I’m sure there are some people who think this sort of news suppression by China at the start of the pandemic was a good thing, because it stopped panic. Maybe. But it had a price. And the price was huge. Not so much in China itself, which seems have avoided the worst of Covid, but in the west, where the suppression led to millions of cases and thousands of deaths that could have been avoided.
In the New York Times the way China deployed its “50-cent army” to shut down information on the virus. Early on.
In the early hours of Feb. 7, China’s powerful internet censors experienced an unfamiliar and deeply unsettling sensation. They felt they were losing control.
The news was spreading quickly that Li Wenliang, a doctor who had warned about a strange new viral outbreak only to be threatened by the police and accused of peddling rumors, had died of Covid-19. Grief and fury coursed through social media. To people at home and abroad, Dr. Li’s death showed the terrible cost of the Chinese government’s instinct to suppress inconvenient information.
Yet China’s censors decided to double down. Warning of the “unprecedented challenge” Dr. Li’s passing had posed and the “butterfly effect” it may have set off, officials got to work suppressing the inconvenient news and reclaiming the narrative, according to confidential directives sent to local propaganda workers and news outlets. [Read on...]
H/t “Lockdown Sceptics”.
