Anger rises in China over censored Beijing hospital fire that killed 29
CHINESE authorities are censoring online posts about a fire that killed 29 people at a hospital in the heart of Beijing, as public anger mounts over the death toll and initial attempts to clamp down on information about the incident.
The deadly blaze erupted at the Beijing Changfeng Hospital’s inpatient department Tuesday, according to a late evening report published by state media outlet Xinhua News Agency. Firefighters were notified of the fire at 12:57 p.m. local time and put it out by 1:33 p.m., Xinhua said. Another 71 patients were evacuated and transferred to other facilities, the report said, citing the local fire department.
Footage and photos of the fire quickly spread on Chinese social media, with one showing patients climbing out of the smoking building with improvised ropes made from bed sheets. But they were quickly scrubbed on platforms including the Twitter-like Weibo and Wechat, a ubiquitous messaging app.
Public anger quickly mounted over how such a tragedy had taken place—and at a location less than seven miles away from Tiananmen Square—along with a dearth of media reports about the events.
Authorities said Tuesday the cause of the incident was being investigated. Multiple calls to the hospital Wednesday were unanswered, while its website and that of its parent company, Beijing Changfeng Hospital Co., appeared to be down.
A filing submitted Wednesday by China Securities Co., the company’s broker-dealer on the National Equities Exchange and Quotations—an over-the-counter marketplace for small firms where it’s listed—said it has failed to establish contact with relevant personnel at the organization after the blaze.
‘Difficult to understand’
“IT is really difficult to understand, hospitals have relatively stronger safety management and precautionary measures, and Beijing is our country’s first-tier city, how could such a large-scale fire lead to so many deaths?” read one censored post on dissident-run tracking site Freeweibo.com, which reposts items that have been deleted on Weibo.
The user said the fire had echoes of a deadly blaze in Xinjiang last year that spurred public outcry over the country’s stringent Covid Zero policy, with online posts at the time questioning whether lockdowns had delayed rescue efforts.
Even Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the Communist Party-backed Global Times, was caught in the censorship dragnet. A Weibo post from Hu, which called for authorities to “trust the public” with information on the incident and criticized the removal of other posts, was itself taken down after a brief time online.
A later post from Hu on Weibo remained online, expressing shock at the fire and calling for more information on the incident to be disclosed.
By evening, restrictions on information appeared to be easing. State media outlets began publishing reports on the fire around 9 p.m. after online users questioned why the topic wasn’t appearing on trending search lists, along with a lengthy delay in reporting the number of deaths.
“Topics that are not conducive to harmony cannot appear on the hot search list,” a user wrote on Weibo, in a post that was later taken down. A hashtag created to share information about the fire, #Fire at Beijing Changfeng Hospital that killed 21, did not reflect any data on Weibo as of Wednesday morning—though a differently-worded hashtag created later that didn’t state the hospital’s name showed over 6.2 million views of the topic.