Chinese doctor who first raised alarm hailed as martyr amid anger at regime
CHINESE citizens yesterday hailed the doctor who blew the whistle on the coronavirus as a martyr, amid an unprecedented wave of criticism of the Communist Party from within the country.
Dr Li Wenliang, who was punished for “spreading rumours” about the disease in December, died yesterday morning after contracting the virus himself while helping patients in a Wuhan hospital. The doctor’s death triggered an outpouring of grief and anger on social media that appeared to overwhelm censors, with many contrasting the 34-year-old’s bravery with efforts by the Chinese state to censor news of the outbreak.
Selfies of the doctor on his sickbed were widely shared and the story of his death was viewed more than 1.5billion times on the social media site Weibo. Some social media users called for Mr Li to receive a state funeral, an honour normally reserved for party leaders.
Others posted videos of the Les Misérables song, Do You Hear the People Sing?’, an anthem that was taken up by protesters against Chinese influence in Hong Kong. While censors scrambled to erase discussion topics including “Wuhan owes Doctor Li Wenliang an apology” and “we want free speech”, they were unable to fully stem an avalanche of mourning tinged with uncomfortable questions for the regime.
Xi Jinping, the president, has cracked down on dissent since taking office in 2013. But even party stalwarts were caught up in the grieving. Chinese state media accounts, which were among the first to praise the late Mr Li as a “whistleblower,” have since deleted their original posts from Twitter.
“Refusing to listen to your ‘whistling’, your country has stopped ticking, and your heart has stopped beating,” said Hong Bing, Shanghai bureau chief of People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s newspaper, in a post he later deleted.
Wang Gaofei, the chief executive of Weibo – which regularly scrubs the internet on the request of censorship authorities – said “we should be more tolerant of people who post ‘untruthful information’ that aren’t malicious”.
Beijing has tentatively responded to the rush of emotion from its 1.4billion citizens, announcing the dispatch of a team to investigate the circumstances of Dr Li’s arrest and death. Dr Li’s family have also been offered 785,000 yuan (£87,000) in compensation and 37,000 yuan (£4,000) to cover funeral expenses, according to state media.
Still, many citizens were scornful. “Why did they start the investigation only after he died?” commented one person online. “We already knew that he was wronged for a long time, but why didn’t he receive any apologies before he closed his eyes?” Dr Li became one of the most visible figures in the crisis after he said he had been reproached by Wuhan police last month for “spreading rumours” about the virus.
The ophthalmologist, who is survived by a five-year-old son and pregnant wife, urged fellow medics to wear protective gear in a social media post in which he warned about a cluster of flulike cases at Wuhan Central Hospital.
His death was “a tragic reminder of how the Chinese authorities’ preoccupation with maintaining ‘stability’ drives it to suppress vital information about matters of public interest,” said Amnesty International.
It emerged yesterday that 40 health care workers were infected with the coronavirus at a single Wuhan hospital in January. One patient who was admitted to the surgical department was presumed to have infected 10 health care workers, according to the paper that was authored by doctors at the Zhongnan Hospital of Wuhan University and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association yesterday.
The crisis poses a massive challenge to Mr Xi. He yesterday told Donald Trump, the US president, that he had “full confidence” the country had the capacity to win the “people’s war” against the deadly coronavirus. Additional reporting by Yiyin Zhong