Chinese President Xi Jinping today demanded strict compliance with government tactics to contain the coronavirus while projecting confidence in the country’s ability to stop the spread of the outbreak.
“Currently, we are at the critical moment of controlling the epidemic,” the communist autocrat said on Wednesday. “Offenses jeopardizing disease control, including resistance to control measures, violence towards medical staff, counterfeiting medical materials, and the spreading of rumors must be severely curtailed.”
Chinese authorities have quarantined roughly 50 million people in Hubei province, where the coronavirus originated and developed into an emergency over the last several weeks, and have harnessed the regime’s high-tech surveillance state to track potential carriers of the virus. These countermeasures have been paired with heavy-handed efforts to manage China’s public image during the crisis, including through the arrests of people who sounded the alarm.
“China is confident and capable of containing the outbreak,” Xi said.
Those optimistic comments take on additional significance given that Xi, perhaps the most powerful Chinese Communist Party leader since Mao Zedong, manages his public image very carefully. The outbreak has been an embarrassment for the Chinese Communist Party, and local party officials blamed Beijing for impeding their ability to share information about the virus before it reached crisis levels.
“We have rolled out a variety of tools and features on the platform to help users stay safe and protect themselves against the ongoing Coronavirus epidemic,” WeChat, China’s the widely used and oft-censored messaging app, said last week. “Importantly, this includes debunking false rumors.”
The outbreak has stoked alarm around the world, especially in countries and territories nearest to mainland China. A medical union in Hong Kong went on strike this week to pressure the Beijing-backed local government to close the border, and Hong Kong prison officials are recruiting guards to help prison inmates make thousands of face masks a day.
At the same time, Beijing has sought to manage the international reaction to the outbreak, with Chinese diplomats accusing the United States of stoking “panic.”
“We believe overreaction, by adopting restriction … is not beneficial to international collaboration, and such measures may lead to more complicated outcomes and interfere with prevention and control efforts,” Chen Xu, a Chinese envoy at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, said at a World Health Organization briefing on Tuesday.
