Chinazism: China, Desperate to Stop Coronavirus, Turns Neighbor Against Neighbor

The authorities hunt for people from Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, encouraging citizens to inform on others. Even those without symptoms are being ostracized.
By Paul Mozur

A man who arrived from Hubei Province in China crossing the Jiujiang Yangtze River Bridge near a checkpoint in Jiujiang, Jiangxi Province.

GUANGZHOU, China — One person was turned away by hotel after hotel after he showed his ID card. 

Another was expelled by fearful local villagers. 

A third found his most sensitive personal information leaked online after registering with the authorities.
These outcasts are from Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province, which is at the center of a rapidly spreading viral outbreak that has killed more than 420 people in China and sent fear rippling around the world. 

They are pariahs in China, among the millions unable to go home and feared as potential carriers of the mysterious coronavirus.
All across the country, despite China’s vast surveillance network with its facial recognition systems and high-end cameras that is increasingly used to track its 1.4 billion people, the government has turned to familiar authoritarian techniques — like setting up dragnets and asking neighbors to inform on one another — as it tries to contain the outbreak.
It took the authorities about five days to contact Harmo Tang, a college student studying in Wuhan, after he returned to his hometown, Linhai, in eastern Zhejiang Province. 

Mr. Tang said he had already been under self-imposed isolation when local officials asked for his personal information, including name, address, phone number, identity card number and the date he returned from Wuhan. 

Within days, the information began to spread online, along with a list of others who returned to Linhai from Wuhan.
Local officials offered no explanation but returned a few days later to fasten police tape to his door and hang a sign that warned neighbors that a Wuhan returnee lived there. 

The sign included an informant hotline to call if anyone saw him or his family leave the apartment. 

Mr. Tang said he received about four calls a day from different local government departments.
“In reality there’s not much empathy,” he said. 

“It’s not a caring tone they’re using. It’s a warning tone. I don’t feel very comfortable about it.”
Of course, China has a major incentive to track down potential carriers of the disease. 

The Chinese coronavirus outbreak has put parts of the country under lockdown, brought the world’s second-largest economy to a virtual standstill and erected walls between China and the rest of the world.

A person suspected of having the coronavirus in Wuhan, China, was taken from an apartment last week.

Still, even some government officials called for understanding as concerns about prejudice spread. Experts warned such marginalization of an already vulnerable group could prove counterproductive, further damaging public trust and sending those who should be screened and monitored deeper underground.
“We are paying attention to this issue,” Ma Guoqiang, the Chinese Communist Party secretary of Wuhan, said at a news conference there last Tuesday.
“I believe that some people may label Hubei people or report them, but I also think most people will treat Hubei people with a good heart.”
While networks of volunteers and Christian groups have been vocal about offering help, many local leaders have focused efforts on finding and isolating people from Hubei. 

On big screens and billboards, propaganda videos and posters warn people to stay inside, wear masks and wash hands.
In the northern province of Hebei, one county offered bounties of 1,000 yuan, or about $140, for each Wuhan person reported by residents. 

Images online showed towns digging up roads or deputizing men to block outsiders. 

Some apartment-building residents barricaded the doors of their towers with China’s ubiquitous ride-share bikes.
In the eastern province of Jiangsu, quarantine turned to imprisonment after authorities used metal poles to barricade shut the door of a family recently returned from Wuhan. 

To get food, the family relied on neighbors who lowered provisions with a rope down to their back balcony, according to a local news report.
Scared for the safety of his children as conditions at home worsened, Andy Li, a tech worker from Wuhan traveling with his family in Beijing, rented a car and began driving south to Guangdong, an effort to find refuge with relatives there. 

In Nanjing, he was turned away from one hotel before getting a room at a luxury hotel.
There he set up a self-imposed family quarantine for four days, until local authorities ordered all people from Wuhan to move to a hotel next to the city’s central rail station. 

Mr. Li said the quarantine hotel did not seem to be doing a good job isolating people. 

