EXPOSING CRACKS
A doctor’s death could break Chinese people’s trust in their Government, argues Alice Su, of the Los Angeles Times, from Beijing.
HE appeared on social media, a solitary man in a surgical mask, warning of a deadly virus. The Chinese Government moved to play down the emergency, but Dr Li Wenliang’s insistence an epidemic was coming turned him into a folk hero.
Li (34) and seven other whistleblowers were arrested for spreading rumours. 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 yesterday in a hospital in Wuhan, the centre of the 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, victim and martyr. They demanded apologies from those who had arrested him and asked that the national flag be flown at halfmast.
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 neardaily 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 selfportrayal as a loving father figure bringing wealth, power and rejuvenation to the nation. His favourite tools of governance — control, propaganda, nationalism and force — are failing to provide what Chinese people need most now, and what Li symbolised: 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 31,000 and continue to jump by the thousands. More than 630 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 selfimposed house arrest, its cities frozen, streets emptied, roads blocked and villages locked down. Guards check people’s temperatures at the entrances to residential compounds.
But inside, online and especially in the epicentre, Wuhan, anguish and fury are growing, inflamed by an ugly reality: that authorities prioritised saving face and appearing in control over the health and safety of their people, and that they continue to do so.
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 past 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 organisations 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 organisations at coordinating donations have, ironically, been celebrities’ fan clubs, the only sort of grassroots organisation still allowed to exist under Xi’s crackdown on civil society.
Their outperformance of the Government and official organisations 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, centralising power under the party 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 mobilised Chinese propaganda and education to spur nationalism.
Those who criticise the Government or seek ‘‘Western’’ values such as human rights and freedom of the press are often sidelined as foreignfunded, selfhating Chinese impeding the motherland’s rise.
Even with other recent challenges — a USChina trade war, unrest in Hong Kong, Taiwan’s assertion of sovereignty and global criticism over Xi’s detention of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang — Xi has managed to hover above public criticism, often by blaming ‘‘foreign intervention’’.
But now Xi faces the biggest challenge yet to his rule and the party’s legitimacy: a preventable crisis that is striking Chinese families dead and cannot be blamed away.
Worse, the virus is a natural disaster, something that could have come straight out of imperial history books, where the Chinese people recognised earthquakes, floods, plagues and other heavensent crises as a sign their emperor was ruling unjustly and had lost his legitimacy — and when the masses lost faith in the emperor, uprisings soon followed.
This might be the moment Xi loses that ‘‘mandate of heaven,’’ said Orville Schell, historian and director of the Asia Society’s Centre on USChina Relations.
It was not something quantifiable, he added. It was a psychological shift, a loss of trust in the rulers’ ability to protect the people.
‘‘Xi Jinping is a leader who has led — and not unsuccessfully, I can say — by control. And now he’s confronting something he cannot control,’’ Schell said.
‘‘If you’re looking at the equation of what makes a leadership have legitimacy . . . a lot of it depends on whether people believe in it and have faith in it. If they believe in some way that it’s running out of gas, or reaching the end of some cosmically ordained cycle, that’s pretty difficult to fix.’’ — TNS