The Journalists’ Battle Against Coronavirus

The novel strain of coronavirus that emerged in Wuhan, China in December 2019 spread like wildfire, despite belated efforts at containment. By February 20, a month after President Xi Jinping himself ordered “resolute efforts” to combat the outbreak, China had reported over 74,500 cases and more than 2,100 deaths. 

In the same time span – starting from Xi’s official acknowledgement of the disease – China’s media surged into action. As has been well-documented, the earliest reports of the new virus were heavily censored, with police threatening doctors into silence over social media posts. Less commonly acknowledged, however, is the powerful reporting done by Chinese media outlets after the novel coronavirus outbreak became public knowledge. 

“One of the hopeful things to have emerged from the coronavirus crisis is the creative coverage produced by China’s more outspoken information outlets and new voices on social media,” Maria Repnikova, the author of Media Politics in China, wrote in an op-ed for the New York Times. “Journalists and activists have demonstrated an impressive ability to mobilize in order to capture this complex story and, at times, challenge the authorities’ handling of the epidemic.”

As often happens in China, once the initial cover-up failed, the central government allowed a surge of reporting on the unfolding crisis. Journalists were at the forefront of tracing the initial denialism in Wuhan and pointing to supply shortages and other issues with the unfolding response. Some of these reports were later deleted and censored, but by no means all.

The coronavirus crisis thus proved that journalism is not dead in China and, in fact, showed just how valuable watchdog reporting can be, not only to society as a whole but even to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime itself. After all, the central government can’t solve a problem if it doesn’t know one exists.

The Heyday of Chinese Journalism

It has been a tumultuous few decades for Chinese journalism, reflecting the same general pattern of opening-and-closing that has played out in other areas of society, from universities to NGOs to the legal profession. The move to commercial-based journalism – rather than full state funding – in the late 1980s forced news outlets to rely on selling ads to pay the bills. This created new incentives for fresh reporting, including on government malfeasance. At the same time, the changes allowed for the birth of independent media outlets not owned by the state – although of course subject to censorship at all times. This competition, in turn, further incentivized even state-owned publications to up their games. Beijing Youth Daily, for example, is the official newspaper of Beijing’s Communist Youth League, but is well known in China for its investigative reporting. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Chinese media entered one of its brightest stretches since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949. 

Then the crackdown came. The pendulum swing back toward stricter CCP control began before Xi took power, but like other aspects of the broader social clampdown the trend has intensified in Xi’s “new era.” The 2013 Southern Weekend incident marked the last great heyday of journalistic freedom. A new year’s editorial in Southern Weekend arguing for constraints on government power was cut and replaced with one praising the Party. In response, the paper’s journalists went on strike and demanded an investigation. The protests were surprisingly tolerated; it’s hard to imagine anything similar happening in 2020. But the CCP won the war. Just a few years later, Southern Weekend, once a bastion of independent journalism, was a shell of its former shelf and struggling to pay the bills. Meanwhile, media outlets are now exhorted to “take the Party as your surname” and journalists are required to pass tests on their knowledge of Xi’s writings before getting press credentials.

The case of Hu Shuli is a useful case study for the twists and turns of Chinese media over the last few decades. Hu founded Caijing Magazine in 1998, and the outlet was soon recognized as a trailblazer for watchdog journalism. “If you want to practice journalism in China, there has been no better place than Caijing to fulfil your dream,” one former employee told The Guardian back in 2009. Caijing did blockbuster reporting on corruption and other sensitive issues – all while managing to stay on the right side of censors. Often, the magazine gathered careful information on the misdeeds of officials, but waited until the culprits got the political axe to publish. 

As the pendulum in China swung back toward the side of control, Caijing was not immune. By 2009 Hu was under increasing pressure to stick to financial and business news (the magazine’s name is shorthand for “finance and economics”) and more and more stories were being killed. When Hu Shuli eventually left, it seemed to sound a death knell for independent journalism.

Hu didn’t disappear, however; instead she founded Caixin media, which remains at the forefront of investigative journalism in China (Caijing itself still exists and is also well regarded). In 2016, for example, Caixin helped break the news that schools were being built on a toxic waste dump in Jiangsu province. And when the coronavirus crisis spilled into the public view, Caixin was at the ready. The outlet published a deep-dive investigative report on the Wuhan government’s approach to the virus in its earliest days and has covered shortages and exhaustion at “frontline” hospitals in Wuhan. 

