Get all the latest news on coronavirus and more delivered daily to your inbox.  Sign up here.

Foreign affairs journalist Gordon Chang told "Bill Hemmer Reports" Monday that the Chinese Communist Party "is playing a very dangerous game it can't win" in response to worldwide condemnation of its handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Earlier Monday, China's state broadcaster CCTV broadcast a report that described U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as "insane" after Pompeo claimed Sunday that "enormous evidence" showed that the coronavirus emerged from a laboratory in the city of Wuhan.

THE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK, STATE-BY-STATE

Chang told Hemmer that China's response showed that the secretary of state had "hit a nerve."

"We don't know exactly what they are trying to hide, but clearly they are trying to hide something," he said. " ... What Beijing is saying is, 'Let's have a discussion about the facts'. At the same time, Beijing is preventing the World Health Organization, the United States CDC, and others from that very investigation.

"So this is a game that China cannot win."

Chang later clarified that it will be difficult to prove whether or not there was "manipulation" -- to use Hemmer's term -- of the coronavirus in the Wuhan laboratory from which it is suspected to have originated.

CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE CORONAVIRUS COVERAGE

"The reason is," Chang said, "after the epidemic broke out in Wuhan, the People's Liberation Army sent in a major general to clean out the Wuhan Institute of Virology. I'm sure that much of the evidence is lost.

"On the other hand, if one of the lab employees decides to talk to Western intelligence, we very well may be able to reconstruct at least part of what's going on there."