Hand it to the Chinese government. Having initiated a pandemic by suppressing knowledge of it and treatment of it when it first came to its attention last December, the Chinese government is now collecting kudos for how to fight the virus. The Chinese government totally shut things down in Wuhan and Hubei Province, and lo and behold, the incidence of the virus is dropping significantly there. Reading or listening to a lot of news these days, you’d think that the only thing China has to guard against now is the virus popping up in some other part of country.
Just one detail: it’s untrue. Just as the government censors thought that to suppress news of the virus would be to suppress the virus itself, China now deploys government censors to blind the world to the real situation in Ground Zero of the virus. The government’s brutal but characteristic crackdown on freedom in Wuhan is accompanied by a parallel, brutal but characteristic crackdown on the accuracy of news getting out of the city. The next time you hear on NPR or read that the Chinese government is a “model” for how to fight the coronavirus, turn instead to a better source of news: courageous Chinese journalists in, or expelled from, Wuhan, or living elsewhere in the country.
According to a lengthy report in The New York Times, here is what the Chinese journalists say:
• When online reports circulated about how life was getting better in Wuhan, one journalist who was there reported on social media that sick patients struggled to receive medical care amid a dysfunctional bureaucracy. He said in an interview, “People were left to die, and I am angry about that.”
His report is but one example of a big war raging in China alongside the war against the coronavirus. This second war is between journalists, long censored but no longer able to abide it, and between the government of Xi Jinping, which is trying harder than ever to suppress all bad news about the virus. Journalists and others in China, however, are fighting back and speaking up or the first time, at great risk to themselves.
• Other Chinese media have reported on a shortage of testing kits in Wuhan, and on the untruth in the government’s claim that the virus could not spread person-to-person, and on the similarities between coronavirus and SARS. One newspaper editor is quoted by The Times as summing it up this way: “Everyone knows this kind of big disaster happens when you don’t tell the truth.” So hold the plaudits for China just now, thank you.
Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News
