3
Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation.
—Ernest Renan, 11 March 18821
It was a crisp 15 degrees in Wuhan, as Vice Premier Sun Chunlan arrived for an inspection on 5 March. The city had been in a state of lockdown for over six weeks by then. All connections with the outside world remained severed. Sun, however, had been a regular visitor, going back and forth between Wuhan and Beijing throughout that time. The only woman on the powerful 25-member Politburo of the CCP and the official in charge of the State Council’s health portfolio, she had been appointed as the central leadership’s point person to oversee disease control efforts in Hubei. Sun, in fact, was present in Wuhan when the lockdown began on 23 January.2
A few days later, on 26 January, she was attending the first meeting of the quickly cobbled together Central Leading Small Group to deal with the epidemic in Beijing before again returning to Wuhan. The group was chaired by Premier Li Keqiang.3 The day after it first met, Li too was in Wuhan, becoming the highest-ranking official to visit the city since the crisis began. While the Premier met with healthcare workers, promised support and sought to instil confidence, President Xi Jinping was largely missing from the public eye.4 From 25 January till 5 February, there were four key reports about Xi’s activities across official media. The first was about him chairing a Politburo Standing Committee meeting on 25 January, which put into motion the government’s response to the outbreak, and another one on 3 February.5 That was followed by a meeting with World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus on 29 January. And finally, on 5 February, it was reported that Xi had hosted Cambodian Prime Minister Samdech Techo Hun Sen at the Great Hall of the People.6
Such constrained reportage about Xi’s activities over a period of nearly two weeks, although not unprecedented for the Party-state media, was uncharacteristic. What was also particularly intriguing about this instance was that it came at a time when the CCP was facing a potentially existential crisis. And instead of Xi—whose image as the hands-on, with-you-in-the-foxhole ‘People’s Leader’ had been carefully crafted over the years—it was the technocratic Li who was dishing out charisma. Little wonder then that the international press speculated about the possibility of Xi setting his Premier up to be the fall guy in the face of a potential disaster.7 That eventuality, however, did not come to pass. Li quickly faded into the background, not returning to the city throughout the lockdown. In contrast, following the coverage of his meeting with Hun Sen, over the next few days, state media reported about Xi’s telephone conversations with the Saudi king and US President Donald Trump. Any perceptions of hesitation or ambivalence from Xi to take a more public role in the Party’s response to the outbreak were firmly put to rest on 10 February.
On that day, for the first time since the lockdown of Wuhan began, Xi was seen in a public place outside the Great Hall of the People. Wearing a mask, he visited a residential community, a hospital and a district CDC in Beijing, mingling with people and expressing ‘confidence that China can certainly obtain a full victory in the fight against the epidemic’.8 The front page of the People’s Daily was entirely dedicated to this visit, underscoring Xi’s public re-emergence at the helm of the fight against COVID-19. A few days later, on 14 February, state media reported that Xi had, in fact, been in charge all along. On 14 February, the Party made public a speech that Xi apparently delivered during the Politburo Standing Committee meeting of 3 February. The speech begins with Xi referring to a Politburo Standing Committee meeting that took place on 7 January, during which he issued instructions on the prevention and control of the outbreak in Wuhan. This was the first time that any Party-state outlet had reported about the 7 January meeting. The timeline of the senior leadership’s response was clearly being reordered to put Xi front and centre. And this has since been repeated ad nauseam in official histories and documents. The Chinese government’s official White Paper on the fight against COVID-19 published in June was empathic in stating, ‘General Secretary Xi Jinping has taken personal command, planned the response, overseen the general situation and acted decisively, pointing the way forward in the fight against the epidemic.’ Yet, if this was indeed the case, with Xi being in command since 7 January, then the narrative blaming local Party bosses for inaction does not stand scrutiny. This only bolsters the argument of a systematic effort to hush up details during the early days of the outbreak.
