Mick Hartley

Terry Glavin – Why we can't believe China on the coronavirus:

In China, people are told only whatever the Ministry of Public Security allows them to be told. A recent analysis by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China found that only 536 foreign journalists are accredited to work in China, but whatever facts they’re capable of reporting about the crisis will not be readily available to Chinese people, if at all. Among the online news sites blocked by China’s state censors are the BBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Economist, NBC News, Time, the Hong Kong Free Press, South China Morning Post, and so on. Also banned: Google, Human Rights Watch, Twitter, Facebook, Amnesty International, and on and on.

That’s why, after the Chinese government was finally forced to admit that there was a strange flu-like ailment killing people in Wuhan, it fell to courageous citizen journalists such as Chen Qiushi, a former human rights lawyer, to try to tell the Chinese public what was actually going on. Chen had made a name for himself last year after he travelled to Hong Kong to report on the mass pro-democracy uprising there. Although Chen’s social media accounts were soon deleted and all his reports from Hong Kong were scrubbed from the Internet, he somehow evaded imprisonment. But his luck ran out last Thursday in Wuhan.

Chen arrived on the last train in, just before the city of 11 million people was locked down on Jan. 24. He was regularly posting reports and videos on social media – front-line accounts from overflowing hospitals and morgues – until last Thursday. He was first to report that cab drivers in Wuhan were already aware as early as mid-December that some unmentionable malady was killing people in the city, and medical practitioners were dying from it.

Chen was picked up by police last Thursday evening. His family says he has been arbitrarily confined at some undisclosed quarantine location. He hasn’t been heard from since. The police aren’t saying anything.

Chen disappeared just as hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens were flooding social media, overwhelming the censors, with demands for free speech and freedom of information. The uproar came just hours after state authorities admitted that the prominent coronavirus whistleblower they had threatened with prosecution and attempted to silence, Dr. Li Wenliang, had succumbed to the sickness. Dr. Li had been forced to sign a letter confessing he had spread “untrue speech” when he warned his colleagues about the virus.  […]

And China continues to lie. “From the very beginning, we have adopted an attitude of being open and transparent to the outside,” Cong Peiwu, China’s ambassador to Canada, said last week. That’s the opposite of the truth. Also last week, Canada’s ambassador to China, Dominic Barton, uttered this incredible statement: “I commend what China is doing in trying to contain this.”

To believe that China’s conduct in this tragedy has been in any way commendable is to believe a lie. That Barton could say such a thing should tell you that you don’t have to be stuck in Wuhan to have some difficulty in knowing quite what to believe or who to trust.