China’s war on whistleblowers

Those images of Li now serve as a symbol of just how much Communist China values truth and transparency — and the lives of its own citizens.

It doesn’t.

There’s a Chinese idiom that translates to: “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey.” It refers to making an example out of someone in order to threaten others. This is what happened to Dr. Li, Curtis S. Chin, a former U.S. ambassador to the Asian Development Bank who also worked with the Hong Kong government during the SARS epidemic, told the Washington Examiner.

“The Communist Party of China has made clear to the Chinese people that while they and the world might demand more accountability and transparency, it is the party that will decide what and when information is shared,” Chin said.

Li wouldn’t leave that bed to return to caring for his patients at Wuhan Central Hospital, in China’s Hubei Province, where he first caught a glimpse of a disease that looked eerily similar to the severe acute respiratory syndrome known as SARS, which also originated in China in 2002. He also wouldn’t return to his pregnant wife or his son. Instead, on Feb. 7, he’d die of COVID-19, the disease he’d been warning about.

On Dec. 30, 2019, Li posted a warning on the social media app WeChat to his medical school alumni saying that seven people were quarantined in his hospital with an illness that scarily resembled SARS and was initially thought to have been contracted from an open-air market in Wuhan.

“I only wanted to remind my university classmates to be careful,” Li told CNN. The memory of the SARS epidemic that claimed hundreds of Chinese lives was still fresh, as was the government’s attempt to cover up that virus, which sprang up from wet markets in Guangdong province. A harbinger of abhorrent behavior to be seen again 17 years later.

In no time at all, what Li had intended to be private messages among colleagues had taken over social media.

“When I saw them circulating online, I realized that it was out of my control and I would probably be punished,” he said. He was brought down to the local Public Security Bureau in the middle of the night, reprimanded for “spreading rumors,” and forced to sign a statement admitting he “seriously disrupted social order,” thus breaching the law.

Seven other doctors were also punished for speaking the truth about the virus.

“The police believed this virus was not confirmed to be SARS. They believed I was spreading rumors. They asked me to acknowledge that I was at fault,” Li told the New York Times in an interview on Jan. 31 and Feb. 1 via WeChat.

“I felt I was being wronged, but I had to accept it. Obviously, I had been acting out of goodwill. I felt very sad seeing so many people losing their loved ones,” he said.

Through April, there were 3.6 million cases recorded globally, with over 250,000 deaths. Thanks to the duplicity of the Chinese government and its handmaiden, the World Health Organization, we don’t know what the toll is in Wuhan or elsewhere around China.

President Xi Jinping proudly boasted that Wuhan was finally under control — even showing up in person to tour hospitals there in March. All the while, thousands of urns were seen arriving at the outbreak’s epicenter. One funeral home reportedly got two shipments of 5,000 urns, according to Caixin, a Chinese media outlet.

Li, who clearly believed in free speech, thought the carnage was preventable.

“If the officials had disclosed information about the epidemic earlier, I think it would’ve been a lot better,” he said. “There should be more openness and transparency.”

Much of the Chinese public seems to share that attitude, as evidenced by the outrage in the wake of Li’s death. “I haven’t seen my WeChat timeline filled with so much forlornness and outrage,” Xu Danei, founder of a social media analytics company, wrote on the messaging platform.

“What I’ve learned is to never shut up,” one Chinese citizen wrote on Weibo, a social media site.

Hashtags such as #WeWantFreedomOfSpeech and #WuhanGovernmentOwesDr.LiWenliangAnApology made the rounds on social media, only for those posts to be repeatedly deleted by China’s censors. Not to be deterred, people continued to post. They posted the first line of the Chinese national anthem: “Arise! All those who don’t want to be slaves!” Others shared the anti-tyranny ballad “Do You Hear the People Sing” from Les Miserables.

By merely telling the truth, Li threatened a government used to being in control. And so, Beijing has had to find a way to strengthen its grip once more. One strategy has been to claim Li as one of its own, labeling him a “martyr.” It is, the state-run Global Times notes, the highest honor the Communist Party can give to a citizen working to serve China. Officials have apologized to Li’s family and have dropped the reprimand against him, saying that the Wuhan authorities acted “inadequately” and failed to follow “proper law enforcement procedure.” And then, the officials declared that the two police officers responsible for reprimanding Li (undoubtedly doing precisely as they were told) had been punished.

“China’s problem was not a wayward Wuhan police station,” Chin said. “At the heart of China’s challenge is an authoritarian Chinese communist government system that led to cover-ups and deception.” What appears to be increasingly clear, Chin added, is that “China’s communist leaders might well fear their own people more than they do the spread of the coronavirus.”

Li was one of many who have been silenced or disappeared by the communist regime since the coronavirus emerged four months ago.

On April 1, the nongovernmental organization Chinese Human Rights Defenders put out a summary of all those missing or penalized by the regime. It noted that human rights violations have surged “since the Chinese government began implementing draconian measures in response to COVID-19. These include deleting critical information online, censoring the media, punishing whistleblowing doctors, detaining and disappearing independent journalists and government critics, and kicking out foreign reporters.”

On Feb. 21, China’s Ministry of Public Security announced 5,111 cases that involved police intervention or penalization for “fabricating and deliberately disseminating false and harmful information.” For its part, Chinese Human Rights Defenders managed to document 897 cases in which Chinese internet users were punished for their online speech or for sharing information about the coronavirus on the internet between Jan. 1 and March 26.

