In 2014, Chinese president Xi Jinping created the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Also known as the State Internet Information Office (SIIO), the agency is in charge of internet regulation and cyberspace security. Essentially, the agency looks after internet censorship and propaganda and answers to the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
This is a role it embraced thoroughly after the first case of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan in 2019, and the subsequent outbreak. By January 10, 2020, the WHO was comparing the outbreak to the 2002 SARS outbreak in China, but the CAC was doing something entirely different – censoring “#WuhanSARS” and investigating Chinese citizens for “spreading rumors.” One such citizen was Dr. Li Wenliang, now known as a whistleblower who warned the world about the novel coronavirus before falling victim to it.
On December 30, 2019, Dr. Wenliang warned his colleagues about possible infection and encouraged wearing protective equipment. However, this precaution on a group chat was met with a big response – from the police. Not only was Dr. Wenliang called in to the Public Security Bureau, but he was made to sign a letter in which he was accused of “making false comments” and “severely disturb(ing) the social order.”
On January 10, Dr. Wenliang began coughing. On January 11, he had a fever. Two days later, he was admitted to the hospital. On January 30, a month after his initial warning, he was diagnosed with what is now known as COVID-19. On February 7, Dr. Wenliang died. Even then, China’s censorship did not stop. In fact, the CAC doubled down, ordered news outlets not to report on the doctor’s death, had social media platforms remove his name from the trending page, and tried to flood websites with comments to drown out any dissent.
Since then, China’s efforts did not cease. It used Artificial Intelligence (AI) to censor all mentions of COVID-19, including synonyms and semantically related words. In fact, a report from the Citizen Lab showed that China’s censorship included at least 516 terms that could be traced back to COVID-19.
Although China insists that it notified the U.S. about control measures and the virus’s progress 30 times in the span of a month (January 3 to February 3, 2020), it did not even acknowledge human-to-human transmission until January 20, 2020. It is this denial of human-to-human transmission that led to the outbreak spreading across the globe without any control measures.
China’s control of the narrative has resulted in a global pandemic, millions of jobs lost, and countless lives ended. While China itself is not to blame for the pandemic, their poor handling of the situation has certainly not helped. Even after a delegation from the World Health Organization visited Wuhan to investigate the initial weeks of the virus, the world still doesn’t have answers. While it isn’t clear whether the pandemic could have been avoided altogether, one thing is certain – openness and cooperation from the start may have made a drastic difference in the world’s response to it.
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