By Han Zhang
Around 5 p.m. on December 30th, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, messaged his college-classmates group on WeChat. He told them that “seven confirmed cases of sars” were in quarantine at the hospital, then followed up with a correction: it was an unspecified coronavirus, which later became known as 2019-nCoV. Li wasn’t authorized to share the information, but he wanted to warn his former classmates—mostly fellow-physicians—so that they would know to protect themselves. He asked them not to share the news outside the group, but soon the chat had spread—via screenshot, with Li’s name attached—throughout and beyond Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital. Li was irritated at first, but understanding.
Eight hours later, at one-thirty in the morning, Li received a phone call summoning him to the offices of the municipal health commission, where his superiors were attending an emergency conference; there, hospital leadership questioned him about the WeChat message. Later that day, while at work, Li was called to the “inspection section”—essentially a political arm of the hospital, which concerns itself with political transgressions, as opposed to professional ones—for more disciplinary meetings. On January 3rd, Li’s local police station called and informed him that he was required to sign and fingerprint an admonition letter for spreading “untrue speech.” Meanwhile, CCTV, the primary state broadcaster, had reported that police had contacted eight people in Wuhan who had spread rumors about a new, sars-like strain of pneumonia. “The Internet is not a land outside the law,” the station warned its viewers.
The following week, Li treated a glaucoma patient who appeared to have an “unidentified pneumonia.” She had a fever, and a CT scan that showed telltale lesions on her lungs, known as ground-glass opacities. Several of the patient’s family members had begun showing symptoms similar to hers. On January 10th, Li began coughing; he ran a fever the next day and was hospitalized, and was given a diagnosis of coronavirus. The general public was still largely unaware of any outbreak.
It was not until January 20th that President Xi Jinping issued a statement on coronavirus, vowing to “resolutely curb the spread of the epidemic.” According to WeChat, which tracks usages of keywords on the platform, the index of mentions of “pneumonia” and “coronavirus” were in the low thousands just a couple of days before Xi’s announcement; they then skyrocketed to more than two hundred million each. On January 21st, the newspaper People’s Daily, an official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, reported two hundred and seventeen confirmed cases in Wuhan, Beijing, and Guangdong Province, and that the virus had spread to Japan, Thailand, and Korea. It was five days before the Lunar New Year, and millions were planning on travelling home or on their way already. On January 23rd, state media called on all Chinese families to cancel gatherings, and the government placed Wuhan on lockdown, halting all trains and flights from the city. Soon, similar restrictions were placed on more than a dozen surrounding cities, limiting the free movement of some thirty-five million people. The populace was urged to stay at home.
Li told his story anonymously to Beijing Youth Daily, a Party-affiliated newspaper, which published his account on January 27th and deleted it about an hour later. The following day, the Chinese supreme court published an article on its WeChat account clearing the eight unnamed “rumor-mongers” in Wuhan of any wrongdoing. “Although the new coronavirus is not sars, the information they distributed was not entirely made up,” the court wrote. “Had the public heard this ‘rumor’ at the time, and, out of fear of sars, started to wear facial masks, sanitize themselves, and refrain from going to wildlife markets, it might have been beneficial for preventing and controlling the epidemic.” An official from China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention later offered public praise for the “whistleblowers,” as they were now called. On January 31st, the Beijing-based magazine Caixin ran Li’s story using his real name. “A healthy society shouldn’t have only one voice,” he told Caixin.
Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, warned others about coronavirus on WeChat. He died, of complications of coronavirus, on February 6th.Photograph from Getty
On the evening of February 6th, Li died, of complications of coronavirus. His was one of 31,261 confirmed cases and 637 deaths to date, according to the official count. Party media, including the Global Times, announced Li’s death. Later that night, however, the phrase “Li Wenliang is still being rescued” began to trend on Weibo; stories circulated that Li had been placed on extracorporeal life support (E.C.M.O.), hours after his heart had stopped. The hospital, and state media, pronounced him dead again early Friday morning. Around 1 a.m. on February 7th, several variations of the hashtag “We demand freedom of speech”—a phrase previously unthinkable on the Chinese Internet—had appeared in more than ten thousand posts on Weibo and had gotten millions of views. Also trending were quotes from the HBO series “Chernobyl” (“Every lie we tell incurs as a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid”) and lyrics from “Les Misérables” (“Do you hear the people sing, singing the songs of angry men”). Before daybreak in China, all versions of these hashtags, as well as numerous detailed discussions of Li’s death, had vanished from Weibo. In their place, a message says, “According to the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the page is not found.”
Because of heavy censorship and a tight, top-down control of information, people in China are habituated to be cautious and apolitical in their online behavior. But the coronavirus seemed to weaken that conditioning. People like Li felt an urgency to share what they knew, and news outlets felt similarly emboldened to report out the information that the public was demanding, in defiance of a state propaganda apparatus that stresses positivity—and, failing that, euphemism—at all times.