The organization was also able to pull together some detailed information from those cases, which it says “occurred in almost every province, autonomous region and municipality in China.” The list is incomplete, it says, and that’s fair. No list can ever truly be complete when you’re talking about a government that excels at making people vanish. And Beijing went after people fast: On Dec. 30, the government acknowledged a “new pneumonia,” and on Jan. 3, it started punishing the whistleblowing doctors and information-sharers.

Take, for instance, Dr. Ai Fen, director of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital. She basically served as the whistle for Li’s whistleblowing: After alerting her bosses to a potential outbreak, she said she was silenced and reprimanded for taking a photo of a patient’s test results in early December and circling the positive “SARS coronavirus” result in red. She then shared those results with colleagues.

In March, Ai went public in an interview with Chinese magazine Renwu. The headline read: “The one who supplied the whistle.”

“If I had known what was to happen, I would not have cared about the reprimand,” she said. “I would have f***ing talked about it to whoever, wherever I could.”

Her interview has since been removed from Renwu’s website, and posts about it have been scrubbed from social media. As for Ai herself, she went off the map for two weeks.

On March 29, 60 Minutes Australia ran a segment about her disappearance. After the piece aired, Ai “posted” a message to her Weibo account. It read: “A river. A bridge. A road. A clock chime.” It was paired with a picture of a Wuhan cityscape.

Ai resurfaced and said the Weibo posts were indeed from her and that she’d just been working, though according to a Radio Free Asia source, she likely “had come under considerable political pressure behind the scenes and wasn’t in a position to talk about it.” Among those whom China’s leaders hope everyone either forgets or stops asking questions about:

· Tycoon Ren Zhiqiang, who has been missing since March 12, after criticizing Xi’s and his government’s handling of the coronavirus in an essay titled “Lives Are Being Harmed by Both the Virus and the Disease in the Political System.”

· Xu Zhiyong, a scholar and activist who first disappeared on Feb. 15 but was later confirmed to be under “residential surveillance at a designated location” on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.” His crime? He, too, criticized Xi’s handling of the outbreak in online essays.

· Dissident and former prisoner of conscience Guo Quan, detained on Jan. 1, then formally arrested in February for speaking publicly about the coronavirus. He’s being held at Nanjing No. 2 Detention Center on charges of “inciting subversion of state power.”

· Journalist and lawyer Chen Qiushi, who’s been missing since Feb. 6, after being taken away by police. Originally from the northeast province of Heilongjiang, Chen began reporting from the front lines in Wuhan after Hubei authorities announced the mandatory lockdown.

· Journalist and former CCTV host Li Zehua, who disappeared after being taken into police custody on Feb. 26. After Chen disappeared, Li picked up where he left off, reporting from the ground and posting videos online.

· Rights activist and journalist Fang Bin, who vanished on Feb. 9, after being taken into police custody. A Wuhan resident, Fang was filming and posting to the internet videos of overwhelmed hospitals, and he called for full government transparency.

“One thing about these citizens, journalists, lawyers, and activists is, sometimes, it doesn’t begin as activism,” Anastasia Lin, a Miss World Canada winner, actress, and human rights advocate, told the Washington Examiner. They’re not thinking, OK, “This is what I’m going to do” and then become an activist, she said. “It’s more of an instinctual act of defiance, of courage, of knowing that it’s the right thing to do. Courage is an understatement.”

That, she thinks, was true in the case of Fang Bin, who shot to international attention after filming and uploading to the internet exactly what he was seeing: vans outside of the Wuhan hospital stacked with bodies. A similar story for Chen Quishi, who also posted a number of videos to the internet.

“So many dead.” Fang counted five, six, seven, eight body bags. “This is too many,” he said in a 40-minute video. Chen, too, started streaming videos — long hospital queues, ill patients.

This, Lin says, is an act of pure courage. “They’re not guided by the idea of freedom because it was not in their education.” They, like most Chinese citizens, “have lived under a totalitarian regime their whole lives and have been indoctrinated their whole lives by the Communist Party.”

But the Chinese people are increasingly no longer willing to be suppressed, she says, realizing their shared interest in the protection of human rights. Xi is aware that his real enemy is internal dissent. That’s why China’s spending budget on police and domestic surveillance far surpasses its military budget. Xi has a social-control model built on restricting and censoring user information and online access. It’s critical to the regime’s survival.

“What’s not unusual in Li’s silencing or other repression of people trying to share information about the novel coronavirus on social media is that Chinese police consistently and regularly detain, punish, and sentence people for sharing political, religious, social, and even humorous comments on applications like WeChat,” Sarah Cook, a senior research analyst for China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan at Freedom House, told the Washington Examiner. “And the [Chinese Communist Party] has a long track record of ordering tech firms and news outlets to censor or downplay breaking news related to health and safety.”

The “uptick” in detentions of ordinary citizens and netizens, however, does seem to be new during this coronavirus pandemic.

“What happened to Li Wenliang is just the tip of the iceberg,” Cook says. “China’s detention centers, jails, and, unfortunately, death counts, are chock-full of Li Wenliangs.”

Elisha Maldonado is a member of the New York Post editorial board and a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.