HOW THE CORONAVIRUS HAS TESTED CHINA'S SYSTEM OF INFORMATION CONTROL

Around 5 p.m. on December 30th, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, messaged his college-classmates group on WeChat. He told them that “seven confirmed cases of sars” were in quarantine at the hospital, then followed up with a correction: it was an unspecified coronavirus, which later became known as 2019-nCoV. Li wasn’t authorized to share the information, but he wanted to warn his former classmates—mostly fellow-physicians—so that they would know to protect themselves. He asked them not to share the news outside the group, but soon the chat had spread—via screenshot, with Li’s name attached—throughout and beyond Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital. Li was irritated at first, but understanding.

Eight hours later, at one-thirty in the morning, Li received a phone call summoning him to the offices of the municipal health commission, where his superiors were attending an emergency conference; there, hospital leadership questioned him about the WeChat message. Later that day, while at work, Li was called to the “inspection section”—essentially a political arm of the hospital, which concerns itself with political transgressions, as opposed to professional ones—for more disciplinary meetings. On January 3rd, Li’s local police station called and informed him that he was required to sign and fingerprint an admonition letter for spreading “untrue speech.” Meanwhile, CCTV, the primary state broadcaster, had reported that police had contacted eight people in Wuhan who had spread rumors about a new, sars-like strain of pneumonia. “The Internet is not a land outside the law,” the station warned its viewers.

The following week, Li treated a glaucoma patient who appeared to have an “unidentified pneumonia.” She had a fever, and a CT scan that showed telltale lesions on her lungs, known as ground-glass opacities. Several of the patient’s family members had begun showing symptoms similar to hers. On January 10th, Li began coughing; he ran a fever the next day and was hospitalized, and was given a diagnosis of coronavirus. The general public was still largely unaware of any outbreak.

It was not until January 20th that President Xi Jinping issued a statement on coronavirus, vowing to “resolutely curb the spread of the epidemic.” According to WeChat, which tracks usages of keywords on the platform, the index of mentions of “pneumonia” and “coronavirus” were in the low thousands just a couple of days before Xi’s announcement; they then skyrocketed to more than two hundred million each. On January 21st, the newspaper People’s Daily, an official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, reported two hundred and seventeen confirmed cases in Wuhan, Beijing, and Guangdong Province, and that the virus had spread to Japan, Thailand, and Korea. It was five days before the Lunar New Year, and millions were planning on travelling home or on their way already. On January 23rd, state media called on all Chinese families to cancel gatherings, and the government placed Wuhan on lockdown, halting all trains and flights from the city. Soon, similar restrictions were placed on more than a dozen surrounding cities, limiting the free movement of some thirty-five million people. The populace was urged to stay at home.

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