Food delivery workers came and went, while gaps in the doors and walls allowed drafts in.
“They’re only working to separate Wuhan people from Nanjing people,” Mr. Li said. 

“They don’t care at all if Wuhan people infect each other.”
To help, he stuffed towels and tissues under the door to block the drafts.
“I’m not complaining about the government," Mr. Li said. 

“There will always be loopholes in policy. But in a selfish way I’m just really worried about my children.”

Delivering packages protected by a mask and special suit in Wuhan.

Across the country, the response from local authorities often resembles the mass mobilizations of the Mao era rather than the technocratic, data-driven wizardry depicted in propaganda about China’s emerging surveillance state. 

They have also turned to techniques Beijing used to fight the outbreak of SARS, another deadly disease, in 2002 and 2003, when China was much less technologically sophisticated.
Checkpoints to screen people for fevers have popped up at tollbooths, at the front gates of apartment complexes and in hotels, grocery stores and train stations. 

Often those wielding the thermometer guns don’t hold them close enough to a person’s forehead, generating unusually low temperature readings. 

Such checks were worthless, for instance, against one man in the western province of Qinghai, whom police are investigating on suspicion that he covered up his symptoms to travel.
Authorities have used computerized systems that track ID cards — which must be used to take most long-distance transport and stay in hotels — to round up people from Wuhan. 

Yet one article about the ID system in The People’s Daily, the mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party, included a plea to all passengers on affected flights and trains to report themselves.
The campaigns have turned life upside down in unexpected ways. 

Jia Yuting, a 21-year-old student in Wuhan, had already been back in her hometown in central China for 18 days — longer than the 14-day quarantine period — when she got news her grandfather was sick in a nearby village. 

During a visit to see him, she followed local instructions broadcast on speakers in the village and registered her personal details with the local Communist Party Committee.
When a middle-school teacher randomly reached out to her on the messaging app WeChat to inquire about her health, she realized her data had been leaked online and was spreading on a list. 

Later, she received a threatening phone call from a man who lived in her home city.

Checkpoints where people’s temperatures are checked, though sometimes not carefully, have proliferated.

“Why did you come back Wuhan? You should have stayed there. You Wuhan dog!” she recalled him saying.
Authorities offered her no explanation for how it happened, and insisted such leaks did not disrupt her regular life. 

Three days after her visit to the village, her grandfather died. 

Local officials there immediately told her family that she would not be allowed to return to the village to pay her final respects at a funeral that was taking place more than three weeks after she had returned from Wuhan.
“I feel that the villagers are ignorant and the government isn’t helping; instead it’s leaking the information everywhere without telling them that I don’t have any symptoms,” she said, adding that she felt guilty she could not be there to comfort her grandmother.
“I was very close to my grandfather. I think it’s not humane — it’s cruel.”

Containing the Coronavirus: Countries Limit Travel to China

With cases spiking in China and early signs of a spread outside Asia, Hong Kong severely cut back transportation to the mainland.

By Paul Mozur

Medical workers at a checkpoint near the border of Hubei Province on Tuesday.

HONG KONG — Countries, cities and businesses across the globe issued new travel warnings on Tuesday, vastly expanding a cordon intended to control the flow of people to and from China, where the authorities are struggling to contain the outbreak of the new coronavirus.
In the most drastic measure to limit travel, the Hong Kong authorities reduced by half the number of flights and shut down rail service to mainland China, and they also limited visas — moves that could inspire other governments to follow suit.
Measures to contain the outbreak of the virus to its epicenter in Hubei Province appear to have failed to stop the contagion.
On Wednesday morning, Chinese officials said the number of cases had increased by nearly a third overnight. 

Experts warned that the actual number of cases could be significantly higher and growing quickly. The number of deaths attributed to the virus also continued to grow.
The new travel restrictions put a deeper freeze on China’s contact with the world, cutting off business and tourism as China’s economy faces a potential slowdown.
With China’s Lunar New Year holiday nearing its end, companies ordered workers to stay home and avoid travel. 

