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Gabriel Leung, Chair Professor of Public Health Medicine at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, speaks about the extent of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak in China during an news conference in Hong Kong Tuesday, Jan. 21.

TYRONE SIU/Reuters

The late-night post to social media from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission in the midst of a viral outbreak looked like a rare sign of transparency in a country where authorities routinely cover up damaging information in the name of preserving social order.

Fifteen medical workers had been infected by a new SARS-like coronavirus, the medical commission wrote shortly before midnight Monday, a revelation that showed the virus had demonstrated the ability to leap between humans, raising the stakes for authorities in China and abroad as they seek to prevent a pandemic.

On Tuesday, as state media said the number of deaths has risen to six and confirmed cases to 291, authorities took more dramatic measures, instituting health inspection points at numerous entrance and exit points to Wuhan, including random checks of drivers on highways. Cases have now been confirmed in 16 Chinese provinces, according to a new online government real-time monitor.

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But perhaps the most remarkable development was the emergence of new calls for official honesty, including from a powerful Communist Party organ, as the Wuhan virus provided some an unusual opening to criticize past practice and demand a greater respect for the interests of everyday Chinese people a reflection of the democratizing influence that can still occasionally be wielded by the power of social media, even in a country with the worlds most sophisticated censorship regime.

Seventeen years ago, Chinese leadership used its control over information to conceal the true spread of SARS, before it became a global epidemic, killing nearly 800. Journalist Karl Taro Greenfield traced the first Chinese headline about SARS to a small city newspaper, Heyuan Daily, that on Jan. 3, 2003, reported: There is no epidemic in Heyuan. There is no need for people to panic.

But the genetically-related Wuhan virus, also known as 2019-nCoV, is spreading in a very different China and the appearance of more official transparency response suggests that even inside the countrys heavily-constrained Internet environment, the ubiquity of social media has forced change upon a leadership that is grappling with its imperfect ability to shape the information people consume.

Self deception will only make the epidemic worse, and turn a controllable natural disaster into a man-made disaster for which we will pay a huge price, the powerful Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, a high-ranking Communist Party organization, wrote in a commentary published on its Weibo account and republished by numerous state press outlets Tuesday. It took unusually direct aim at the SARS response, saying the concealment of information at the time greatly hurt the government's integrity and social stability.

People are not living in a vacuum, they will not be kept in the dark forever. Depriving them of their right to know the truth will only give rumours a place to rage, the commission wrote.

Even more terrible than a viral infection is an infection of panic, it wrote. As for the Wuhan virus, it is more likely to be killed only when exposed to sunlight.

There remain signs that Chinese authorities are once again not disclosing full information. Scholars at Imperial College London used epidemiological computer modelling to estimate that the number of people infected is many times what is now the official report. Authorities in China have issued deeply conflicting statements 24 hours before others acknowledged person-to-person transmission of the virus, the head of the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention said the risk of such transmission was low. Patricia Shen, a Wuhan woman with close relatives who work in medicine in Wuhan, told The Globe and Mail: the situation is worse than in some early news reports.

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Yet there were also signs of the opposite: authorities updated statistics on deaths and infections within hours on Monday, with additional information released Tuesday including an acknowledgment that officials are monitoring 922 people for signs of infection, a figure closer to the Imperial College London estimate.

China alerted the World Health Organization on Dec. 31 and made public the genetic profile of the virus, enabling other countries to develop fast identification tests. Local authorities have also taken a light hand at intervening in a surprisingly robust conversation online, where people published photos of crowded hospitals and their own accounts of being turned away for treatment raising questions about how accurately officials had been able to grasp the scope of the problem.

Critical keywords like Wuhan, virus, and pandemic remained openly searchable Tuesday.

The signs of action did little to quell public skepticism, a sign of discontent and distrust that, despite signs of official transparency, yet another Chinese health coverup is underway.

