That if there are issues (there are) in the top-down system enforced in China, it is still the fault of the CCP given they implemented and sustain such system.
As I wrote they made mistakes. I'm purely speculating on behalf of the data we have, and some of the "strangeness" of those, but I think the local government in Wuhan decided to handle this one themselves, to please people higher up in the party. Then they realized that the situation was running out of control, and that led to Xi getting angry. Then you fire someone not important, and normally that's "case closed", but Xi realized that this could get out of control for all of China, spreading to the rest of the World, meaning the orange baby et al would get angry as well. Also having messed up handling the 2003 Sars epidemic, Xi probably decided that the best thing to do was being honest, but because the numbers were already smothered in lies, it took some time from that message until the numbers China could state became close to the real numbers.
There were 5-6 days where the data correlated 100% to an exponential function, something that is highly unlikely (though not impossible). It also might explain why the graph of number of cases looks so "strange" plotted semilogarithmic:
Edit: It could perhaps also relate to the holidays due to the Chinese New Year, ending tomorrow.