The economic impact of such measures pointed to a deeper political crisis, with many people accusing the Chinese authorities online of failing to act quickly to contain the virus, even as the government continues to struggle to control its spread.
The travel advisories and bans came as the virus showed early signs of spreading outside China, with cases of transmission to people who had not recently traveled to China reported in Japan, Germany and Vietnam. 

Countries across the world may now be faced with the task of limiting the spread of the disease on their own soil, not simply seeking to identify and quarantine infected people who had been in China.

Disinfecting a Thai Airways airplane near Suvarnabhumi Airport in Thailand.

Officials at the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned against nonessential travel to China, noting that there is “limited access to adequate medical care in affected areas.” 

The United States is expanding the screening of travelers arriving from Wuhan to 20 airports and other ports of entry, from five, federal officials said on Tuesday.
The World Health Organization revised its global risk assessment for the outbreak from “moderate” to “high,” although it noted this shift in a footnote buried in a report published on Monday. 

The change in the risk assessment, which coincided with a visit to China by the organization’s director general, risked confusing the public about the severity of the outbreak, which has killed more than 130 people in China and been diagnosed in at least 14 countries.

The pro-China World Health Organization was criticized after it refused twice in recent days to declare the outbreak a global emergency, despite its spread.
With other countries scrambling to evacuate their citizens from the locked-down epicenter of the outbreak in central China, the WHO said its director general, Beijing puppet Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, had discussed with Chinese officials “possible alternatives to evacuation of foreigners if there are ways to accommodate them and protect their health.”
Although Chinese medical workers have described a desperate need for more resources to treat thousands of new patients, state-run Chinese media reported that Tedros had spoken highly of the Chinese efforts to contain the virus. 

The Chinese authorities agreed on Tuesday to allow in teams of international experts, coordinated by the World Health Organization, to help with research and containment.

A hospital under construction in Wuhan that will treat people infected with the coronavirus.

Chinese officials said Wednesday that 132 people had died from the virus, up from 106 the day before. 

The total number of confirmed cases rose sharply as well, to 5,974 on Wednesday, according to the National Health Commission.
The youngest confirmed patient is a 9-month-old girl in Beijing. 

While the majority of confirmed cases were in Hubei, where a number of cities have been put under effective lockdown, an additional 1,800 cases have been diagnosed outside the province, the authorities said.
In Wuhan, medical workers have cited a lack of masks and kits to test for the virus. 

China’s medical products administration said on Sunday it had approved new virus detection kits to speed detection, but three Chinese medical companies said they did not have the capacity to produce enough of them, according to local news media reports.
Many in Wuhan with symptoms of the virus have not been tested or have been told the hospitals did not have enough test kits, some local residents said.
During a visit to Wuhan on Monday, Li Keqiang promised to provide more equipment, and the local government has begun building new hospitals that it hopes to open in a matter of weeks. 

But online, many people mocked the government’s efforts.
In indications of the virus’s spread beyond China’s borders, Thailand reported 14 cases of infection, while the United States and Australia have each confirmed five cases. 

Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia each said they had confirmed four cases.

Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare, which has now confirmed six cases, said that the virus had been found in the first Japanese citizen. 

The ministry said he had worked as a bus driver for two different tour groups from Wuhan. 

He had no history of traveling to Wuhan.
The man, who had driven for the tours earlier this month, first reported experiencing chills, a cough and joint pain on Jan. 14. 

He visited a clinic three days later, but was sent home. 

On Jan. 22, his joint pain and cough grew worse, and he returned to a health clinic on Saturday, when a chest X-ray showed abnormalities and he was admitted to a hospital. 

A test confirmed the coronavirus on Tuesday.
German officials said Tuesday that they had identified what they believed was the first instance of the virus spreading within Europe. 

They said a man from Starnberg in Bavaria was infected and was being treated and kept in isolation. The health ministry described him as being in “good condition” medically and said it was also monitoring his family and other people who might have been exposed, including in his children’s day care center.
“It was to be expected that the virus would come to Germany,” Jens Spahn, Germany’s health minister, said in a statement on Tuesday. 

