Last month I noted that some observers wondered if the Chinese Communist Party would be able to use their response to this epidemic to boost the Communist Party brand. Part of WaPo’s latest report suggests the answer may be inclining towards no:
The risk to front-line medical staff was painfully illustrated this week when the Wuhan “whistleblower doctor” Li Wenliang, who was detained and forced to apologize for rumor-mongering at the beginning of January after trying to alert his colleagues to a strange new illness, died of the coronavirus.
The death of a healthy young doctor who tried to sound the alarm has led to an explosion of anger across China at the way its leadership responded to the outbreak, an anger that many political observers are saying represents one of the biggest challenges to the Communist Party in years.
With the party struggling to manage public reaction, a Beijing-based company, Womin Technology, quickly compiled a “public sentiment” report drawing on posts from more than 100 social media sources and submitted it, along with their recommendations, to the central leadership.
The seven-page document, which was reviewed by The Washington Post, analyzed the intensity of public outrage over Li’s death. It recommended that the party leadership “affirm” the doctor’s contributions while stepping up efforts to block harmful speech and “divert” the public’s attention with positive news.
It predicted, finally, that there was “low probability” of street gatherings but warned local authorities to be on guard to “deal decisively” with any unrest.
Any worries about unrest suggest the response has been late, inadequate, or both. A taste of authoritarian methods:
Beijing authorities Friday said that lying about having contact with someone with coronavirus could be punishable by death, that failure to report symptoms such as fever could lead to criminal charges, and that people who are not wearing masks could be detained.
“If found to have endangered public safety with dangerous means, those with such behavior … could be arrested and sentenced to three years or less of imprisonment for lighter cases, and 10 years or more in jail, life sentence, or even death sentence in severe cases,” said Li Fuying, director of the Beijing Judicial Bureau.
And overnight, CNN has a report on a Chinese lawyer turned journalist who has apparently disappeared:
Chen Qiushi, a citizen journalist who had been doing critical reporting from Wuhan, the central Chinese city at the epicenter of the outbreak, went missing on Thursday evening, just as hundreds of thousands of people in China began demanding freedom of speech online. …
Friends and family later found out from the police that he had been forced into quarantine. By Sunday, Chen’s disappearance had started to gain traction on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like platform, with many pleading for his release.
“Hope the government can treat Chen Qiushi in a fair and just way,” one user wrote on Sunday morning. “We can no longer afford a second Li Wenliang!” …
Will this stir up anger? CNN uses suspect adjectivals:
Amid deep and boiling anger, China announced on Friday that the National Supervisory Commission — the Communist Party’s much-feared disciplinary watchdog which operates in secrecy — is dispatching a team to Wuhan to conduct a “full investigation” into [late medical doctor] Li’s case. [Li had been silenced as a rumormonger in the early days, caught the virus from one of his patients in hospital, and passed away recently.]
Deep and boiling anger is a subjective, and suspect, phrase. It may be accurate, but to me this stands out as a red flag in CNN’s report. Until China is actually caught up in revolution, and the Communists are collapsing, I wouldn’t take those adjectives too seriously.
But, while on the same page, for those folks who want strong leaders, go back and read that bit about China’s National Supervisory Commission – while “much-feared” is also subjectively adjectival, this has an air of plausibility, since even the FBI was once much-feared, when under the control of Director Hoover. There’s a good reason FBI Directors are term-limited. In the autocracy towards which President Trump leans, this is what happens, and all the guns you can put in your basement won’t help if it’s accepted that his much-feared disciplinary organization is permitted to engage in such nonsense. President Xi has known autocracy all of is life, and consequently those are the tools to which he’ll first turn.
Meanwhile, the data coming from the graphic monitoring tool from Johns Hopkins University, as of last night, now has deaths over 800 (814, as of the last refresh, and I’m not going to redo the screen capture, etc) and infections over 37,000 – if you trust the data. I don’t have an opinion on that issue, nor am I trying to spread a rumor; as a software engineer who has studied data collection issues from time to time, suspicion about data is simply a professional tool. As someone who is aware of some of the methods of autocracies, I have a persistent voice asking Why should we trust data from China? There’s already been questions raised about their economic growth numbers. Not to make my readers paranoid or anything …
While the deaths are tragic, the numbers of deaths doesn’t appear to be exploding in the way I would expect if this was an existential threat to humanity. Not that I know anything about such topics, nor do I happen to know any epidemiologists – but I would be expecting an exponential increase in the early stages, and that phenomenon doesn’t appear to be there.
Still, keep an eye on things.
