National Post (National Edition)
Citizen journalists are disappearing without a trace. Nobody knows quite what to believe, or who to trust.
REACTION TO CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK UNACCEPTABLE
Roughly 60 million people are now locked down in the most extensive and draconian quarantine in human history. China’s economy has come to a standstill. Factories are silent. Trains sit idle in the stations. In Wuhan, the teeming city at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, the streets are strangely empty. State censors work round the clock to scrub the internet of independent reporting. Citizen journalists are disappearing without a trace. Nobody knows quite what to believe, or who to trust.
According to China’s official tally, as of Wednesday morning roughly 45,000 people have fallen ill and more than 1,100 have died from the virus, now designated by the World Health Organization as COVID-19 in order to satisfy Beijing’s complaint that calling the sickness the Wuhan coronavirus or some such name would be “stigmatizing.” Nobody believes Beijing’s numbers. In Washington on Tuesday, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, admitted as much. “We absolutely assume that the reported cases are an underestimate,” she said.
In China, people are told only whatever the Ministry of Public Security allows them to be told.
A recent analysis by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China found that only 536 foreign journalists are accredited to work in China, but whatever facts they’re capable of reporting about the crisis will not be readily available to Chinese people, if at all. Among the online news sites blocked by China’s state censors are the BBC, The New York Times, Washington Post, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Economist,
NBC News, Time, the Hong Kong Free Press, South China Morning Post, and so on. Also banned: Google, Human Rights Watch, Twitter, Facebook, Amnesty International, and on and on.
That’s why, after the Chinese government was finally forced to admit that there was a strange flu-like ailment killing people in Wuhan, it fell to courageous citizen journalists like Chen Qiushi, a former human rights lawyer, to try to tell the Chinese public what was actually going on.
Chen had made a name for himself last year after he travelled to Hong Kong to report on the mass pro-democracy uprising there. Although Chen’s social media accounts were soon deleted and all his reports from Hong Kong were scrubbed from the internet, he somehow evaded imprisonment. But his luck ran out last Thursday in Wuhan.
Chen arrived on the last train in, just before the city of 11 million people was locked down on Jan. 24. He was regularly posting reports and videos on social media — front-line accounts from overflowing hospitals and morgues — until last Thursday.
He was first to report that cab drivers in Wuhan were already aware as early as mid-December that some unmentionable malady was killing people in the city, and medical practitioners were dying from it.
Chen was picked up by police last Thursday evening. His family says he has been arbitrarily confined at some undisclosed quarantine location. He hasn’t been heard from since. The police aren’t saying anything.
Chen disappeared just as hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens were flooding social media, overwhelming the censors, with demands for free speech and freedom of information. The uproar came just hours after state authorities admitted that the prominent coronavirus whistleblower they had threatened with prosecution and attempted to silence, Dr. Li Wenliang, had succumbed to the sickness. Dr. Li had been forced to sign a letter confessing he had spread “untrue speech” when he warned his colleagues about the virus.
Another citizen journalist, Fang Bin, was arrested on Monday. Fang was best known for breaking a story about corpses piling up at a Wuhan crematorium, and he’d promised to post a new video every morning, no matter the content, just so his followers would know he was still free. Several social media accounts reported Fang’s arrest as it was happening Monday afternoon. Police raided his apartment, and after Fang refused to let them in, firefighters broke down his door and he was taken away.
China’s citizen journalists have managed to get their reports onto YouTube — the video-sharing website that was one of the first major overseas platforms banned in China, in 2009 — by circuitous methods involving virtual private networks (VPNs). But digital access routes around the “Great Chinese Firewall” are routinely blocked, re-established, and blocked again.
China’s massively popular Weibo blogging platform is being so closely patrolled by Public Security censors that even the beloved Wuhan novelist Fang Fang had her account suspended after she posted an essay on Saturday about the city’s grief upon learning of the death of the whistleblower Dr. Li.
“In the evening, the people of Wuhan turned off their lights when Li Wenliang passed away and, using flashlights or their cellphones, shot beams of light into the sky and blew whistles. In the deep dark night, Li Wenliang is this beam of light. After all this time, what can Wuhan people do to dispel the gloom, sadness, and anger in their hearts? Perhaps it can only be done this way.”
It was the last essay Fang was permitted to post on Weibo.
The coronavirus keeps on spreading, and it keeps on killing, and the pandemic isn’t expected to peak until April.
But these things are difficult to predict, and they are difficult to discuss honestly and openly, even far beyond the quarantines of Wuhan, and far beyond China’s borders.
Just as everybody knows the Chinese government lies through its teeth as a matter of public policy, everybody knows World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has been less than candid about the coronavirus crisis from the beginning. He’s had to mimic Beijing’s propaganda, just to ensure Beijing’s co-operation in mounting an effective global response to the outbreak, which has spread so far to at least 24 countries.
An online petition calling for his resignation had garnered more than 369,000 signatures by Tuesday night, mostly to protest his delay in declaring the outbreak a global emergency until Jan. 23, well over a month after people started dying in Wuhan.
Gebreyesus has also parroted Beijing’s complaint about several countries that have taken such precautions as barring travellers from China altogether — even though China itself has barred travellers from Wuhan from leaving the city, and has ring-fenced cities throughout China.
But lying is a prerequisite of staying in Beijing’s good graces, so the WHO plays along, even to the point of excluding Taiwan from data-sharing and engagement without China’s say-so. Beijing insists that Taiwan has no right to participate with the WHO, on the rounds that Taiwan is not a country, but rather a wayward Chinese province governed by separatists and renegades.
And China continues to lie. “From the very beginning we have adopted an attitude of being open and transparent to the outside,” Cong Peiwu, China’s ambassador to China, said last week.
That’s the opposite of the truth. Also last week, Canada’s ambassador to China, Dominic Barton, uttered this incredible statement: “I commend what China is doing in trying to contain this.”
To believe that China’s conduct in this tragedy has been in any way commendable is to believe a lie. That Barton could say such a thing should tell you that you don’t have to be stuck in Wuhan to have some difficulty in knowing quite what to believe or who to trust.