By Helen Raleigh
Thursday, March 19, 2020
Three Chinese citizen journalists have gone missing in
recent months. They are presumed to have been detained by Chinese authorities
after posting videos on social media documenting the reality of the ongoing
coronavirus pandemic.
The most recent Chinese citizen journalist to suffer this
fate was Li Zehua. Li was living a picture-perfect life. After graduating from
one of China’s best universities, he began working as a news anchor for China’s
most important and prominent state TV station, CCTV. At the age of 25, handsome
and thriving, Li was a rising star. Had he stayed within the boundaries the
Chinese authorities have drawn and not raised concerns over the topics that
Beijing deemed “sensitive,” he might have lived a good, prosperous life. The
coronavirus has changed everything — at least for Li and many like-minded young
adults in China.
Unlike their parents’ and grandparents’ generations,
today’s young Chinese have no living memories of the atrocities that the
Chinese Communist Party has committed since 1949. Massive famine and poverty,
minuscule food rations, and millions of people who perished are now a part of
history that has gone up in flames, never to be spoken of again. The Chinese
authorities have made sure that Communist China’s history, from 1949 to 1989
(including the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre), is scraped clean or reduced to
just a few historically inaccurate paragraphs. Today’s young Chinese grew up
with little to no awareness of what has happened, not knowing that the glorious
Communist China sits on the corpses of millions of innocent people.
With neither living memories nor historical knowledge,
young Chinese today do not see the CCP as an evildoer. They grew up in a China
that has been a rising world power with signs of prosperity and modernity
everywhere. The social contract the Chinese government has offered to them —
limited freedom in exchange for stability and prosperity — appears to have
worked out well for almost every citizen. So what if they can’t access a few
Western social-media sites such as Facebook and Twitter? Western-style
democracy wouldn’t work in China anyway, the CCP has told them.
But the spread of the coronavirus has exposed the
Achilles’ heel of this social contract. When everyone has the potential to be
infected, when they hear stories of people who had to walk an hour to seek
treatment only to be turned away, when they read the countless pleas for help
and heartbreaking stories online, and when they see videos of overcrowded
hospitals and overworked medical staff, they see the façade of stability and
prosperity crumbling right before their eyes. They are hungry for information.
They want to know how to protect themselves and their families. In the past,
the search for information and truth would always eventually run up against a
wall, and they would just give up. However, the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, one
of the handful of early whistleblowers on the coronavirus outbreak, awakened
many Chinese, especially the young. They finally realized that the stability
and prosperity they were promised and for which they gave up their freedom was
nothing but a beautifully wrapped lie.
This is a generation that grew up with the abundance of
social media, a generation that is constantly influenced by Western cultures
through fashion, music, movies, and YouTube videos. They value freedom of
expression. Like young people in the West, they want to instantly share with
the world what they see and how they feel. They grew up with electronic
gadgets; they have the technological know-how to bypass the Chinese
government’s Internet firewall. Since the coronavirus outbreak, some of these
young people have taken to heart Dr. Li’s final words: “A healthy society
shouldn’t have only one voice.” They have decided to do something about it —
through seeking and sharing truth on their own.
That’s what Li Zehua set out to do. He quit his job and
found a way to get into Wuhan. With the locals’ help, he was able to get a car
and find a place to stay. By sheer coincidence, Li’s new temporary lodging was
right next to the former lodging of another young citizen journalist, Chen
Qiushi, who had previously posted videos about his visits to Wuhan. By the time
Li arrived in Wuhan, Chen had “disappeared,” gone since February 7. Government
officials told Chen’s family and friends that Chen had been put into forced
medical quarantine, but they refused to disclose when and where.
Undeterred, Li started posting videos of his visits to
infected locations such as college campuses and funeral homes. He interviewed
residents, migrant workers, and employees at the funeral homes. Li said in one
of his videos, “If one Chen Qiushi falls, 10 million more Chen Qiushis will
stand up to take his place.” Li’s words held true. Through his reporting, we
learned that local authorities didn’t carry out promised disinfectant measures
in infected communities and that residents were running low on groceries. These
are the types of information China’s state-run media would not dare to report,
but Li chose to. For exposing the truth, Li was often harassed by the local
police and self-identified security guards, but he continued to do what he
regarded as legitimate reporting.
On February 26, when Li was on his way back from the
Wuhan Institute of Virology, which many conspiracy theorists believe was
responsible for creating and spreading the coronavirus, he posted a short video
while he was being chased at high speed by a public-security vehicle. Viewers
can hear him exclaim, “They’re chasing me. . . . I’m sure that they want to
hold me in isolation. Please help me!”
Li made it back to his apartment and started
livestreaming again. He was visibly shaken by the chase and knew very well that
something baleful was getting close to him. Then he heard a knock at the door.
Through the peephole, he saw two big guys outside. It was to be his final hour
of freedom. Before he opened the door, he made an impassioned speech.
Li said: “Since I first arrived in Wuhan, everything I
have done has been in accord with the constitution of the People’s Republic of
China and with its laws.” Knowing he would be taken away and even forcibly
quarantined, just like Chen Qiushi, Li made sure to note in the video that he
had protective gear and that he was healthy at the moment of his arrest. It was
important for him to emphasize this on the record, because if the Chinese
government later claimed that Li was sick and quarantined or even had died of
the coronavirus, the rest of the world, especially Li’s family, would know it
was a lie.
Many Chinese youths today “probably have no idea at all
what happened in our past,” Li went on to say. “They think the history they
have now is the one they deserve.” Li hoped that more young people would join
him in standing up for the truth. After these words, Li opened the door. Two
men in masks and dressed fully in black walked in. The camera was abruptly shut
off, and the livestreaming stopped. No one has heard from Li since that day.
Thanks to the China Media Project, Li’s final speech was translated into
English.
Li is the third Chinese citizen journalist detained by
Chinese authorities since the start of the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. The
other two journalists are Fang Bin and Chen Qiushi. Chinese authorities will
continue to ruthlessly suppress these truth-tellers. However, something has
changed inside China. The pandemic has become a wake-up call for Chinese
people. Many of them are starting to realize that freedom of expression is
essential for their own and their families’ well-being, even their survival.
Last week, when a senior Communist Party official visited a lockdown community
in Wuhan, residents were forbidden to come out. So a handful of them shouted
from their apartments, “Everything is fake.” This week, the Chinese censors
deleted an interview of a Wuhan doctor who discussed the local government’s
early cover-up. According to BuzzFeed, Chinese Internet users have been
implementing all kinds of creative ways to share the interview, including
“rewriting it backward, filling it with typos and emojis, sharing it as a PDF,
and even translating it into fictional languages like Klingon.” Beijing is
making a big mistake if it thinks that more repression will silence all Chinese
people into submission going forward.
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