https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-journalism-coronavirus/
Protecting the Truth About the Coronavirus in ChinaTens of thousands of us
are working to save the articles and accounts of COVID-19 before Chinese
censors can delete them forever.
By Shen Lu <https://www.thenation.com/authors/shen-lu/> Today 5:59 am
[image: vigil-for-coronavirus-doctor-img]
<https://www.thenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/vigil-for-coronavirus-doctor-img.jpg>People
attend a vigil to mourn for doctor Li Wenliang, a Chinese ophthalmologist
who warned about the novel coronavirus. (Athony Kwan / Getty Images)
Since February 3, censors have deleted eight posts that I’ve shared on
Weibo—all of them about the COVID-19 outbreak. Gone is an analysis of
China’s governance written by high school students; a desperate message
from a Wuhan resident to the rest of China: “Even if you don’t care about
politics, politics will come after you”; screenshots of diary entries from
a Wuhan native on how her parents’ health deteriorated and they eventually
died from infection; and a plea from a rural Hubei health clinic for
medical supplies.
As China clamps back down on speech, it saddens me that there are human
stories about the crisis that might never be seen again. But I’m relieved
to know that volunteers worked together to save so many accounts and so
much of the courageous reporting. If the evidence always disappears, there
can never be any accountability.
As of February 18, the pneumonia-causing virus that emerged in December in
Wuhan, China, has killed more than 1,870
<https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200218-sitrep-29-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=6262de9e_2>
and sickened 72,528 in China. The World Health Organization reports
<https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situation-reports/20200216-sitrep-27-covid-19.pdf?sfvrsn=78c0eb78_2>
804 confirmed cases in 25 other countries. Getting around censorship on
Weibo and Douban is a familiar cat-and-mouse game. But the outrage on these
social media platforms is on a scale I’ve never seen before. The death of
Li Wenliang, a doctor reprimanded for warning about a dangerous new virus
that would later kill him, led to an outpouring of grief and rage and
sparked demands for freedom of speech
<https://twitter.com/muyixiao/status/1225526482497343489?s=20>. Authorities
responded by increasing censorship and launching propaganda campaigns.
For weeks, I have been glued to Chinese social media and Chinese-language
media. Some nights, I can’t sleep as I stay up to read the pleas of health
care workers for medical supplies and sick residents for treatment. I’ve
also been riveted by brave reporting: Chinese journalists uncovered the
government’s delayed response to the epidemic and the inability of the
local Red Cross chapter to distribute donated products. After
epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan confirmed human-to-human transmission on
January 20 and before pervasive censorship began in early February, there
was relative press freedom in China. During that window, I marveled at the
depth and breadth of the coverage. Hard-hitting investigations revealed the
extent of the crisis, and human-interest stories captured the range of
emotions. Yet, as a journalist on the China beat and a Chinese social media
user of over 10 years, I worried about the lifespan of the work; I knew
that anything challenging the government’s narrative or questioning how
authorities handled the epidemic could one day just vanish. Whenever I read
a piece that I thought might be deleted, I saved it to the Internet
Archive, a digital library that provides free access to collections of
digitized materials.
I was not alone in this effort. Tens of thousands of us have come together
to preserve what we read online. In late January, when I shared on Weibo
how to save content to the Internet Archive, more than 1,500 users shared
the simple instruction. (Mind you, I am not an influencer.) A few commented
under my post that they had been taking screenshots “like crazy” in an
effort to document pieces of information before they disappeared.
Around the same time, groups of volunteers in and outside of China started
their own archival efforts. On January 28, reports began circulating:
Government censors would start disappearing posts and gagging individual
social media accounts on February 3. Almost immediately, a Chinese college
student worked with others to publish a list of outstanding news coverage
by outlets, such as *Caixin* and *Sanlian Life Week*, as well as features
and critical op-eds published by personal accounts on WeChat and Weibo.
