When the Chinese doctor who warned the world about the COVID-19 suddenly succumbed to the deadly virus a massive censorship effort was launched to help the Chinese government maintain control of the narrative about the crisis within the country.
Dr. Li Wenliang died on February 7 and news of his death along with other events during the very early days of the virus outbreak were recently leaked to the public in an article from ProPublica and the New York Times.
The Chinese government appeared to be making the impact of the virus seem less severe by creating the illusion that government officials had a tighter grip on controlling the outbreak than they actually did.
At first Chinese officials may have been trying to prevent widespread panic but they failed to act during the six days between learning they had a pandemic on their hands and informing the public about it, even though hundreds of infected people were already showing up at hospitals during that time frame.
In the article jointly produced by ProPublica and the Times, a University of California at Berkeley professor claims that China’s propaganda and censorship operation is beyond any other nation in the world.
“This is a huge thing,” said Xiao Qiang, at UC Berkeley’s School of Information. “No other country has that.”
China was worried that news about the doctor’s death would set off a chain reaction of ensuing news stories that would damage the government, so they ordered news outlets not to promote stories about Wenliang and ordered social media sites to remove his name from trending topics.
Chinese censors also hired people to act as internet trolls to create “distracting chatter” to help influence the public’s opinion as the coronavirus became a bigger news story. Security personnel was also ordered to silence commentators whose views did not agree with those of the government.
According to the leaked documents a massive deployment of both people and technology and “presumably, lots of money” were spent to control the narrative.
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