“But the Bavarian case shows us that we are well prepared.” 

He said the risk to Germans remained low.
Japan planned to send a chartered plane to Wuhan on Tuesday night to bring back the first Japanese citizens who wish to be repatriated. 

At least 13 countries have said they would evacuate their citizens from Wuhan, where the virus is believed to have been transmitted from animals to humans.
Businesses that operate in China have issued warnings of their own. 

In a flurry of emails sent in recent days, General Motors, Honeywell, Bloomberg, Facebook and other companies have warned employees not to travel within mainland China.

A shopping area in Beijing, normally busy during the Chinese New Year, was nearly empty on Tuesday.

Honeywell, which has offices and operations across China, said it had restricted travel to some regions, but did not specify which ones. 

A spokesman for General Motors said the company had issued a global travel ban to China, with only “business-critical” travel allowed and only after clearance from a doctor. 

Bloomberg told its employees in Hong Kong and mainland China to work remotely until further notice and it restricted travel to China and Hong Kong over the next 30 days, according to an email seen by The New York Times.
The Chinese government has extended the Lunar New Year holiday until Feb. 3, with some of China’s biggest cities telling businesses not to open until the following week. 

China’s biggest technology companies went further, notifying employees to work from home until Feb. 10. 

NetEase, an internet and entertainment platform, asked employees who were returning from another city to quarantine themselves for 14 days.
Investors in Asia were gripped on Tuesday with fear about the health of the global economy for a second day, with a widespread sell-off continuing in the markets. 

Investors dumped stocks in companies thought to be most vulnerable to the effects of the virus.
“The coronavirus is the No. 1 threat to financial markets currently as global investors are becoming jittery on the uncertainty,” said Nigel Green, founder of an investment company, the deVere Group.
In Hong Kong, medical professionals called for additional border checkpoints.
“The next week or two will be a critical time for the development of the epidemic,” the faculty at the Chinese University of Hong Kong wrote on its Facebook page. 

“We must closely monitor whether there is a community outbreak outside Hubei Province, especially in Hong Kong’s neighboring regions.”

A checkpoint on the outskirts of Beijing.

As Virus Spreads, Anger Floods Chinese Social Media

The sheer volume of criticism of the government, and the clever ways that critics dodge censors, are testing Beijing’s ability to control the narrative.
By Raymond Zhong

In Beijing on Sunday, riders wearing protective masks cycle on a nearly empty street that is normally busy wih tourists.

SHANGHAI — Recently, someone following the coronavirus crisis through China’s official news media would see lots of footage, often set to stirring music, praising the heroism and sacrifice of health workers marching off to stricken places.
But someone following the crisis through social media would see something else entirely: vitriolic comments and mocking memes about government officials, harrowing descriptions of untreated family members and images of hospital corridors loaded with patients, some of whom appear to be dead.


CGTN
✔@CGTNOfficial
137 medical personnel head for Hubei from north China's Shanxi
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7:07 AM - Jan 27, 2020

The contrast is almost never so stark in China. 

The government usually keeps a tight grip on what is said, seen and heard about it. 

But the sheer amount of criticism — and the often clever ways in which critics dodge censors, such as by referring to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping, as “Trump” or by comparing the outbreak to the Chernobyl catastrophe — have made it difficult for Beijing to control the message.
In recent days, critics have pounced when officials in the city of Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, wore their protective masks incorrectly. 

They have heaped scorn upon stumbling pronouncements. 

When Wuhan’s mayor spoke to official media on Monday, one commenter responded, “If the virus is fair, then please don’t spare this useless person.”
The condemnations stand as a rare direct challenge to the Communist Party, which brooks no dissent in the way it runs China. 

In some cases, Chinese leaders appear to be acknowledging people’s fear, anger and other all-too-human reactions to the crisis, showing how the party can move dramatically, if sometimes belatedly, to mollify the public.
Such criticism can go only so far, however. 

Some of China’s more commercially minded media outlets have covered the disease and the response thoroughly if not critically. 

