China doesn't want international sympathy. They want economic growth, and this thing is definitely not helping! So my guess is that it's really just people eating weird animals and getting the disease to jump cross-species (kind of like what happened with AIDS). Then the population density and lack of sanitation does the trick, highly populated cities being helpful for transmission of this shit.

Honestly I don't understand why t.f. they haven't closed off air travel already. Simplest way of preventing the spread of this around the globe. But you know what, I bet secretly the chinese wish that this disease would also come visit other countries, most notably their geopolitical adversaries (Taiwan, HK, USA).