Knowing it would be valuable information for non-Chinese journalists and
researchers monitoring or covering the crisis, I shared
<https://twitter.com/shenlulushen/status/1224016430758268931?s=20> the list
on Twitter. One friend immediately started translating the headlines of the
articles, another began saving the articles as PDFs on her computer. Over
the weekend, a few of us archived the more than 100 articles and translated
the directory
<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1RqYvfEbLhcyH8rhw0xLpjc2w0JqPBQINzj3ORE-Jka0/edit?ts=5e386661>.
The goal was to keep it for historical record and amplify the work by
Chinese journalists who risked their health and careers to report from the
epicenter of a coronavirus outbreak.
Separately, another group began to save individual stories
<https://github.com/jiayiliujiayi/2020nCov_individual_archives> of those
suffering from disease or injustice. A few academics pursuing advanced
degrees in social sciences created a Telegram channel
<https://t.me/wuhancensored> called Cyber Graveyard, which archives and
broadcasts censored social media posts. Collections of Chinese news coverage
<https://github.com/2019ncovmemory/nCovMemory>, personal documentation, and
English-language media reports and academic papers
<https://github.com/Academic-nCoV/2019-nCoV/wiki> have also sprung up on
GitHub, a platform that hosts open-source projects.
Other volunteers are working to debunk
<https://new.qq.com/omn/20200212/20200212A05XZC00.html> rumors, translate
Chinese news and personal stories about the crisis into English, and count
<https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=DQSIkWdsW0yxEjajBLZtrQAAAAAAAAAAAAO__SfrIo5UOUtTTEI2NTJRR09LTVZCT1hDMU1aR0xTSy4u&from=timeline&isappinstalled=0>
cases of people who displayed symptoms but never received an official
COVID-19 diagnosis and are therefore not included in statistics. According
to a project that aggregates <https://weileizeng.github.io/OpenSourceWuhan/>
open-source projects related to the outbreak, more than 10,000 people have
contributed to efforts on GitHub to inform the public and document this
period of history.
In the past, the Communist Party has succeeded in manipulating the
collective memory by winnowing out evidence of sensitive events. This
archival work is a collective effort to avoid another national amnesia;
it’s a decentralized battle of the Chinese people against the government’s
attempts to crush their rights and freedoms. I’ve not seen anything like it
in my lifetime.
At the same time, some of the international press coverage and commentary
of COVID-19 has been profoundly alienating. One *Wall Street Journal* op-ed
headline called China “the Sick Man of Asia
<https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-the-real-sick-man-of-asia-11580773677>.”
*The New York Times* described China in a tweet (now deleted) as the “incubator
of deadly diseases
<https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gaeilV2IcnGoB_UEWb6fuTjx3Iv68f39/view?usp=sharing>.”
An *Economist* cover
<https://shop.economist.com/products/the-economist-in-print-or-audio-february-1st-2020>
depicted the globe wearing a face mask made of the Chinese national flag.
One *Bloomberg* article read, “China Sacrifices a Province to Save the World
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-05/china-sacrifices-a-province-to-save-the-world-from-coronavirus>.”
Other headlines started to call the Coronavirus just the “China Virus
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/energy/opec-underestimateschina-virus/2020/02/16/7550e864-5092-11ea-967b-e074d302c7d4_story.html>.”
Headlines and covers like these disregard the suffering of the Chinese
people. For many outside China, the COVID-19 crisis is just another
spectacle that sweeps into a country whose culture, ideology, governance
are distinctively different. Such content reawakens racist tropes that
Chinese people carry disease and are barbaric wild animal eaters,
furthering the spread of xenophobic ideas on and offline.
I spend far less time on Twitter as a result, and reserve my clicks for
on-the-ground news coverage. Worry, anger, sorrow, and dismay have consumed
my daily emotions as I watch my people suffering from afar. There’s little
energy left to grapple with sensationalist headlines and articles that are
lazy, insensitive, and dehumanizing, let alone to raise the underlying
issue of a lack of diversity in the newsrooms of mainstream media outlets.
But there is hope. Tens of thousands of Chinese people—and I believe that
number is likely much higher—are speaking up, exercising their civic
duties, and bearing witness to a crisis that the Chinese government has
sought to efface. It’s the people living under the authoritarian rule who
are protecting their collective memory of this tragedy and fighting for
their own autonomy.
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