China’s mishandling of the coronavirus outbreak has emboldened local social leaders and dissidents to demand that authorities honor free speech rights, especially following the death of a doctor who was punished for warning about the contagion.
“You have, on Chinese social media, people referring to him as a ‘martyr,’” Marion Smith, the executive director of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “A martyr for what? Well, clearly a martyr for the cause of honesty and justice and free speech.”
Li Wenliang, the doctor who was forced to admit to wrongdoing after he detected the virus in the earliest days of the outbreak, helped trigger the political backlash before his own death from the sickness by declaring that “a healthy society should not only have one kind of voice.” That sentiment has been amplified by doctors, academics, and dissidents.
“The key point is freedom of speech, rights guaranteed by the constitution,” Tang Yiming, a classics professor at a university in Wuhan, the city where the virus originated, said last week after publishing an open letter reminding authorities that the regime’s constitution promises many of the same rights that Americans would recognize in the First Amendment.
“If the words of Dr. Li had not been treated as rumors, if every citizen was allowed to practice their right to voice the truth, we would not be in such a mess, we would not have a national catastrophe with an international impact,” he said.
Those comments, and the open letter published by Tang and his colleagues, brought home a rebuke that a law professor in Beijing aired earlier last week in Chinese-language publications beyond the reach of mainland Chinese authorities.
“The political system has collapsed under the tyranny, and a governance system [made up] of bureaucrats, which has taken [the party] more than 30 years to build has floundered,” wrote Xu Zhangrun, who was suspended from teaching in 2018 after he criticized the Chinese Communist Party for removing Xi Jinping’s term limits.
Those rebukes are a sign that it is “open season on the effectiveness of the Communist Party leadership,” Smith observed. “It’s definitely an existential crisis of the Chinese Communist Party.”
Xi, who has overseen a plan to develop a comprehensive social credit system that rates the behavior of the individual Chinese people by 2020, has tried to maintain discipline during the coronavirus crisis. The outbreak spurred authorities to quarantine roughly 50 million people on short notice after weeks of neglecting to address the virus. Additionally, local officials have implemented “wartime” policies of arresting suspected patients and sending them to quarantine camps.
These aggressive tactics could provide a cover for punishing the academics and activists who have rebuked the government, Western analysts said.
“We don’t know the extent to which they’re taking advantage of the coronavirus as a potential opening for silencing dissidents or using the coronavirus as an excuse to take people they want to silence into custody,” Olivia Enos, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation’s Asian Policy Center, told the Washington Examiner.
The regime’s ability to implement those containment measures demonstrates “how agile” the regime has become at repression. “The apparatus is all there,” Enos said.
Those aggressive tactics provide unmistakable evidence that the party has failed on an essential task, according to Smith, who agreed that it is “too soon to tell” if the medical emergency will have significant political fallout.
“Clearly, this hits the party right on their strongest talking point, which is, ‘We may not have democracy, we may not have free speech, but we are efficient modern managers of the society,’” the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation official said. “And that’s just very clearly the opposite of what’s playing out right now.”