Nevertheless, while Beijing seemed mired in intrigue through those early days and weeks, on the ground in Wuhan, it was Sun who was actually guiding the implementation of the central leadership’s agenda. From 22 January to 10 February, she made five separate trips to Wuhan, meeting with local workers, inspecting hospitals and entry points into the city, and engaging with experts at the Hubei Provincial CDC. On 5 March, she was on a similar inspection visit to Wuhan, albeit a far more politically significant one. In a few days, Xi would be visiting the city. Although Wuhan’s lockdown would continue for another month after the Presidential visit, Xi’s brief time there would be presented as a victory lap for the Party.
All signs leading up to the visit were positive. The beginning of March had coincided with a sharp decline in the number of daily COVID-19 cases in Hubei. According to the NHC, the province reported 570 new cases of confirmed infections, including 565 in Wuhan, on 29 February. That number fell to 196 for the province, with 193 in Wuhan, on 1 March and continued to remain in the low 100s for the next few days. When Sun landed on 5 March, the numbers were down to 134 new cases in Hubei, with 131 of those being in Wuhan.9 It had been an incredible turnaround, which the leadership was keen to demonstrate to the world.
Alas, as Sun, along with an entourage of officials, walked through the Kaiyuan Mansion, a residential community in the city’s Qingshan District, residents heckled from their balconies. ‘Fake. It’s all fake,’ their voices echoed across the empty premises. Videos of the incident quickly spread, becoming viral on Chinese social media platforms. However, Party-state media were quick to control the narrative. The People’s Daily and Global Times argued that the residents’ jeers were aimed at highlighting the failures of local officials and the community’s property management in ensuring essential supplies.10 State broadcaster CCTV said that Sun had discussed the issue with officials subsequently, calling for an investigation and an end to formalism and bureaucratism. Privately owned outlet Caixin’s reportage echoed this view. It quoted a local resident as saying that ‘during the outbreak, property management companies haven’t taken disinfecting work seriously. When central leaders come, (local officials) make a special effort.... But the reality is that food delivery is often inadequate. Look at how quickly they’ve worked now to put on a show.’11
In part, as discussed earlier, the narrative of local failures suited the central leadership. However, this did not imply a carte blanche for critical reportage. Instead, where and when feasible, the narrative was leveraged, adapted or rewritten as in the case of the 7 January Politburo Standing Committee meeting; where and when it was inconvenient, the coercive apparatus of the state was unleashed.
Glitch in the Matrix
Leading up to the lockdown of Wuhan, most Party-state media outlets, national and local, generally tended to either ignore the outbreak or limited their coverage to official reports and statements. In a survey of four key official newspapers—People’s Daily, Hubei Daily, Changjiang Daily and Chutian Metropolis Daily—from 1 January 2020 to 26 January 2020, China Media Project’s Qian Gang highlights the lack of coverage.12 This was more so the case between 6 January and 17 January, which is when key city and provincial political meetings were underway in Wuhan, involving 2,369 delegates. There was occasional coverage, of course. For instance, Changjiang Daily on 6 January reported about a notice from the Wuhan Health Commission on the viral pneumonia. The same day, according to the Chinese government’s official timeline of events, the NHC ‘gave a briefing on cases of pneumonia of unknown cause at a national health conference’.13 Then on 10 January, Chutian Metropolis Daily carried a report confirming that the outbreak was the product of a novel coronavirus. This was a case of delayed reportage, given that the official announcement to this effect had been made by the NHC on 8 January.
The primary focus of city and provincial media coverage through this period was about the local political leadership’s agenda. This is underscored in another assessment by Qian, which reveals that from 6 to 17 January, at both city and provincial levels, a total of 148 pages across four major newspapers—Hubei Daily, Changjiang Daily, Wuhan Evening Post and Chutian Metropolis Daily—were devoted to the official meetings. This number, Qian says, ‘excludes frontpages reporting the opening and closing of the meetings, and pages simply publishing the texts of government work reports’.14 Throughout this time, there was no questioning in the media about the government response to what was clearly emerging as a public health crisis. This was also the case on 18 January, when the Wuhan government held a massive New Year banquet in the Baibuting community, with some 40,000 people sharing a meal.15 This is incredible when one considers that a central team of health experts arrived in the city on the same day and would soon raise an alarm about the unprecedented nature of the outbreak. According to the Chinese government’s White Paper, ‘in the middle of the night of January 19, after careful examination and deliberation’, the NHC’s national expert team that had travelled to Wuhan a day earlier ‘determined that the new coronavirus was spreading between humans’.
