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.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
RSS