Willy Fautre. The Chinese Communist Virus: Never again after the Covid-19 pandemic
In this year, 2020, the world faces a very challenging and dangerous transformation. The Covid-19 pandemic not only threatens the health and lives of hundreds of millions of people but also puts the global economy at risk.
In China, where the pandemic originated, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) bears the full responsibility of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its management of the virus, its mishandling of the outbreak, its lies, and its purposeful omissions in reports to the world media have shaken the international community.
Half of the earth’s population is under some form of lockdown; national economies are falling apart as businesses go bankrupt and dozens of millions of people lose their jobs; increased impoverishment is sketch out on the horizon. This catastrophe is unprecedented.
From the beginning, in November 2019, the CCP silenced the doctors and whistle blowers who were sounding the alarm about the danger of a pandemic. These humanists were neither politically motivated nor anti-communist; they were just highly concerned about public health in China and abroad. The CCP, however, did not appreciate their efforts and quickly gagged and imprisoned them.
Though the virus responsible for Covid-19 is new, this form of repression is not. Throughout the 20th century, the lack of freedom of thought and freedom of expression has been one of the main characteristics of all communist regimes around the world. Censorship and propaganda are in their DNA.
Censorship and propaganda
Exposing any failure of the Communist Party in China can be seen as almost equivalent to an act of blasphemy, with the CCP as God and its doctrine a sacred text. It is a matter of life or death for the CCP, and any criticism is severely and quickly repressed.
In March 2020, Bitter Winter reported on the case of an online paper, written by two Chinese researchers, that strangely disappeared from the international scholarly database Research Gate a few days after it was uploaded. The paper did not claim that the novel coronavirus was intentionally created in a Chinese laboratory but suggested that the virus came from bats. As there are no wild bats carrying the virus in or around Wuhan, the authors asserted that the virus could have come from bats kept in one of two laboratories operating in Wuhan.
The activities of these two research centers named in the paper are shrouded in secrecy. France, a partner in some of their projects, has never been allowed access to their facilities.
Chinese society is saturated by CCP propaganda. Chinese journalists have no freedom of expression once the political management of the country is questioned. It is usually ordinary citizens who whistleblow, violating political taboos and risking their personal freedom and their lives.
In the case of Covid-19, the first victim of repression by the CCP was Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital. Although no one understood the nature of the illness at the time, he was the first to sound the alarm on the possibility of a coronavirus pandemic.
Dr. Li spoke about the ongoing epidemic for the first time on 30 December 2019, when he sent out warnings to a WeChat group of former faculty of medicine students. His messages were shared very widely on the microblogging website Weibo, and it was also seen by CCP watchdogs.
Two days later, on 1 January 2020, Dr. Li and seven other doctors were questioned for spreading false information about Wuhan’s pneumonia, as it was officially called in China.
On 2 January, China Central Television publicly announced the punishment of eight people spreading “rumours” on Wuhan’s pneumonia.
On 3 January, the eight doctors (including Dr. Li) were forced to sign a statement recognizing that Dr. Li had “spread false rumours.”
One month later, the young doctor tested positive for Covid-19; he died the following week. Online posts on Weibo about his death were viewed by more than 1.5 billion people. A photo of him wearing a face mask that went around the Chinese blogosphere with the hashtag #WeWantFreedomOfExpression was used in more than two million posts before being censored.
Dr. Li was the first, but others were silenced for speaking out about Covid-19 as well.
Chen Qiushi, a Chinese lawyer and human rights activist, became widely known for providing first-hand coverage of Covid-19 in China and criticising the government’s response. His videos were viewed by hundreds of thousands of people on Weibo and WeChat despite being quickly censored. Quishi’s Weibo account was deleted two days later. He was last heard from on 6 February 2020, and, as of May 2020, his whereabouts remain unknown. Friends of the family say he is being detained by the CCP.
Fang Bin, a textile businessman living in Wuhan, never regarded himself as a journalist. However, he felt obliged to share the real situation in the city with his fellow citizens, contrary to the images supplied by the CCP’s propaganda machine.
In his first video report on 25 January 2020, he documented the saturation of the hospitals in Wuhan. The report showed the bodies of coronavirus victims inside buses that had been turned into improvised hearses.
After the video’s release, the police confiscated Bin’s laptop and interrogated him at length. He later recorded a live video from his home, stating that it was surrounded by plainclothes policemen.
Fang Bin has not been heard from since 9 February 2020.
These are examples of a just few cases. However, according to Reporters Without Borders, since January 2020, more than 450 Internet users have been detained in China for sharing information about the coronavirus that the authorities regard as “false rumours.”
Never again, but how?
Through extensive use of new technology, President Xi Jinping has successfully imposed a social model in China based on severe control of news and information and online surveillance of its citizens.
China languishes near the bottom of the Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders. It is ranked 177 out of 180 countries, only followed by Eritrea, Turkmenistan, and North Korea.
Freedom of investigative journalism and freedom of expression in China can only be reclaimed by Chinese citizens. It will be a lengthy, uphill battle against the rule of the CCP. Freedom of expression activists and whistle blowers have already paid a high price, losing their freedom and sometimes their lives. Such courageous people deserve the full support of the international human rights community for the long haul.
After the pandemic, the world cannot go back to business with China as usual. Beijing must be held to account. Under international law, China and/or the Chinese Communist Party can and should be sued for the enormous damages they caused worldwide. There are several avenues of possible redress.
The 2002 SARS epidemic, also of Chinese origin, prompted the World Health Organization (WHO) to adopt new International Health Regulations (2005) that are legally binding on all WHO member states, including China. These Regulations cover diseases such as SARS and the virus responsible for Covid-19, and require member states to share relevant information with WHO “within 24 hours.”
The International Court of Justice provides another legal recourse to hold not only China as a state to account but also entities (such as the CCP) or persons (such as President Xi Jinping and others) for contributing to Beijing’s breach of its obligation to promptly share information with WHO.
China may reject the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice, however, there are alternative ways to apply sanctions.
Law firms in North America are preparing civil lawsuits to hold China, the CCP, and Xi Jinping and his accomplices accountable for the cover-up of the Covid-19 pandemic and to seek damages for the enormous number of deaths and financial damages they caused.
Additionally, the Global Magnitsky Act (2016) authorizes the United States to take action against human rights offenders.
As countries around the world seek accountability, the question remains: what will the European Union, which claims to be a soft power, courageously dare do?
Human rights NGOs should call upon the Chinese government to:
- lift censorship and allow the free flow of information, press and media reporting, and free expression;
- respect the right of Chinese population and the international community to know about the spread of the Covid-19 outbreak and its response;
- restrict police power to end the harassment, intimidation, and arbitrary detention of netizens.
They should also press the international community, including the World Health Organization and other UN human rights agencies, to urge the Chinese government to end censorship, the criminalisation of freedom of expression and information sharing as well as the arbitrary detention of citizens.
Last but not least, they should support Chinese human rights activists and citizens in their quest to sort fact from propaganda and to safely exercise their right to share their findings.