However, even before official confirmations and efforts to take control of the healthcare situation and the narrative got into gear, studies point out that people had begun to take note and act with caution. In her assessment, Xiaoling Chen observes that in stark contrast to the absence of coverage in official media, Chinese citizens were actively engaging in self-help on social media, by disseminating information and dismissing rumours.16 She argues that as the nature of the crisis became evident, Chinese social media became ‘a space of active public engagement, in which citizens expressed care and solidarity, engaged in claim-making and resistance, and negotiated with authorities’. This description does well to capture the early weeks following the lockdown. Yet, as time went by, social media discourse became far more vitiated with censors taking control and nationalistic backlash targeting Party critics.
But it is indeed the case that for a brief period at the end of January and early February, it appeared that the veil of control across China’s media ecosystem and cyberspace had fallen. The unprecedented nature of the outbreak appeared to have caused a glitch in the matrix. For a moment, it seemed like the attention of everyone across the country was focussed on one single issue. Speaking on Jordan Schneider’s China EconTalk podcast in early February, journalist Tony Lin quipped that American basketball star Kobe Bryant’s death was perhaps the only public issue that momentarily punctuated the endless conversations about the outbreak on social media.17
This is a critical yet underappreciated aspect of the Chinese Party-state’s approach to the media ecosystem. Political scientist Maria Repnikova, who teaches at Georgia State University, casts this relationship between the Party and the media, including critical journalists, as a ‘fluid collaboration’, aspiring towards a ‘shared goal’ of improving governance.18 She posits this partnership within the broader framework of fragmented authoritarianism, which implies the presence of significant gaps between central-level initiatives and local-level implementation. These gaps, she argues, ‘create opportunities for alliances to form between central authorities and societal actors, including critical journalists, that target policy gridlocks and governance failures at local level’.19 This process goes a long way in sustaining political control. In other words, the glitch is not so much a glitch; rather one can think of it as an element of design.
Viewed from this prism, the social media discourse that Xiaoling Chen highlights, such as sharing advice on hand washing and mask wearing to fundraising and collecting healthcare supplies and providing information about hospital beds and testing capacities to those seeking treatment, would have been eminently acceptable to the central leadership.20 Another assessment of discourse on Weibo by Yuxin Zhao, Sixiang Cheng, Xiaoyan Yu and Huilan Xu reveals that a majority of users expressed predominantly negative sentiments in the context of the outbreak from the period of 31 December to 26 January.21 Given the early failures of the Chinese leadership and the unprecedented nature of the healthcare challenge before them, permitting negative or critical discourse can be helpful in gauging threats and addressing governance gaps. At the same time, media channels can be leveraged to direct anger at local officials while emphasising central leadership control.
This task was clearly carried out by official media at the national level, such as People’s Daily, Xinhua, Global Times, China Daily and broadcaster CCTV. In part, they focussed on the steps taken under the direction of the central leadership, such as a 24-hour live stream of the hospitals being constructed in Wuhan, and glorified the efforts of party cadre, the military and healthcare workers. At another level, they began sharpening their attacks on the local Party leadership. But while national platforms could do this, attacking the Party leadership was still a challenge for city and provincial media outlets. This is amply demonstrated by the case of Hubei Daily apologising to the Wuhan Party Committee after one of its reporters took to social media on 24 January to call for a change in leadership.22 The overarching goal of such reportage by national media was to reassure the public and stress that the central authorities were now in control. Pedalling this narrative necessarily implied ignoring the many lacunae in the government’s response to the epidemic.
These gaps were in large parts filled by individuals on social media such as writers like Fang Fang, citizen journalists like Fang Bin, Chen Qiushi and Li Zehua and a number of journalists working for Chinese language news outlets, which, although part of the mainstream in the country, are not necessarily well known to the outside world. Platforms like Caixin, China Youth Daily, Caijing, YiMagazine, Beijing News, People and Sanlian Lifeweek put together investigative reports and first-person accounts of government failure, overwhelmed hospitals, shortages of beds, essentials and health supplies and the challenges that healthcare workers and ordinary citizens were encountering. These reports paint a picture of not just anger and frustration but also the chaos and helplessness that characterised the early official response amid a lockdown, which came with little prior warning. Some of these stories were later taken down by Chinese censors. Fortunately, much of this material has been stored in the nCoVMemory repository, archived by a group of journalists and researchers.23 The challenges of this effort cannot be underscored enough.
