[With anger rising over the response to the
outbreak, even some with ties to China’s leaders have called for acknowledging
divisions, not papering them over.]
By
Li Yuan
 |
|
At Union Hospital in
Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak,
the staff is going online
to beg for medical supplies.
Credit Chris Buckley/The
New York Times
|
From the outside, China’s Communist Party
appears powerful and effective. It has tightened its control over Chinese
politics and culture, the economy and everyday life, projecting the image of a
gradually unifying society.
The coronavirus outbreak has blown up that
facade.
Staff members at prestigious Union Hospital
in Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, have joined others around
China in begging online for medical supplies. Videos show patients in Wuhan
beseeching medical staff for treatment. Residents of Wuhan and its province,
Hubei, are being chased off planes and ousted from hotels and villages.
Online critics are comparing current leaders
unfavorably with past ones, even though the older generation had its own
tarnished record on responding to emergencies. Some people have urged local
party officials to kill themselves.
As cracks show in China’s veneer of
stability, even some with ties to the party leadership are calling for those in
power to shine light on divisions rather than papering them over. The crisis
has shown that China remains riddled with vulnerabilities that no amount of
censorship or strong-arming can hide.
“The local government’s tolerance level of
different online voices is way too low,” wrote Hu Xijin, the editor of the
Global Times newspaper, a nationalist, party-controlled outlet that fiercely
defends Beijing from its critics, in a social media post.
Government agencies have weakened the
checks-and-balances function of the Chinese news media, Mr. Hu wrote, citing
the example of eight early whistle-blowers who were summoned for talks by the
Wuhan police.
The coronavirus outbreak has already killed
over 100 people and infected more than 4,000 in China, mostly in Wuhan and
elsewhere in Hubei. For online critics of the government’s responses, which at
times have been slow or seemingly random, the crisis has prompted a rethinking
of the grand trade-off with the party, in which the people have surrendered
individual rights for the promise of stability and prosperity.
“The current system looks so vibrant, yet
it’s shattered completely by a governance crisis,” one user wrote on the social
media site Weibo.
“We gave up our rights in exchange for
protection,” the user wrote. “But what kind of protection is it? Where will our
long-lasting political apathy lead us?”
The post was shared over 7,000 times and
liked 27,000 times before censors deleted it.
Westerners can be easily awed by how quickly
and forcefully the Chinese government can mobilize resources and build
infrastructure. Even some international public health experts have said they
were impressed with the speed and scale of China’s lockdown on more than a
dozen cities, which has affected 56 million people. The Chinese propaganda
machine has highlighted such abilities as two new Wuhan coronavirus hospitals
are built from scratch, to be completed in days.
This single-minded pursuit of efficiency
masks deep problems. Propaganda videos and flashy new buildings don’t show the
toll that this relentless drive can take on people, society or the environment.
Many Chinese people are willing to go along.
Partly, the state has taught them to think that way. But many are satisfied
with the status quo because they believe that the party has kept their interests
in mind.
The epidemic now threatens to change some of
that thinking.
Officials in Wuhan initially played down the
threat and censored information as the disease spread throughout the country
and even internationally. The city and the province then abruptly imposed a
lockdown on travel, even though millions had already left for China’s Lunar New
Year holiday.
Local residents complained that restrictions
later imposed on traffic made it difficult for people to get to work and seek
medical assistance, perhaps hindering prevention efforts rather than helping
them.
Wuhan’s medical system was so overwhelmed
that videos of overworked medical workers having breakdowns and desperate
patients pleading for help circulated widely online.
The situation was so dire that Zhang Ouya, a
senior reporter at the state-run Hubei Daily, wrote that “Hubei must
immediately replace its commanders” on his verified Weibo account. The post was
soon deleted, but a screenshot circulated widely. In an official document
leaked online, the newspaper apologized to Wuhan officials and promised that
its staff would post only positive content.
For many people in China, the most unexpected
revelation came when local hospitals ran out of supplies and had to ask for
donations on social media, going around the Chinese bureaucracy. As the crisis
expanded, even hospitals in Beijing and other provinces resorted to public
appeals for face masks and protective medical gowns.
“I’ve always thought we have the most refined
state-run system, which can pool and deploy resources at a moment’s notice,”
wrote a Weibo user called Meng Chang, a former journalist in Beijing. But the
reality was disappointing, he wrote: “Where is the omnipotent system?”
National leaders, meanwhile, look out of
touch. As the outbreak became a national crisis, the front page of the People’s
Daily, the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, last week extolled the leadership but
didn't mention Wuhan. “There’re no people in the People’s Daily,” one of my
WeChat connections, an economist, messaged me.
China Central Television, the state
broadcaster, featured a banquet held by the leadership to celebrate the
country’s successes. On Friday night, the eve of the Lunar New Year, CCTV’s
annual holiday broadcast worked in six minutes of praise for Wuhan’s medical
workers between the skits and songs. Wuhan’s people went unmentioned.
“I was very sad when watching the Spring
Festival gala last night,” a woman named Jiujiu told the podcast Gushi FM.
“Wuhan has come to this, yet the whole nation still seemed full of great joy.”
Some within China’s institutions appear to be
trying to fix the problems.
While Weibo has censored many posts about the
epidemic, it appears to be leaving loopholes for its users to vent. Wang
Gaofei, Weibo’s chief executive, posted research by scientists at the
University of Washington that showed a correlation between greater news coverage
and a reduction in infections.
But in a country where history is often
rewritten to serve the party’s interests, the lessons of the past can be
forgotten. Discussion of SARS, the outbreak that killed hundreds 17 years ago,
has been muted. Even as many Chinese people quietly complain about current
leaders, they wax nostalgic about the role that former President Hu Jintao
played in the SARS epidemic, apparently forgetting that Beijing tried to cover
up that outbreak for three months.
A video of a CCTV interview with Beijing’s
mayor at the time, Wang Qishan, who is now China’s vice president, was viewed
over four million times in two hours before it was deleted. The comments were
full of praises for his candid and confident answers and yearning for a strong
leader like him.
“It’s not that this nation has a bad memory,”
wrote one person who pointed out the irony. “It’s because those in power don’t
like that you remember.”
The police in various parts of China have
fined or detained over 40 people in the past few days for spreading “rumors,”
many of which claimed that there were confirmed cases of the virus locally,
according to a tally by a WeChat account based on media reports.
Wang Heyan, an investigative reporter for the
magazine Caixin who has written about corruption cases involving top Chinese
leaders, lamented on her WeChat timeline that she and her colleagues couldn’t
get any medical workers to talk to them in Wuhan. Even after she promised them
anonymity, Ms. Wang said, the workers feared reprisals.
“If all medical workers aren’t willing to
take a little risk to speak the truth and the media can’t report the truth, in
the end everyone, including the doctors, will be victims,” she wrote.
A reporter from Beijing News also complained
on social media that even though he was in the epicenter of the epidemic, he
couldn’t write a single word about what he had learned.
Many Chinese still have strong belief in the
power of the central government. After Premier Li Keqiang visited Wuhan on
Monday, a week after the epidemic became a full-blown crisis, a retiree told my
colleague Chris Buckley, “In China, if a leader visits, that shows that all the
resources of the government can be mobilized.”
Li Haipeng, a former journalist, predicted as
early as last week that eventually the state would come to Wuhan’s rescue.
“The state will be interpreted, proved and
trusted as the only savior,” he wrote on Weibo. “All our stories are the same:
They start with the failure of the state and end with its victory.”