After President Xi’s statement on January 20th, WeChat spilled over almost instantly with information, rumors, and conspiracy theories: that coronavirus was spread by snakes; that the American government had developed the virus as a biological weapon; that it could be prevented with antibiotics or honeysuckle or urine. Various public accounts on WeChat published Wuhan diaries and interviewed experts, including a Hong Kong epidemiologist who called on officials in Wuhan to “get to the bottom of what’s the worst-case scenario.” Caixin, known for its formidable investigative reporting, dispatched five staff reporters and two interns to Wuhan before the transportation ban took hold; overwhelmed with traffic, its news app crashed multiple times over twenty-four hours. (Last weekend, Caixin Weekly published an issue dedicated to its Wuhan coverage online, but could not distribute the print magazines, owing to unspecified “technical issues.”)
“In the past few years, since Xi started to regulate the Internet and control information and crack down on civil society—including many verified users with large followings—there have been fewer and fewer voices that question or criticize the government, and less and less discussion of public affairs,” Xiao Qiang, the director of the Counter-Power Lab, at the University of California, Berkeley, which studies digital freedom and censorship, told me. “This is the first large-scale eruption of opinions since then.”
Videos circulated on Weibo and WeChat, showing miserably crowded hospital lobbies and overworked medics in states of apparent emotional breakdown. On Weibo, people posted distraught accounts of sick family members who could not gain admission to hospitals or obtain a test kit for 2019-nCoV; begging for help, many of them posted their phone numbers. The Hong Kong–based digital outlet Initium Media and China Newsweek, among others, published candid interviews with doctors in Wuhan. Chinese epidemiologists published articles in The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and the free platform bioRxiv, revealing information that included the genome of the virus and the early transmission dynamics. (Some of these reports convinced many that China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention was aware of the nature of the outbreak weeks before January 20th.) Stories out of Hubei Province suggested that the Wuhan Red Cross was mishandling donations, as in a video that allegedly showed a local official absconding with a box of surgical masks—a much sought-after commodity. Chinese citizens and overseas Chinese swiftly organized themselves through chat groups, alumni networks, and other platforms to provide donations and volunteer services.
“If people are not angry enough, they don’t want to touch certain topics, because they prioritize safety,” Fang Kecheng, an assistant professor of communications at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said. “But people are really angry now. And, when everyone is on the same page, they feel safer—the voice of criticism doesn’t stand out so much anymore.” Fang is generally pessimistic about the state of journalism in China, given the shrinking print industry and the mounting pressure from government censorship, but he was pleased to see the early reporting on Wuhan. “I was surprised to see a handful of quality outlets had the capacity to send professional journalists to cover something like this,” Fang said. “People were trying their best to break through the censorship.”
Although this recent wave of relatively free reporting and information sharing has been striking, it has not altered the system of information control in China—rather, it has temporarily overwhelmed it. Xiao told me that the degree of open exchange was due to the sheer volume of the response to the outbreak, and not to any relaxation of censorship. “The censors are advanced and aggressive. We saw many posts that were deleted soon after posting,” Xiao said. Xiao’s lab monitors widespread V.P.N. outages in China, which tend to happen during politically sensitive periods; a nationwide V.P.N. interruption began on the eve of the Lunar New Year and lasted about forty-eight hours. (The last disruption of this scale occurred in October, Xiao said, during celebrations for the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the Communist state.)
Internet censorship in China has two layers. First, most platforms, such as WeChat and Douyin—a Chinese analogue to TikTok—have automated censorship protocols to screen out “sensitive words”; they also use human content moderators, who operate according to government-issued guidelines. Then, once a post is live, if it reaches a large audience and a government censor objects to its content, the platform may be required to remove the post or limit its distribution.
In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, it has been harder for censors at either of these stages to draw a clear line between what is permitted and what is not. In January, People’s Daily launched a reader survey on the Wuhan epidemic that was suspended by the survey platform Wenjuan Xing, owing to its containing “sensitive words.” A social-media editor at People’s Daily criticized the decision on WeChat, asking, “What’s wrong with this platform? Whether there is a sensitive word or not, wouldn’t I know better than you do?”
Guo Jing, a social worker who moved to Wuhan in November, for work, started a daily journal that she has been sharing on Weibo and WeChat. Her first entry on Weibo was shared thousands of times, but her following updates only received dozens of shares each. She told me that, for a while, she couldn’t receive friend requests on WeChat, and she also suspects that Weibo has limited the visibility of her posts. (Weibo’s algorithm is not transparent; certain posts seem to appear only if a follower goes to a user’s profile page.) On WeChat, another young woman shared the story of a brief reunion with her father, who was infected with coronavirus after nursing the woman’s dying mother; her account went viral, and, although WeChat did not delete it, it blocked it from being shared, citing a nonspecific violation of user rules.