Take Caijing’s 30 January report about a Wuhan Municipal Health Commission notice which identified the first symptomatic case of infection on 8 December 2019.24 The piece also referred to a 24 January Lancet article, which argued that the symptom onset date of the first patient admitted to Wuhan Jinyintan Hospital was 1 December 2019.25 This patient had no history of exposure to the Huanan Seafood Market, which was later seen as the origin and epicentre of the outbreak. Another story by Beijing News on 28 January detailed the acute shortages of health supplies such as masks, disinfectants, thermometers and PPE despite the tremendous effort that was underway to build capacity amid what was the annual holiday season.26 The story also talks about the sudden and sharp spike in prices for these products.
Another piece on iFeng News’ ‘Living’ Studio WeChat account documents the challenges of a university teacher who was separated from his parents based in Wuhan amid the lockdown.27 The piece discusses the family’s struggle to get an appropriate diagnosis, hospital admission and treatment for the teacher’s 57-year-old father. The sudden lockdown in Wuhan had meant that there was no public transport available to get him to the hospital. Given this, along with the refusal of emergency services to pick up patients due to shortages of protective equipment, the man’s wife had to borrow a cart and wheel him to the hospital.
A few other stories are worth highlighting for these were critical in shedding light on the early failures of the Chinese leadership. Throughout the period of the lockdown of Wuhan, Caixin’s team of reporters stayed in the city documenting events. In early February, they published a three-part series, which highlighted the rising number of fever cases in December, infections among healthcare workers in early January and the silencing of doctors by officials.28 The excellent work of Caixin’s journalists was perhaps punctuated by its late March report interviewing bereaved Wuhanese coming to collect the ashes of their deceased loved ones outside the Hankou Funeral Parlor.29 The number of urns seen in images published with the story seemed to suggest a higher death toll than the official number of 2,535 deaths by then.30 Beijing had clearly played fast and loose with numbers of infections and the death toll. Some of this was indeed a product of institutional chaos and the reporting methodology that was adopted.31 But, in other instances, the spin on the numbers was clearly by design. For example, officially, the Chinese leadership continues to claim that there were zero COVID-19 infections among the country’s armed forces. Yet, given the number of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) personnel deployed to combat the outbreak in Wuhan along with presence of key military facilities in the city, this claim simply does not stand scrutiny.32 Interestingly, on 17 April, Chinese authorities formally revised the COVID-19 death toll in Wuhan, with an increase of 50 percent, to 3,869 deaths. The government said that the discrepancies were a product of misreporting within an overwhelmed system.33
The other story to note is an interview of Ai Fen, a doctor at the Wuhan Central Hospital, by journalist Gong Jingqi for the Ren Wu magazine.34 The story titled The One Who Handed Out the Whistles was published on 10 March, as Xi Jinping toured Wuhan. It revealed that Ai was the doctor who had shared an image in a WeChat group on 30 December, which raised the alarm about possible SARS-like infections and led to eight doctors, including Li Wenliang, being reprimanded by local police. In the piece, Ai also revealed that the disciplinary office of her hospital had accused her of ‘manufacturing rumors’. Thereafter, she chose to stay quiet—a decision she subsequently regretted. The story was quickly taken down by censors. However, it continued to survive on social media, with people posting screenshots and PDFs, and translating the entire piece into hexadecimal code, Morse code, Braille and even emojis.35
The Inconvenient Diarist
Writing about this incessant cat-and-mouse game to preserve Ai’s interview, Fang Fang noted on 11 March that these individuals were performing a ‘sacred duty’.36 This duty, she added, ‘comes from an almost subconscious realization that keeps telling them: Protect those posts, for protecting them is the only way to protect yourself’.37 Such a characterisation perhaps also underscored Fang Fang’s personal sense of mission.
