BEIJING - US travel curbs and evacuations, Washington rolling out the red carpet for Taiwan's vice-president-elect, a US naval warship sailing across the Taiwan Strait and the US congress passing a Tibet human rights Bill - all in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in China - have fuelled Chinese suspicions about America's intentions.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping grappled with his latest and biggest crisis, it did not help that Mr Tom Cotton, a Republican senator from Arkansas, told American military leaders at a Senate hearing on Jan 30 that the outbreak could be a man-made bioweapon that leaked from a virology institute in Wuhan, the epicentre of the epidemic and provincial capital of landlocked Hubei in central China.