Chinese Media Amid the Coronavirus

Perhaps no case better demonstrates the brief blooming of Chinese media in early 2020 than the story of Li Wenliang.

When Li, an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, warned his classmates abouts a SARS-like virus he had seen in his hospital, he was visited by police and forced to sign a self-criticism promising not to “spread rumors” again. A few weeks later, however, when the government had been forced to admit the virus was real, Li became a national hero. 

Importantly, Li jumped into the public eye through an interview with a Chinese media outlet, Beijing Youth Daily, which confirmed he had been one of the “rumormongers” punished by local police. That report, which also noted that Li himself had contracted the coronavirus, was later deleted, but his name had already entered the public sphere. Official figures, from Supreme Court judges to scientists with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, later spoke in support of Li and argued he should not have been punished for his social media posts on the virus.

The same pattern – media reports, denial, then official acceptance – played out again with the tragedy of Li’s death. Caixin was one of the earliest media outlets to report on Li’s passing, but it was not alone – the state-run Global Times issued a short report of its own early on. Both posts, along with other media outlets’, were later deleted. Caixin’s reporters, however, continued to post on Twitter about their vigil outside Li’s room in the hospital and what they were being told by doctors and nurses. A few hours later, an official statement from Li’s hospital confirmed the reports of his passing, albeit with a different (and later) time of death. State-run outlets mourned Li alongside the public, and the Chinese government announced it was sending an inspection team to investigate the circumstances around his death.

From Li’s rise to fame to his death, Chinese media outlets were helping shape the narrative – and drive government action – in a way that is rarely seen in China. In another example, coverage by Caixin and other outlets of the many coronavirus cases seemingly going unacknowledged in official reports may have helped spark a mid-February change in the way Chinese authorities count infection cases.

To quote Repnikova again, “Temporary information openings are useful to the [Chinese central] government: They can help it identify the sources of a problem, assess public sentiment and possibly, too, deliver an effective response – or at the very least, allow it to project an image of managed transparency.”

“But,” she continued, “the window for critical reporting in times of crises tends to be quite narrow, and it opens and shuts rather unpredictably.” In this case, it appears the “window” for Chinese media was open from January 20 – when Xi Jinping ordered “resolute efforts to curb the spread of the virus” – until February 5, when the government issued new guidance on reporting about the coronavirus.

In early February, Chinese media – both state-run outlets and more independent ones – were told to focus on “positive” stories, such as highlighting the tireless efforts of frontline medics in Wuhan. One line in the new instructions for media outlets was particularly telling: “Only cover what needs to be covered.” In the wake of the new instructions, there was a wave of censorship that saw many previously published stories taken down.

According to the China Media Project, at the same time social media companies were also sternly informed that “illegally engaging in internet news information services in epidemic-related reports” could bring trouble. As a warning, the video sharing app Pipi Gaoxiao was removed from app stores entirely for hosting problematic videos and some WeChat accounts belonging to online news services were suspended. Chinese internet giants Sina Weibo, Tencent (the firm behind WeChat), and ByteDance (which owns TikTok) were all placed under “special supervision” to prevent any further independent reporting on their platforms. And the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) demanded that “local CACs actively exercise their management responsibilities, creating a favorable online environment for winning the war for prevention and control of the coronavirus outbreak.”

In a more chilling display of the new policy, practitioners of “self-media” – essentially private citizens who attempt to break news on their social media accounts – began to disappear. The most prominent case was Chen Qiushi, a “citizen journalist” who had recorded videos from Hong Kong’s summer protests before traveling to Wuhan to report on the epidemic. Chen went missing in early February; family and friends suspect he has been detained under the guise of a disease-related quarantine for his videos about life in Wuhan.

It seems the window of opportunity has slammed shut once again, and Chinese media outlets will go back into relative hibernation. But if there is some hope to be found amid the immense human suffering caused by the coronavirus epidemic, it’s this: the crisis provided proof-of-life for China’s journalism scene, despite the harsh crackdown of recent years. When the next crisis comes – and it will, inevitably – we will likely see the same all-too-brief bloom of investigative reporting.