But articles and comments about the virus continue to be deleted, and the government and internet platforms have issued fresh warnings against spreading what they call “rumors.”
“Chinese social media are full of anger, not because there was no censorship on this topic, but despite strong censorship,” said Xiao Qiang, a research scientist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder of China Digital Times, a website that monitors Chinese internet controls. 

“It is still possible that the censorship will suddenly increase again, as part of an effort to control the narrative.”
When China’s leaders battled the SARS virus in the early 2000s, social media was only just beginning to blossom in the country. 

The government covered up the disease’s spread, and it was left to journalists and other critics to shame the authorities into acknowledging the scale of the problem.
Today, smartphones and social media make it harder for mass public health crises to stay buried. 

But internet platforms in China are just as easily polluted with false and fast-moving information as they are everywhere else. 

During outbreaks of disease, Beijing’s leaders have legitimate reason to be on alert for quack remedies and scaremongering fabrications, which can cause panic and do damage.

Li Keqiang, center, visiting a supermarket in Wuhan on Monday.

In recent days, though, Beijing seems to be reasserting its primacy over information in ways that go beyond mere rumor control. 

At a meeting this past weekend between Xi and other senior leaders, one of the measures they resolved to take against the virus was to “strengthen the guidance of public opinion.”
Wang Huning, the head of the Communist Party’s publicity department and an influential party ideologue, was also recently named deputy head of the team in charge of containing the outbreak, behind only China’s premier, Li Keqiang.
Chinese officials seem to recognize that social media can be a useful tool for feeling out public opinion in times of crisis. 

WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging platform, said over the weekend that it would crack down hard on rumors about the virus. 

But it also created a tool for users to report tips and information about the disease and the response.
Internet backlash may already have caused one local government in China to change course on its virus-fighting policies. 

The southern city of Shantou announced on Sunday that it was stopping cars, ships and people from entering the city, in a policy that echoed ones in Wuhan. 

But then word went around that the decision had led people to panic-buy food, and by the afternoon, the order had been rescinded.
Nowhere has the local government been the target of more internet vitriol than in Hubei Province, where Wuhan is the capital.
After the Hubei governor, Wang Xiaodong, and other officials there gave a news briefing on Sunday, web users mocked Wang for misstating, twice, the number of face masks that the province could produce. 

They circulated a photo from the briefing of him and two other officials, pointing out that one of them did not cover his nose with his mask, that another wore his mask upside down and that Wang did not wear a mask at all.
On Monday, social media users were similarly unrelenting toward Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang.
During an interview Zhou gave to state television, commenters in live streams unloaded on him, with one writing: “Stop talking. We just want to know when you will resign.”
Top authorities may be deliberately directing public anger toward officials in Hubei and Wuhan as a prelude to their resigning and being replaced. 

Many other targets within the Chinese leadership seem to remain off limits.
This month, as news of the coronavirus emerged but Xi did not make public appearances to address it, people on the social platform Weibo began venting their frustration in veiled ways, asking, “Where’s that person?”

Masks offer a visible reminder of China’s struggle with the coronavirus. A Chinese couple took a selfie while overlooking the Forbidden City in Beijing on Sunday.

But even those comments were deleted. 

So users started replacing Xi’s name with “Trump.” 

As in, “I don’t want to go through another minute of this year, my heart is filled with pain, I hope Trump dies.”Other people hungering to express frustration have taken to the Chinese social platform Douban, which has been flooded recently by user reviews for “Chernobyl,” the hit television series about the Soviet nuclear disaster.
“In any era, any country, it’s the same. Cover everything up,” one reviewer wrote on Monday.
“That’s socialism,” wrote another.
Some Chinese news outlets have been able to report incisively on the coronavirus. 

The influential newsmagazine Caixin has put out rigorous reporting and analysis. 

The Paper, a digital news outlet that is overseen by Shanghai’s Communist Party Committee, published a chilling video about a Wuhan resident who couldn’t find a hospital that would treat him and ended up wandering the streets.
Mr. Xiao, the Chinese internet expert, said the central authorities long gave such outlets special leeway to cover certain topics in ways that official media cannot. 