Starting from New Year’s Day on 25 January 2020 till 24 March 2020, Fang Fang wrote daily diary entries on Chinese social media, offering people across the country and the world a window into the events that were unfolding in Wuhan. An acclaimed poet and novelist, Wang Fang, her real name, is no stranger to the vagaries of China’s intellectual and public sphere. Born in 1955, she grew up amid the tumult of the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, even working as a porter at a point in time in order to support the family. The winds of change that swept through Chinese politics in 1978 allowed her to pursue a degree in literature at Wuhan University. Through the course of her career, Fang Fang has published a number of works, winning several literary awards, including China’s most prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize in 2010. She has also served as president of the Hubei Writer’s Association.
Over the years, Fang Fang’s work, often discomfiting for its bleak realism, has revolved around the exploration of the lives of ordinary Wuhanese, from factory workers to intellectuals. Her writings at times served as a note of dissent, attracting controversy and even bans, such as the case with her 2016 novel Soft Burial. But seldom had she been accused of dissidence. That changed with her Quarantine Diary on Weibo. In the days and weeks that followed the lockdown of Wuhan, Fang Fang’s posts captured the imagination of millions of readers. From the mundane to the sublime, the morbid to the sanguine, her writings reflected the tussle between hope and dismay, admiration and anger, life and death, which the people of Wuhan were living each and every day.
For instance, on 2 February 2020, she noted,
The city isn’t the purgatory that a lot of people seem to be imagining it to be. It is instead a rather quiet and beautiful, almost majestic, city. But all that changes the second someone in your family falls ill. Immediately everything is thrown into chaos.38
At times, she criticised the failure of officials and demanded accountability, lamenting that people had ‘put too much faith in our government’. On occasion, she admonished ‘deeply ingrained habitual behaviors, like reporting the good news while hiding the bad, preventing people from speaking the truth, forbidding the public from understanding the true nature of events’. Some days, she lashed out at faux displays of patriotism by cadres who spent their time ‘shouting empty slogans’. She chastised officials visiting hospitals for singing There Would Be No New China Without the Communist Party to bedridden patients. She mourned the passing of Li Wenliang, was horrified by cellphones piled up on the floor of a funeral home and echoed people’s exasperation with reports of an overwhelmed healthcare system and desperate patients ‘dragging their sick bodies all over the city in search of treatment’. Amid all this, the virus, she noted on 7 February, ‘continues to roam the city like an evil spirit, appearing whenever and wherever it pleases, terrorizing the people of this city’.
Yet, there were moments when Fang Fang also expressed confidence in the efficiency and effectiveness of the central leadership. For instance, discussing reports on 25 January about the central leadership taking control of the situation, she wrote that this gave ‘the people of Wuhan some solace and helped calm their spirits ... because everybody knows that once something in China is taken up at the national level, everyone will step up and do what needs to be done’. To her, the building of the Huoshenshan and Leishenshan hospitals represented this. And then there were posts laden with a sense of fatalism, as this excerpt from her 4 February diary entry shows:
Even if the government made some mistakes early on, no matter what, we now have no choice but to put our faith in our leaders; we need to believe in them. Otherwise, what is the alternative? Who else can we believe in? Who else can you rely on?’39
Her diary, The New York Times noted in a review following its publication in English as a book, ‘provided a daily catharsis’ to the city’s people.40 For those individuals, Fang Fang represented the ‘Conscience of Wuhan’. However, for many, particularly those comprising China’s far left, her words represented the ultimate betrayal. In a thorough assessment of the Fang Fang phenomenon, Professor Hemant Adlakha, from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, notes that
at least among the established ‘left’ Chinese websites, the first article ‘attacking’ Wuhan Diary had surfaced in early February. Subsequently, in a series of articles, commentaries and blogs—on average five to six write-ups a day—mainly carried by a few ‘Maoist’ leaning websites and blogs, Wuhan Diary has not only been dismissed as trash and nothing but a pack of lies, Fang Fang herself too has been targeted as ‘dishonest’; writer of ‘petty-bourgeois’ character and who only cares for cheap publicity.41
In general, the Chinese leadership and national media tend to share a complex relationship with the far left. Concerns about left tendencies derailing the leadership’s economic reform agenda date back to the years of Deng Xiaoping.42 In spite of his authority, even Xi Jinping has had to manage a tricky policy balance to blunt the criticism and clout of those from the far left.