So the government finally admits that the virus is transmittable. Cant believe it has taken us such a long time to get facts. Why is telling truth so difficult? wrote one of the top commenters on the Wuhan Municipal Health Commissions post about medical worker infections on Chinas Twitter-like Weibo service. For government officials, suppressing rumours and stopping their spread is much more important than curbing the virus. Thats the fact of things in China, wrote another. Looks like all of the lessons we learned over the past 17 years have been wasted. They are still trying to control the public opinion, wrote a third, in a reference to SARS.

Panicked buyers emptied national supplies of inexpensive antiviral masks on Jingdong, one of Chinas biggest online retailers. Fears hit stock markets, too, with airlines and travel companies retreating while drugmakers rose on anxiety that China is hurtling into a health emergency. An office worker in Wuhan, 28, described empty streets, bed shortages at hospitals and a sense of personal fear: he had himself developed a cough. The Globe and Mail is not identifying him because he worries he could be among those placed in isolation.

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The Chinese government has a long history of minimizing the seriousness and hiding facts around public safety, said Zhang Lifan, a Chinese historian and Communist Party critic. And the public is fed up with dishonesty and lies, he said.

But, he said, the Chinese public now possesses powers it could never before muster particularly online.

The only difference between the Wuhan virus and SARS is that this time it was people within China, within the infected zone, that first came out to tell the public what was going on, Mr. Zhang said. Thats a result of developments in Internet and telecommunication. In the past we had no choice but to listen to what officials tried to convince us to believe in, but now we have more choices.

Chinese authorities maintain the ability to delete large volumes of commentary they consider unacceptable. Mockery of President Xi Jinping has, in the past, led to blanket bans on the use of Winnie the Pooh whose portly figure has been likened to the Chinese leader and even the letter n, a reference to mathematical uncertainty that circulated when Mr. Xi stripped away term limits.

But the loose hand on critical commentary Tuesday suggested a recognition that there were risks, too, in suppressing the conversation.

They know what a tinder box theyre presiding over, said Scott Savitt, an author and former China correspondent who remains a keen observer of the country. Although much smaller in scale, it reminded him of the more open environment for political discussion ahead of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, amid fear that an overly-harsh response might cause more social instability, Mr. Savitt said.

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At the same time, the rise of social media, even in crippled form in China, has placed powerful tools of mass communication in the hands of hundreds of millions. Even information shut out by state media can slip and circulate widely on WeChat and Weibo including the British estimates that the virus had spread far more broadly than publicly acknowledged.

Local governments now find it basically impossible to completely hide things, said King-wa Fu, a scholar at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at The University of Hong Kong. Thats really a major difference between 2003 and now.

Rising wealth has also created new forms of individual empowerment: more than 100 million people in China have now achieved U.S. middle-class standards of income. Many have equivalent expectations for government performance.

Its not clear to what degree, however, those pressures will create new forms of response. Official attempts to control the message remain: On Tuesday, at least one correspondent reported being told by a Wuhan hotel that foreign journalists were not welcome.

And an outpouring of popular rage, particularly during a Spring Festival season that is meant to be an annual moment of goodwill, will almost certainly provoke a harsh response, said Prof. Fu.

If more and more people express anger online, they will control it, he said. Just wait and see a few more days.

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But for the moment, at least, the Chinese government is under tremendous pressure, he said, to disclose more information, both from foreign governments determined to block the virus and from within.

On Tuesday, Hu Xijin, the provocative editor of the national tabloid Global Times, publicly criticized Wuhan officials for being slow to disclose information, likening it to squeezing out toothpaste.

The practice of delaying the release of important updates needs to be completely changed, he wrote on his Weibo account.

In the era of mass democracy on the internet people have their own ability to exercise independent judgment. People do not need or we can say that they are even against the idea that their lives need to be arranged. They see themselves as having equal right to know the truth, as government officials do, on affairs that involve their interests, and they want to decide how to respond independently.

-with reporting from Alexandra Li

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This entry was posted on January 21, 2020 at 8:45 am and is filed under Genetic medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |