How China twisted the Covid narrative
On February 7, 2020, China’s Internet censors experienced an unusual and deeply upsetting trend: they felt they were losing control. News of the death of a doctor, Li Wenliang, who had exposed the outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan, had overwhelmed people’s grief and they were sharply criticising the government’s efforts to suppress inconvenient information on the social media.
Senior officers in the censor department, according to reports in the US media, were ordered to send thousands of secret directives to manipulate the online discourse. They were told to suppress the inconvenient news, fake online commentators were asked to flood social sites with distracting chatter, trolls were instructed to inundate the social media with party-line blather and security forces were deployed to muzzle the inconvenient voices.
Within days, the powerful censors reshaped the narrative removing much of negativity about the government’s handling from the public domain.
The virus emerged in Wuhan in December, 2019; initially, the city authorities dragged their feet, waiting for instructions from Beijing while pressuring the whistle-blowing doctors to keep quiet.
Much of the delay took place as the information travelled through the vast labyrinth of the Chinese Communist Party awaiting a decision by its top leader Xi Jinping. Once he made the decision, Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, was sealed off on January 23, 2020 to contain the spread of Covid-19.
“The most miserable thing was not death, but trying to get medical treatment,” recalls a city resident according to a Chinese media report. One of his friends died of lung cancer in February, as he could not get transport to reach hospitals, which were overwhelmed, and turning away patients. Another resident recalled how his “mother was put in a body bag while she was still breathing.”
According to a survey by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control in April 2020, about 4.5 lakh people contracted Covid-19, about nine times more than the 50,008 people claimed in the official media; the official figure of death is 3,800, though unofficial figures are much higher as the authorities refused to relate certain deaths to Covid to keep the figures low.
Most of those who died due to Covid were cremated by the officials; even today, many Chinese don’t know where their family members are buried.
Some locals, like citizen journalist Zhang Zhan, who tried to report on the early experiences of the people in Wuhan during the lockdown, were arrested for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” and jailed for four years.
Mass quarantines, systematic use of artificial intelligence in contact-tracing and complete shutdown of most daily life activities were credited with controlling the virus.
President Xi Jinping, who had maintained a low profile during the initial spread of the virus, arrived triumphantly in Wuhan in March 2020 to proclaim victory over the virus.
The world would have celebrated China’s success in controlling Covid-19 if it had timely shared information with the international community on the origin of the virus and taken measures to control the travel of its virus-carrying tourists abroad.
If nothing else, it expected the Chinese government to behave more maturely in reacting to its criticism of the early handling of the virus rather than threatening other countries, forgetting that China was the cause of the huge global devastation and deaths.
China tried to blunt the global criticism by its despatch of masks, respirators, ventilators and medicines to countries. When some, including the US, Spain, Brazil and the Philippines, complained about substandard products sold by the Chinese companies, the latter ascribed these to “improper use”.
China’s global image declined sharply in 2020 due to its arrogant behaviour.
Having controlled the coronavirus early and revived its economy, China is now peddling a new narrative — that its centralised authoritarian model, which can efficiently mobilise government agencies, companies and individuals, is better and more efficient than the democratic system.
This argument is simplistic as it obscures the untold miseries and hardships endured by the Chinese people after the imposition of the lockdown. Also, historically, high growth rates have been achieved by countries, China included, when they followed market reforms in a liberal environment, not those scaling new heights of authoritarianism.
After the arrival of Xi Jinping in 2012, China’s growth rates have declined. While China may have obtained a GDP growth of 2.3 per cent in 2020 (official claim), much of it came from China’s debt-fuelled financing of infrastructure, real estate, state-owned industries and exports. Retail sales growth, a measure of ordinary people’s purchases, declined by 4.6 per cent in December, 2020, indicating that the Chinese domestic consumption had declined as the pandemic raged.
China’s unbalanced economic recovery and low quality growth represent a big lost opportunity for the ordinary Chinese struggling with high unemployment, stagnant or low increase in wages and low purchasing power. While the state and its upper crust are getting rich, the prosperity is not percolating enough to the middle and lower classes.
There has been criticism in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore and other countries about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines made by a Chinese company, Sinovac. Beijing, which had hoped to burnish its scientific credentials on a par with the West, is again furious, complaining of motivated criticism. As part of its vaccine diplomacy, China is exporting 500 million vaccine doses this year, given the global shortages.
As 2021 began, there was another eruption of Covid-19 in certain parts of China. The authorities clamped down with their familiar ‘blunt lockdowns’, including suspension of rail and air transportation.
Has China learnt any lesson from its handling of the pandemic in 2020 and would it act better in the future? Some Chinese analysts are unsure.
China has a history of not telling the ‘truth’ and unless the ‘superior system’ changes, the situation would remain the same, they say.
