CoronavirusHow China Is Controlling the COVID Origins Narrative — Silencing Critics and Locking Up Dissenters
Just over a year has gone by since the novel coronavirus first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan and the world still has many questions about where and how it originated. The Chinese government has greatly restrained any attempts to investigate the origins of COVID-19 — both internally and by foreign experts — while at the same time advocating alternate theories that the pandemic originated elsewhere. The top leadership sees control over this narrative as vital to its hold over the Chinese population and the boosting of its international reputation.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published on 13 January 2021, a few days before an international joint mission team led by the World Health Organization (WHO) went to Wuhan for a 2-week investigation into the zoonotic source of the outbreak.
Just over a year has gone by since the novel coronavirus first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan and the world still has many questions about where and how it originated.
The World Health Organization is sending a team to China this week to investigate the origins of the virus — which has now claimed nearly 2 million lives globally — but one health expert warns expectations for the visit should be set “very low”.
The Chinese government has greatly restrained any attempts to investigate the origins of COVID-19 — both internally and by foreign experts — while at the same time advocating alternate theories that the pandemic originated elsewhere.
The top leadership sees control over this narrative as vital to its hold over the Chinese population and the boosting of its international reputation.
The stakes could not be higher because Beijing has presented the Communist Party’s strong, centralized rule as the key to the country’s success at controlling the pandemic and reviving its economy.
This has been contrasted with disastrous efforts to control the disease in the US under the Trump administration. The state-run Global Times has called the US a “living hell”.
Against this backdrop, Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, says the WHO investigation team “will have to be politically savvy and draw conclusions that are acceptable to all the major parties.”
Citizen Journalists Disappear after Reporting the Truth
Part of controlling the Communist Party narrative has entailed the detention of many citizen journalists who sounded the alarm about the virus in its early days, exposed the government’s attempts to cover it up and criticized its early response to control it.
In late December, one of these independent journalists, Zhang Zhan, was sentenced to four years imprisonment for the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”.
A former lawyer, Zhang travelled to Wuhan in February to talk to people about how they were coping in lockdown. She shared videos and talked about what she observed, at one point noting the fear people felt toward the government was actually greater than their fear of the virus.