But the outlets should not be viewed as independent of the government, he said, calling their coverage “planned and controlled publicity” from the authorities.
Even outside the digital realm, it is not hard to find people in China who remain unsure of whether to trust what their government is telling them about the outbreak.
Chen Pulin, a 78-year-old retiree, was waiting outside a Shanghai hospital recently while his daughter was inside being tested for the virus. 

When word of the disease first began trickling out, he immediately had doubts about whether officials were being forthcoming about it.
“Even now, the government seems to be thinking about the economy and social stability,” Mr. Chen said. 

“Those things are important, but when it comes to these infectious diseases, stopping the disease should come first.”

In Coronavirus, a Battle That Humbles China’s Dictator

Chinese communists have stepped up its response to the Wuhan crisis, but the effort has been plagued by bu
reaucracy and a lack of transparency.
By Steven Lee Myers and Chris Buckley

People wearing protective masks at the Tiananmen Gate in Beijing on Friday amid the coronavirus outbreak.

BEIJING — It took thousands of infections and scores of deaths from a mysterious virus for China’s authoritarian leader to publicly say what had become glaringly obvious to many in recent weeks: The country is facing a grave public health crisis.
After his declaration, the dictator, Xi Jinping, put China on a virtual war footing to cope with the unfolding epidemic of the coronavirus. 

He convened an extraordinary session of the Communist Party’s top political body, issuing orders for handling the crisis with the crisp, somber stoicism of a field marshal.
“We’re sure to be able to win in this battle,” he proclaimed on Saturday before his six grim-faced colleagues on the party’s Politburo Standing Committee.

Compared to the very low bar set by the Chinese leadership’s secrecy and inaction during the SARS epidemic in 2002 and 2003, Xi has responded with speed and alacrity to the latest health emergency, a pneumonialike virus that at last official count has killed at least 80, sickened thousands in China and spread around the world.
But there are also signs that the government, especially at the regional level in Hubei Province, the source of the outbreak, was slow to recognize the danger and is continuing to mishandle the crisis. 

Public health experts have asked whether the sweeping travel restrictions that have been imposed are leaving people without access to medical care, while Chinese remain unconvinced the government is being completely forthcoming about the toll of the disease.
“Substantively, the response this time is more or less the same,” said Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. 

“Local officials downplayed the outbreak at the initial, but crucial, stage of the outbreak. The media was muzzled. The public was kept in the dark. As a result, valuable time was lost.”

Wuhan Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Spread of the Outbreak. The virus has sickened more than 2,900 people in China and a handful in other countries.


The turnaround from complacency to nationwide mobilization typifies how China can respond to unexpected crisis like a lumbering giant, reluctant to stir, but then capable of shattering urgency.

It represents both sides of the authoritarian political bargain under Xi.
A fear of upsetting the party’s protocols and leaders’ desire for unruffled stability can deter even officials who want to do well by the public. 

Conversely, the government can operate with brutal aggressivity when it wants.
It was only after a brief written statement under Xi’s name on Jan. 20, when he was touring a military base and shopping exposition in Yunnan Province, that the vast Chinese state bureaucracy began to shudder into action.
Paramedics transporting a man believed to be Hong Kong’s first Wuhan coronavirus patient last week.

Officials then quickly acknowledged the dangers of the coronavirus and ordered drastic measures to stop the spread — belatedly — including the lockdown of much of the province where the epidemic emerged, penning in 56 million people. 

The government also ordered the construction of two hospitals in Wuhan to deal exclusively with patients afflicted with the coronavirus, which are expected to open within days, not months or years.
“The thing about China is that they can mobilize agencies and resources faster than anybody else can,” said Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney and author of “Xi Jinping: The Backlash.” 

“The other side is that they can conceal things.”
“In China there is no independent entity that can get on the front foot and disseminate information,” he added.

From a localized medical mystery a few weeks ago, the coronavirus has erupted as one of the most complex and unpredictable tests for Xi since he came to power more than seven years ago. 