These attacks, according to Fang Fang, led to domestic publishers backing away from their initial interest in her diary. Eventually, the announcement of the overseas, English publication of the diary brought the so-called nationalists in step with left wing ideologues. The milder of the ilk argued that Fang Fang belonged to a generation that had naively idealised the West and were in turn serving those pushing an anti-China industry internationally.43 Others were far more brazen, comparing her criticism to the actions of a mercenary serving Western interests. Compared to the left-wing narrative, the nationalism argument is one that the Party leadership is far more comfortable with. Consequently, media outlets like the Global Times, and its usually trigger-happy editor Hu Xijin, lent their voices to the attacks against Fang Fang.44 The vitriol can be gauged from the fact that at one point, Global Times carried a story mentioning social media debates comparing Fang Fang to Qin Hui, a Song Dynasty politician whose treachery has been immortalised at a temple in Hangzhou.45 The site is home to the tomb of Yue Fei, a patriotic general, whom Qin and his wife had killed. Their statues kneel today outside the tomb, with tradition calling on passersby to spit at them.
Yet it is worth noting that Caixin preserved Fang Fang’s posts on its blog and provided her the space to defend herself. ‘There’s no tension between me and the country, and my book will only help the country. Because I’ve recorded in detail Hubei’s measures at the later stage after the change of its top leadership,’ she told them in an interview.46 She also lashed out at internet regulators for indulging in ‘online violence’ by not acting against those engaging in doxxing and abuse. Juxtapose this with the fact that throughout the lockdown, Fang Fang’s posts were routinely deleted by censors, driving her to lash out in a 9 February post, saying:
To my dear internet censors: You had better let the people of Wuhan speak out and express what they want to say! Once they get these things off their chests, they will feel a bit better. We’ve already been locked down in quarantine for more than 10 days and have seen a lot of terrible things. If you won’t even allow us to release some of our pain, if you can’t even permit us to complain a little bit or reflect on what is happening, then you must be intent on driving us all mad!47
The intent, alas, was not to drive people to insanity; it was to perpetuate selective amnesia.
Picking Quarrels; Provoking Trouble
The first formal steps in this direction came in early February. The statement issued following the 3 February 2020 Politburo Standing Committee meeting acknowledged ‘shortcomings’ in the Party’s response to the outbreak, but emphasised the need to improve public opinion guidance, both online and offline.48 The objective of this effort was to build public confidence and win hearts. In terms of specific actions, the statement said it was important to ‘publicize the major decisions and deployments of the Party Central Committee ... and vividly tell the moving stories’ of those on the frontlines.49 Soon after, reports appeared of a notice being sent to Chinese media outlets warning against using non-authoritative sources for reports about the outbreak. It said that ‘sources of articles must be strictly regulated, independent reporting is strictly prohibited, and the use of non-regulated article sources, particularly self-media, is strictly prohibited’.50
On 5 February the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) issued a statement announcing tightening of control over online content. The CAC called on internet platforms and local authorities to ‘create a good cyberspace environment’ amid the outbreak.51 The notice targeted specific platforms for having carried out illegal reporting activities. Some of China’s tech giants, running the most popular social media platforms, Sina, Tencent and ByteDance, were placed under ‘special supervision’.52 This coincided with an intensification of censorship, with reports being deleted and accounts being shut down. Canada-based research group Citizen Lab’s assessment, published in early March, showed how platforms such as YY and WeChat censored specific terms related to the outbreak. In particular, the assessment argued that WeChat ‘expanded the scope of censorship in February 2020. Censored content included criticism of government, rumours and speculative information on the epidemic, references to Dr. Li Wenliang, and neutral references to Chinese government efforts on handling the outbreak that had been reported on state media’.53 An assessment of official accounts published in Young Weekly, a publication run by journalism graduates from Nanjing University, found that from February onward, censors largely focussed on business media, negative reportage and articles about doctors and patients.54 In their assessment, publications such as Freezing Point Weekly, Caijing Magazine, Caixin, The Paper, China News and 18 other popular media outlets had roughly 41 articles that were deleted or blocked. Writing about the nature of censorship in Foreign Policy, journalist Tracy Wen Liu noted that at one point ‘every night, around 2 am, thousands of posts from the “COVID-19 patients pleading for help” Weibo group disappeared’. What was more troubling, however, were accounts of police harassment of ordinary people demanding accountability and compensation, the continued silencing of doctors and targeting of journalists and activists seeking to preserve censored news articles, which spoke about the human cost of the opacity of the Chinese system amid the outbreak.55
