The Foreign Affairs essay you linked does seem to implicate poor Chinese 'biosecurity' as the culprit.
From that link:
Since coronaviruses are zoonotic, which is to say that they jump from animals to humans, scientists believe that they have an animal origin. Most agree that bats are the natural reservoir host for the virus, although snakes for a time were also suspected. Scientists conjecture that pangolins—widely considered a delicacy in China—may be the intermediate host to pass the novel virus to humans. Overall, they are inclined to view the outbreak as a problem of zoonotic infection transmitted from wild animals to humans. While the virus was indeed found in people associated with a wet market (where live animals were sold and slaughtered) as well as in the market environment, some of the early cases were in people who had not visited the market, suggesting that the jumping of species may have occurred elsewhere or earlier.
Another, less supported hypothesis views the outbreak as the result of a biosafety accident in which the coronavirus leaked out from a lab where scientists failed to follow proper decontamination protocol. Supporters of this theory point to the seemingly overwhelming circumstantial evidence that connects the outbreak to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which also houses China’s only biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) lab, the highest level of biosafety precautions. They noted that Dr. Shi Zhengli, a researcher in the lab who has acquired the nickname “Batwoman,†has been actively hunting down the coronavirus and proving that bats are natural reservoirs for SARS-like coronaviruses. Shi has flatly denied that the institute was the source of the novel coronavirus, which she said was rather “nature punishing the human race for keeping uncivilized living habits.â€
Other Chinese social media posts focused on the credentials of the director general of the institute, Wang Yanyi. A widely shared post allegedly written by Rao Yi, a leading Chinese biologist, said Wang had a weak academic background and ascended to her current post through nepotism. On February 17, one post accused Wang of flouting the biosafety rules and selling laboratory animals to wet markets for profit. Another study, conducted by the South China University of Technology, concluded that the coronavirus “probably†originated in the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which is just 280 meters away from the Hunan Seafood Market. The study mentioned that bats linked to coronavirus once attacked a researcher, who had to be self-quarantined because “blood of a bat shot on his skin.†The paper was later removed from ResearchGate, a commercial social-networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers. Thus far, no scientists have confirmed or refuted the paper’s findings.