Over that time, he has by some measures established himself as the most authoritarian Chinese leader since Mao Zedong.
The epidemic and the effectiveness of the government’s response remain subject to many unknowns, but the outbreak comes at a time when Xi has already been facing quiet whispers about his political acumen. 

In the past year, he has experienced repeated setbacks on some of the most vital issues on his agenda.

A crowded railway station in Beijing last week. The Chinese government issued a number of travel restrictions around central China.

Protests against China’s tightening grip continue to convulse Hong Kong. 

Rancor with Washington was only partly eased by a trade deal that some said required China to promise too many concessions. 

Two weeks ago, voters in Taiwan, the island democracy that Xi has made clear should join a greater China, resoundingly re-elected a president despised by Beijing.
Xi’s sheer dominance, according to several experts and political insiders, may be contributing to his problems by hampering internal debate that could help avoid misjudgments. 

Beijing, for example, has underestimated the staying power of the protesters in Hong Kong and the public support behind them.“It’s a paradox,” said Rong Jian, an independent scholar of Chinese politics in Beijing. 

“It’s precisely because Xi is so powerful that policy problems often arise — nobody dares disagree, and problems are spotted too late.”
While state and local officials have been criticized, the public health system has been credited with responding effectively, particularly compared to the response to the SARS crisis.
In that case, officials covered up the extent of the viral outbreak for months, almost certainly abetting its spread and exacerbating the death toll, which reached nearly 800.
This time, even as officials in Wuhan said nothing publicly, government scientists shared information with the World Health Organization on the last day of 2019, isolated the virus, and posted details about it on an international database 10 days later.
That allowed experts from around the world to quickly conclude that the new coronavirus, like the one from SARS, had very likely originated in bats and made the leap to humans through infection of another mammal in a market in Wuhan.

Medical staff outside a hospital in Wuhan on Saturday. China deployed medical specialists in the region to combat the outbreak.

Xi’s government, despite its call to arms, has already undercut people's trust.
On the local level in Wuhan, people have vented anger and frustration, which is percolating on social media despite censorship. 

In widely circulated, and then censored, comments, a senior journalist with The Hubei Daily, the province’s main party newspaper, called for a change of leadership in Wuhan.
“With this extraordinarily grim situation worsening and expanding by the day, those currently in office lack that commanding leadership,” the journalist, Zhang Ouya, wrote on Sina.com Weibo, a popular Chinese social media service.
There is evidence, too, that the local authorities kept a lid on the crisis in the first days of January so as not to upset the cheerful tone for a provincial legislative session that is a highlight of the local political cycle.
“This year will be a major landmark year,” Wang Xiaodong, the provincial governor, told the legislative members. 

“Let us unite even more closely around the party central leadership with Comrade Xi Jinping at the core.”

A near-empty street in Wuhan on Sunday.

Wang is now widely accused of underplaying the virus threat.
“China is a much more decentralized place than it appears,” said David Cowhig, a former American diplomat who served 10 years in China and monitored health and science issues.
“Local officials have great discretion; China is a coalition of ‘little’ Big Brothers,” he said. 

“Xi realizes this and is trying to re-centralize China.”
Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations who studies China, said that the centralization of power since the SARS crisis did not appear to have strengthened expertise at the local level or the willingness of underequipped regional hospitals to report.
“I think the central health authorities are trying to be more transparent,” he said, “but the local government remains loath to share disease related information in a timely and accurate manner.”
Not all the blame can fall on the officials in Wuhan.
The central authorities still control the political and propaganda apparatus, which has sought to minimize the severity of the crisis. 

Before the standing committee’s meeting on Saturday, Xi and other senior officials went about their business as if there were no crisis, appearing at a banquet on Thursday in the Great Hall of the People to celebrate the Lunar New Year.When he did speak, Xi emphasized the need for preserving public stability.
The phrase alludes to the fear of popular unrest boiling over, which is, as ever, the party state’s highest priority. 

