The Chinese police have exercised unusual restraint in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.
It seems that just eight people have been detained so far, all doctors who early on turned to work-related chat groups to warn of the dangers of a new mysterious infection. The local police — an honorary, if usually uninvited, participant in every chat group in China — detected malfeasance and pounced, briefly detaining the doctors on grounds of rumor-mongering.
The new coronavirus, for its part, was treated with dignity and respect. When it first emerged, suspect 2019-nCoV appeared to be committing illegal assembly, unwanted touching and incitement to subvert the state. Yet no handcuffs were deployed, no tear gas was fired, and no police brutality was reported.
No ringleaders were produced on state television for a teary confession. No minion was sent to a re-education camp for a refresher course in core socialist values. The culprits’ relatives — SARS, MERS, the common cold — have not been placed under house arrest.
But now many Chinese people are furious that the doctors were ever chastised for telling the truth and that no state newspaper even reported the outbreak at its beginnings, while it might still have been stopped. On Friday, WeChat, Weibo and other Chinese social media platforms exploded with anger and grief over news that one of the doctors, 34-year-old Li Wenliang, had died after being infected.
This coronavirus surfaced just in time for the Lunar New Year holiday, a beloved traditional celebration for many people and a grand occasion for propaganda for the Chinese Communist Party. Even as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was raising its internal threat level warning and bracing for the coming epidemic, the front page of the People’s Daily showed the nation’s leader shaking hands with other nations’ leaders.
While the epidemic was spreading through Wuhan, one of the city’s official newspapers ran a feel-good feature about a holiday potluck banquet with more than 40,000 families. (Many of those people are now ill.) A week after Wuhan was locked down, the People’s Daily was touting the superiority of the Chinese model.
So the coronavirus got the silent treatment from the government? Standard procedure. The government’s favorite way of ending problems in China these days isn’t to solve them; it’s to get the people to stop caring. Only, the people do care.
Censorship can’t stop an epidemic, it turns out. Who knew.
And now the people are seething over the information blackout — and pointing fingers at their local officials. Local officials who, as the outbreak worsened, appeared to be making every effort to do nothing.
After they hastily locked down Wuhan on Jan. 23, it took the authorities of Hubei Province three days to hold a televised news conference. The governor was the only person in the room without a mask. One senior provincial party official did wear a mask, but left his nostrils exposed. The mayor of Wuhan wore his mask inside out, as if to protect the people from his words.
The governor said that Xiantao, another city in Hubei, could alone produce 10.8 billion masks a year. Then he said 1.8 billion masks. Then, after someone passed him a note, he said 1.08 million masks — produced by the entire province.
To call those officials incompetent would be to redefine the concept of incompetence. To call that news conference a “car wreck,” as some media outlets did, is disrespectful to the grisliest of head-on collisions.
Local officials seem blameworthy, and they are being blamed. But should they be? They can’t not be absolutely loyal to their superiors and the government — a government that, in critical respects, cannot govern and leaves its people with next to no means of holding it to account.
Meanwhile, heartbreaking stories keep pouring out on social media from Wuhan and elsewhere in China: A newborn is found to be infected at 30 hours of age. An older man drops dead in the middle of the street. Family members living in forced isolation infect one another.
So can we, please, just blame the virus?
Yifu Dong is a junior fellow at Morningside College at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.