Doctor’s death could break Chinese people’s trust in government
BEIJING — He appeared on social media, a solitary man in a surgical mask, warning of a deadly virus. The Chinese government moved to downplay the emergency, but Dr. Li Wenliang’s insistence that an epidemic was coming turned him into a folk hero in a country that prizes secrecy and crushes dissent.
Li and seven other whistleblowers were arrested for spreading rumors. Only last week, as the coronavirus outbreak kept 50 million Chinese people on lockdown and accelerated around the world, did authorities concede that Li and the others should not have been censured.
“It’s not so important to me if I’m vindicated or not,” Li said in an interview from a quarantine room with Chinese publication Caixin. “What’s more important is that everyone knows the truth.”
Li’s vindication seemed even more meaningless after news that he died early Friday in a hospital in Wuhan, the center of an epidemic he warned about in December. Conflicting accounts about his condition echoed through official channels and across social media, adding another layer of confusion in a government that appears increasingly overwhelmed. Early reports of Li’s death were retracted when the hospital said it was working to save his life.
Hours later, he was officially reported dead.
Li left behind his wife, also infected with the coronavirus and pregnant with their second child. Chinese internet users flooded social media with an outpouring of grief, calling Li a hero, a victim and a martyr. They demanded apologies from those who had arrested him and asked that the national flag be flown at half-staff.
His death was the latest tremor in an unprecedented crisis that has spread beyond public health to public trust in China. The virus is exposing cracks in the political system with near-daily revelations of corruption, ineptitude, inefficiency and lack of transparency and accountability at the cost of people’s lives.
It has also damaged President Xi Jinping’s self-portrayal as a loving father figure bringing wealth, power and rejuvenation of the great Chinese nation under his leadership. His favorite tools of governance — control, propaganda, nationalism, and force — are failing to provide what Chinese people need most now, and what Dr. Li symbolized: reassurance that their lives are valued and that they will be given the truth.
Two weeks into China’s coronavirus outbreak, there are no signs the crisis is under control. The confirmed infections in China have surpassed 28,000 and continue to jump by the thousands, turning each day into an eerie tick-tock of who might be next. More than 560 people have died, and reports abound of sick Hubei residents who died “outside the numbers,” untested and thus uncounted within official coronavirus records.
China is now a nation under self-imposed house arrest, its cities frozen, streets emptied, roads blocked and villages locked down. Guards check temperatures at the entrances to residential compounds that feel hollow without the usual sounds of children playing and neighbors taking walks.
But inside, online and especially within the epidemic’s epicenter in Wuhan, anguish and fury are growing, inflamed by an ugly reality: that authorities prioritized saving face and appearing in control over the health and safety of their people — and that they continue to do so now.
Within an hour of Li’s death, the trending topic “Wuhan government owes Dr. Li Wenliang an apology” on the social platform Weibo was censored.
The gap between propaganda and reality, government and people has become more apparent in the last two weeks. State TV broadcasts have been a steady stream of praise for the party’s leadership. Chinese journalists and online activists, meanwhile, have exposed governmentbacked charities in Hubei for mishandling donations of medical equipment, diverting protective masks to private organizations and for officials’ use rather than sending them to frontline hospitals in dire need.
On Thursday, reports of local officials trying to steal one another’s masks went viral: Officials in Dali, a southwestern city, tried to intercept a shipment meant for Chongqing. And in Qingdao, officials ordered customs to steal masks meant for Shenyang.
The most efficient organizations at coordinating donations have ironically been celebrities’ fan clubs, the only sort of grassroots organization still allowed to exist under Xi’s crackdown on civil society as he moves to consolidate his power.
Their outperformance of the government and official organizations has played out live on the Internet. Critical posts are moving faster than censors while hundreds of millions of Chinese people are stuck at home doing nothing except reading, swiping and growing angry.
Xi has ruled with an unrelenting grip since his political ascent in 2013, silencing lawyers, activists, journalists and liberal intellectuals, wiping out civil society, centralizing power under the party, erasing his own term limits and enshrining his “Xi Jinping Thought” into the
Constitution.
That has raised concerns from dissidents and grassroots groups on the margins of Chinese society, but not shaken his power in the mainstream, in part because Xi has so adroitly mobilized Chinese propaganda and education to spur nationalism.
Those who criticize the government or seek “Western” values such as human rights and freedom of the press are often sidelined as foreign-funded, self-hating Chinese impeding the motherland’s rise.
Even with other recent challenges — a U.S.-China trade war, unrest in Hong Kong, Taiwan’s assertion of sovereignty, and global criticism over Xi’s detention of Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in Xinjiang — Xi has managed to hover above public criticism, often by blaming “foreign intervention.”