It could become a reality if the epidemic, as predicted, inflicts sustained hardship on the economy and people’s livelihood.
“The truth is in a public-health emergency, it’s not just the medical professionals who matter,” Mr. McGregor said. 

“It’s the management of it in the government and in the public that matters, too. It’s hard to argue that they’ve done that well.”

Chinese are selling poisoned darts to kill dogs for meat

Chinese gang sold 200,000 syringes modified for use as darts

Agence France-Presse in Shanghai

Dogs in cages are sold by vendors at a market during a dog meat festival in Yulin.

Poisoned syringes that could be fired at dogs on the street to kill them instantly were sold by a gang in China, allowing pets to be snatched and sold for the dinner table, according to state media.
Police in the eastern province of Anhui arrested eight people, alleging they sold 200,000 of the syringes across the country filled with a large dose of the muscle relaxant suxamethonium.
The buyers were mainly dog vendors who collect and sell the animals to restaurants for meat, Xinhua news agency said, citing police who warned that people who ate the meat were also in danger of being poisoned.
The needles were modified by the gang with a spring and tailfin so they could be shot from a distance.
After buying the needles, unscrupulous dog dealers would target pets, then abduct them.
Police were searching for more of the syringes, which contained enough suxamethonium to kill the animals immediately.
When police raided the gang’s lair in Enshi City, central Hubei province, in October, they found 4kg of chemical powder, 10,000 needles and 100,000 yuan (£11,200).

Axis of Evil

Now China comes for the lawyers
The Washington Post

Human rights activist Jiang Tianyong. 
CHINA’S CRACKDOWN on lawyers and human rights defenders is not a single event but a rolling onslaught. 

Last month, three prominent rights activists were detained by police in separate provinces. 

What makes these detentions so pernicious is that China’s security apparatus has targeted the backbone of the rights movement: lawyers and defenders who represent the accused. 

The latest detentions are part of Xi Jinping’s broader campaign to snuff out opposition to the ruling party-state wherever it can be found.
Liu Feiyue, one of the activists recently arrested, started a website in 2006, Civil Rights & Livelihood Watch, or Minsheng Guancha. 

The website has documented protests, land seizures, detentions and other human rights violations that often go unreported by the official Chinese news media. 

Mr. Liu’s website, one of the few located on the mainland to courageously expose such stories, was blocked in China soon after it was launched. 

He was undeterred.
For two decades, Mr. Liu has been repeatedly detained, harassed and put under surveillance by the authorities. 

He was routinely taken in during politically sensitive events such as sessions of the Chinese party congress and legislature. 

But this time, the charges appear to be more serious. 

He was detained in mid-November in the central Chinese province of Hubei and police informed his relatives the charges were “incitement to subvert state power,” which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison and is frequently used to silence journalists and dissidents. 

An unnamed volunteer in his group told Radio Free Asia that Mr. Liu is being prosecuted for accepting overseas funding to run his activities, but did not provide details. 

The overall crackdown has included new laws that impose sharp restrictions on foreign nongovernmental organizations that work in China.
Also detained recently was prominent lawyer Jiang Tianyong, a leader of the China Human Rights Lawyers Group, who disappeared Nov. 21 when he had been due to board a train from the city of Changsha in Hunan province to Beijing. 

He had been in Changsha attempting to visit the wife of a fellow attorney who was among those taken in a wave of arrests of lawyers that began in July 2015. 

Mr. Jiang’s clients have included the blind lawyer-activist Chen Guangcheng, now living in the United States.
Yet another rights activist, Huang Qi, the Sichuan-based founder and director of a human rights group called 64 Tianwang, was taken from his home Nov. 28 by police. 

He, too, has been detained and imprisoned several times for his work and his website is blocked inside China. 

A volunteer, Pu Fei, initially published news of his detention on Twitter, but that message was deleted and Mr. Pu has also disappeared.
Every effort must be made to speak up for those who are hustled away in the middle of the night. President Donald Trump has shown little interest in human rights, but after he takes office he should not remain silent about these cases, because silence only encourages more repression.