It was perhaps not a coincidence that the first signs of such a crackdown emerged on the same day as the CAC notice was issued. On 5 February, People’s Daily reported about a meeting at the level of the Ministry of Public Security. The report emphasised that the ‘maintenance of political security should always be the top priority’ for officials.56 Among the tasks that were needed to be carried out to ensure this, it was ‘necessary to promptly investigate and punish online rumors and disturbances in accordance with the law’.57
In the following days, two prominent citizen journalists covering Wuhan, lawyer Chen Qiushi and local resident Fang Bin, were reportedly taken into custody. Fang had shot to fame after he released a video clip of dead bodies in a van outside a city hospital.58 Then on 10 February 2020, China’s top law enforcement agencies—the Supreme People’s Court, the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Justice—issued a guideline that was aimed at targeting ‘illegal acts that jeopardize epidemic prevention and control’.59 The guideline identified a number of crimes, such as price gouging and intentionally spreading the infection. The list also included rumour-mongering about the outbreak—the same nature of offense that had led to Li Wenliang being admonished.60 Officials were handed greater legal armour starting 1 March 2020, as the Provisions on Ecological Governance of Network Information Content, a regulation that had been adopted in December 2019, became effective. The new regulations empowered authorities to tackle unacceptable content, such as material that hurt national honour, rumours that disturbed economic and social order or improper comments on natural disasters, major accidents or other disasters.61 The legal responsibility for such content, under the new regulations, also rested not just on the platforms that hosted it but also service providers, content producers and service users. The aim, as People’s Daily noted, was to ‘eradicate the weeds in cyberspace’.62
In the days and weeks that followed, reports informed about officers from China’s Cybersecurity Defense Bureau tracking down and conducting lengthy interrogations of online dissenters.63 As of the end of March, Chinese Human Rights Defenders documented 897 instances of people being punished for ‘spreading rumours’ online.64 Among them was Li Zehua, a former employee at state broadcaster CCTV. On 26 February 2020, Li awaited a fateful knock on his door, after a brief hot pursuit in Wuhan. He was taken to a local police station and then questioned on charges of disrupting public order. Although he was not formally charged, Li was later forced into quarantine in Wuhan, only to be released on 28 March.65 A few days later, the lockdown was formally lifted in the city.
Despite that, the state continued to keep tabs on online speech, questioning and detaining detractors. For instance, Cai Wei, Chen Mei and Xiao Tang, volunteers for Terminus-2049, which sought to preserve critical reportage on a GitHub repository, were detained in Beijing in April. Xiao Tang was released after 25 days, but Cai and Chen were held for much longer, before being formally arrested in June.66 On 18 May, journalist Jiang Xue was taken in for questioning by police in the city of Xi’an. This came following an essay she wrote criticising the ‘arranged chorus’ that was the National Mourning Day.67 In the same month, legal scholar Zhang Xuezhong was also detained briefly after she criticised the government’s response to the outbreak and called for constitutional changes to protect citizens’ rights in a WeChat post.68 Not as lucky was lawyer and citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who was detained in May in Shanghai.69 Zhang had live-streamed from Wuhan during the lockdown and was critical of the government’s handling of the situation. The increased government sensitivity in May was likely linked to the delayed annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, which was to be held towards the end of the month. However, the formal notification of charges against Zhang in June, as against Cai Wei and Chen Mei, for allegedly ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble’, indicated that the memory of the Party’s early failures would continue to remain a sensitive issue going forward.