Chen Qiushi, a lawyer in Beijing, started making videos in 2016, mostly to introduce legal terms to a lay audience. But he soon found that he was interested in commenting on social affairs, and, last August, he travelled to Hong Kong to cover the escalating protests. “After I went to Hong Kong,” Chen told me, “all my social-media accounts were bombed”—slang for “disappeared”. He lost more than a million and a half followers and four hundred videos on Douyin; he had not saved them to a hard drive.
He uses a V.P.N. to visit sites such as Twitter and YouTube, which are blocked in China, so that he can read uncensored news; that’s how he learned of the outbreak of coronavirus. He travelled to Wuhan on January 24th, the day after the lockdown, to, as he said, “witness for myself.” In Wuhan, Chen rides his moped to hospitals, supermarkets, a burial center, and a hospital construction site, reporting on what he sees and capturing conversations he has with local residents, including, in one case, a bereaved family. His one-man operation is one of a kind in Wuhan. He has produced twenty videos so far, and what they lack in professional polish they make up for in immediacy and context. Several of them have received more than a million views, most of them from Chinese viewers using a V.P.N.
In one video, Chen visited a makeshift quarantine facility that was being set up inside an exhibition center; workers were busy off-loading supplies from buses, and lines of porta-potties were visible. Inside the facility, laborers were building dividers, and a dozen or so beds were already in place. Chen told his viewers that it appeared to be less a quarantine facility than a makeshift shelter, and he questioned whether the setup would only lead to more cross-infection—a concern that many observers have raised since.
These days, Chen told me, “I’m feeling a mixture of emotions: fear, anger, sadness, and missing my family.” When I asked him what he planned to do next, he said, “I can’t get out of Wuhan, so I’ll just keep reporting.” Chen, who has stayed in constant contact with his friends and posted videos daily since he arrived in Wuhan two weeks ago, told his mother that he was visiting a new quarantine center on Thursday night. His family and friends have not heard from him since then.
In Fang’s view, it was telling that state media, for the most part, has been absent from the efforts to report on both the human suffering caused by the coronavirus outbreak and the bureaucratic failures that compounded that suffering. He cited People’s Daily and also Xinhua, the state-run news agency, both of which have bureaus in Wuhan. “Their local reporters must know the city very well and can do in-depth investigation there,” Fang said. “But we haven’t seen any of that.”
A Chinese journalist in her twenties told me that she felt a new kind of space opening up in the week or so after Xi’s statement on January 20th, when the anger and desperation swirling around the government’s handling of the outbreak was most intense. By the first days of February, however, she said that a familiar pressure had started to descend. “Editors have been telling us to focus more on ‘positive energy’ and positive stories,” she said, adding that reporters were asked to stay away from certain topics, including the Wuhan Red Cross. Recently, a colleague’s reported story, on patients with serious chronic illnesses who struggle to gain access to treatment, was killed.
A doctor prepares to enter the isolation ward at a hospital in Wuhan.Photograph from China Daily / Reuters
Lately, a common refrain in state media is “Wuhan Jiayou,” or “Cheer for Wuhan.” These outlets call the outbreak “a war without gunsmoke” and celebrate medics “on the front line.” Baidu, China’s main search engine, leads its news section with headlines such as “We Have No Way Back, Only Firm Hopes.” On Weibo, typical trending hashtags include “Nationwide Face Mask Production Over Twenty Million a Day” and heart-warming anecdotes such as “Jinan man unloaded 300 kilos of sanitizer and just left.” A military-led operation began in Wuhan to build a pair of new hospitals, which were named Fire God Mountain and Thunder God Mountain, in order to absorb coronavirus patients; CCTV set up a live stream of the construction.
State media employ language that “maintains a clear and bright cyberspace,” Guobin Yang, a professor of sociology and contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “It is Internet censorship in the name of civility.” He pointed out that, although the Chinese supreme court cleared the Wuhan “rumor-mongers,” their decision did not necessarily endorse a free flow of information. In its statement, the court stressed the importance of general vigilance against rumors, especially those that could lead to “social disorders”; these include rumors that “slander the state for inability to control the epidemic” and “fabricate information about hospitals losing control of the epidemic.”
In short, the court’s decision “says that you can’t punish these eight people. It also reaffirms the rule that you can’t spread rumors,” Yang said. “But what is a rumor, and what is not? That’s still up to the public-security people to decide. Often, in this kind of situation, even the authorities don’t know what kind of signal to send out. So a safer approach is to send a positive signal and then a negative signal.”
On February 3rd, President Xi asked officials to strengthen the “guidance of public opinion” and to “unite the people online and offline, inside and outside the country, on matters big and small.” The following day, the central propaganda department sent hundreds of reporters to Wuhan. Since Xi’s announcement of the outbreak, at least three hundred and fifty more people in China have been reprimanded or detained by the police for “spreading rumors” about the coronavirus.
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