successfully to the pandemic: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong.

Indeed. For its sins here, China should have to give Hong King independence.