A secrecy that kills

China has a new hero. Li Wenliang was one of eight doctors who tried to sound the alarm at the end of December about a new illness spreading quickly in the city of Wuhan. Instead of listening to the doctors, though, authorities silenced them and lost precious time to contain what we now know as the coronavirus.

Dr. Li himself contracted the disease and, on Friday, he died at the age of just 34. His death sparked an outpouring on Chinese social media of grief at his fate and anger against officials who were more concerned about hushing up bad news than looking out for the safety of the public.

Coronavirus, the World Health Organization said on Tuesday, is still confined almost entirely to China. But it has already claimed more than 1,000 lives there (more than SARS) and should now be considered “a very grave threat for the rest of the world.”

In fact, says the WHO, it must be treated as “public enemy number 1” for its potential to spread death and instability far beyond its point of origin in China’s Hubei province.

Already, though, as Li Wenliang’s tragic story shows, the virus has shaken faith in China’s authoritarian political system. Many Chinese are outraged that local officials in Hubei were more concerned about stopping the spread of what they dismissed as mere “rumours” than getting to the truth about about a dangerous new sickness.

Before he died, Li himself spelled out the impact. “If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier,” he said, “I think it would have been a lot better. There should be more openness and transparency.”

Of course, officialdom everywhere often falls short when a new threat emerges, even in supposedly democratic countries. But in a quasi-totalitarian system like China, it’s a lot easier for the state to use its raw power to shut down inconvenient news, and there are few non-official channels for the truth to emerge.

The result in the case of the coronavirus, which the WHO now officially calls COVID-19, was that local officials covered up the spread of the outbreak for weeks. It wasn’t until the last day of 2019 that Chinese scientists shared information with the WHO and isolated the virus. Meanwhile, the disease gained a foothold in Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million people, and many people travelled out of the city — potentially spreading it across the country.

Public outrage did spill over on China’s social media after Li’s death. The hashtag #WeWantFreedomofSpeech spread on the Weibo platform before censors deleted it, and academics launched two petitions in favour of freer information.

But after a brief opening up, the government has once again clamped down. Media organizations have been directed to focus on positive stories about efforts to contain the virus and on “vividly conveying the stirring achievements from the front lines of epidemic prevention.” Stories critical of the government response have vanished from view and Chinese President Xi Jinping has emphasized the need to “strengthen control over online media” to maintain social stability.

By all accounts, though, discontent about the government’s performance in this crisis has not been contained, and has spread far beyond Hubei province, where a staggering 56 million people remain effectively quarantined. The government has already been forced to respond; two senior health officials have been sacked and it’s expected the reckoning will go much further than that.

The Chinese have done a lot right in their response to COVID-19. When officials finally acted, they did so decisively, cutting off travel in and out of the most affected area and keeping the WHO informed about the disease.

But this outbreak has revealed a lot about the weaknesses of the Chinese system as well.

A system that silences those who try to tell the truth can never be the best at what Mao Zedong famously called “serving the people.”