Alexandre SCHIELE, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
We are now in the second year of a pandemic the epicenter of which has been located in Wuhan, Hebei, in the People’s Republic of China. At the beginning, a cluster of a mystery illness causing pneumonia-like symptoms in late 2019 against which modern medicine seemed powerless. Panic social media posts breached the Great Firewall of China. Dr. Li Wenliang was one of those voices. On 3 January 2020, mere days after his personal post, he was summoned by the police and forced to recant, promising not to continue “making false comments on the internet”, and to sign an official confession form. This infamous confession form, with three of his fingerprints, quickly made the rounds on the internet. He contracted Covid 19 a few days later, and died in early February. Authorities at all levels, fearing repercussions from above, attempted to suppress the bad news, keeping the central government in the dark and delaying the contingency plans developed after SARS in 2002-2004. It is only once the world voiced its grave doubts about the situation in Wuhan and its official handling that the central government imposed a strict lockdown which virtually cut Wuhan, and later Hubei, from the rest of the country and the world. In so doing, the central government attempted to hamper as much the spread of the virus as the spread of information, if not more. In the context of an overly positive media message with militaristic overtones, some bloggers, vloggers and other social media users started reporting on their daily life under quarantine, quickly to be nicknamed “citizen journalists” in the foreign media, becoming a go-to reference especially as China’s official numbers appeared incredibly low before ceasing to be reported to the WHO altogether. The most critical voices quickly disappeared and when they reappeared, they were condemned to lengthy prison sentences for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. Even during the WHO official mission to China in late 2020, China still refused to share its data, preferring instead to give them an organized tour replete with cultural events celebrating China’s victory over Covid 19, closely mirroring those celebrating military victories. The lack of transparency extending to its own vaccine development, the much lower efficiency of which compared to Pfizer and other vaccine was only revealed from trials in Brazil, although much hyped by China. Even more preoccupying, as the US President and QAnon conspiracists were disingenuously associating the virus with China to the point of suggesting that the virus had been weaponized in a Chinese lab, China replicated by trying to shift the blame to the outside world by implicating imported food packaging – long invalidated by the WHO -, but more nefariously by very early on giving weight to rumors accusing the US military of spreading it during the 2019 Military World Games which took place in Wuhan in late October 2019. This narrative has won in China…