At the end of December 2019, when the coronavirus outbreak was still in its early stages, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital used WeChat to alert colleagues to the true scale of the threat. Shortly afterwards, Li Wenliang was summoned by local police and reprimanded for “making false comments on the Internet”. He returned to work, caught the virus from an infected patient, and died in early February. The authorities summoned, rebuked, and silenced other “rumourmongers” to avoid stoking public fear.
Had Li’s warning of a potential “SARS-like” virus been heeded instead of suppressed, the 2019-nCoV (coronavirus) might have been contained. Instead, China’s culture of secrecy and paranoid state control enabled the virus to spread faster and further than was necessary. With retrospect the praise that WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus lavished on the People’s Republic for its innovative and aggressive response to the outbreak seems, at best, half-true in light of the government’s role in hiding the truth when it mattered most.
Last week a resident of Wenzhou, a city about 500 miles from the epicentre of the 2019-nCoV outbreak told the Guardian: “We are completely disappointed. [The authorities] are lying, we know they are lying. They know that we know they are lying, and yet they still lie” Another citizen of Xuzhou, in the more distant province of Jiangsu, said: “This is truly a manmade disaster.”
In 1999 the Indian economist Amartya Sen noted that “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy — be it economically rich … or relatively poor … Famines have tended to occur in colonial territories governed by rulers from elsewhere … or in one-party states … or in military dictatorships…” This, Sen reasoned, was because: “famines are extremely easy to prevent if the government tries to prevent them, and a government in a multiparty democracy with elections and free media has strong political incentives to undertake famine prevention.” The wider lesson, he concluded, was that “political freedom in the form of democratic arrangements helps to safeguard economic freedom and the freedom to survive.”
Sen’s insight applies equally well to epidemics. In 2003 when the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic originated in China, the authorities covered up the disease for months until another brave doctor, Jiang Yanyong, raised the alarm. SARS infected more than 8,000 people, and claimed 800 lives in 17 countries. The coronavirus has already surpassed that toll and is currently poised to have a much greater impact. But much if not all of this could have been prevented if there was greater respect for free speech in China.
After Li’s death social media in China teemed with posts about his martyrdom. This soon led to demands for free speech. “We want freedom of speech” became a trending topic and millions of people watched and shared links to “Do You Hear the People Sing?”, a song from the musical Les Miserables, which has become a resistance anthem in the Hong Kong protests. These messages were censored too, but the Communist Party’s internal watchdog was eventually forced to announce that it was sending investigators to Wuhan to look into “questions raised by the masses.” This belated concession was, of course, cold comfort to anyone who was affected, or lost a family member, in the period between official denial and acknowledgement of the truth.
If anything can be learned from such episodes, it should be that in crises like these, political freedom, the freedom to be a whistleblower, to defend the public interest without fear of being silenced, can literally become a matter of life and death.
