As Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) toured the stricken city of Wuhan this week, setting the tone for an official narrative that China would win a “People’s War” against COVID-19, numerous social media users went to extraordinary lengths to make an alternative voice heard.
The effort to get around China’s censors and publish the words of Wuhan Central Hospital emergency room director Ai Fen (艾芬), the first to sound the alarm over the coronavirus, was among the most elaborate in an outpouring of dissent against the government narrative, as the outbreak exacts a devastating human and economic toll.
In a bid to fool censors’ artificial intelligence software, netizens translated an interview with Ai into at least five languages and reformatted it in at least 22 ways.
Photo: AP
The text was rendered backwards, into emojis, Braille, oracle bone script, Morse code, song sheets and even the Elvish language from Lord of the Rings.
“The scale and intensity of the pushback against propaganda during this virus outbreak is unprecedented,” Beijing Foreign Studies University media professor Zhan Jiang (展江) said.
“To some extent, the ‘404 system’ has collapsed temporarily,” he said, referring to the error message that appears when content has been moved or deleted. “It will bounce back into this seesaw game with the netizens.”
Under Xi, censorship has steadily tightened and National University of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy associate professor Alfred Wu (吳木鑾) expects that to continue.
“Aware that many are unhappy, it is in the nature of the [Chinese Communist] Party to adopt the strategy of offense as defense,” Wu said.
Xi acknowledged the suffering of those infected or forced to stay at home when he visited Wuhan.
“People under lengthy quarantine have some frustrations to vent,” which should be understood and tolerated, state television cited him as saying.
In the article that was repeatedly deleted and reposted, Ai recounted how, instead of taking early precautions after she warned others about the virus, the hospital chastised her for spreading rumors and causing panic — part of the suppression of early information that exacerbated the spread of SARS in 2002.
Xi, who was conspicuously absent from state media coverage in the outbreak’s early days, has become the face of the COVID-19 fight. After his Wuhan visit, Xinhua news agency posted a video entitled: “The People’s Leader commanding the decisive battle.”
After Xi visited a Wuhan hospital and stood in front of a red banner saying: “Resolutely winning the People’s War,” Fang Fang (方方), a Wuhan novelist who has gained a following by posting diary entries about life in a city under lockdown, wrote: “Remember, there is no win, only an end.”
The death from COVID-19 last month of Li Wenliang (李文亮), an ophthalmologist from the same Wuhan hospital and one of the eight given a police warning for circulating Ai’s message about the disease, triggered a rare outpouring of outrage against authorities.
The government ended up honoring Li among more than 500 “model healthcare workers.”
“A healthy society should have more than one voice,” Li said in a Caixin interview before his death from the coronavirus, in what became a rallying cry for free speech among Chinese netizens.
A rare view of public anger involving a top official went viral last week: a video showed residents of a Wuhan apartment complex accusing employees of staging the delivery of groceries to impress a high-level inspection tour, jeering: “It’s fake.”
Chinese Communist Party Wuhan Secretary Wang Zhonglin’s (王忠林) launch on Friday last week of a “gratitude education” campaign, asking residents to be thankful to Xi and the party, also triggered a backlash.
“Anyone with a conscience would not demand the people of Wuhan, still reeling from shock, to be grateful,” commentator Chu Zhaoxin (褚朝新) said in a WeChat article that went viral.
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