Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/coronavirus-outbreak-social-media-world-endless-unverified-information/
January 31, 2020
People wear masks in Hong Kong, China, January 31, 2020. (Tyrone Siu/Reuters)
Navigating the outbreak in a world of endless unverified information
Certain news stories drive me to an unhealthy reliance on social media. With my infant daughter sleeping in a bassinet beside me, I watched a series of individually broadcast livestreams of the mayhem developing in Paris on November 13, 2015. I suppose the first step is admitting you have a problem.
I doubt I’m the only person who seems to find every discomfiting YouTube video or Twitter thread about developments out of Wuhan, China.
Even just having your digital ear open for the chatter, you hear that Shanghai has been almost entirely “shut down,” with its residents driven to social-media boredom and rumormongering. You hear that Wuhan has been half-evacuated. I can’t even begin to comprehend what it would look like to evacuate half of a city that is larger than New York or London. Or wonder what that might mean for the rest of China, absorbing a population of that size, when the coronavirus is contagious well before it shows symptoms.
As in all tragedies, the alt-right-ish comedian Sam Hyde has been falsely and hilariously blamed for the spread of coronavirus. Earlier in the week there was a long Twitter thread by Matt Parlmer, urging people to look at the signs coming from China — the massive shutdowns and travel restrictions — that signaled a number of very likely events to anticipate, namely the disruption of global supply chains and international travel. This has now happened, and we are on the way to its being a global emergency. Firsthand accounts about how under-resourced Wuhan is for this outbreak are sprawling across YouTube. Here’s a particularly vivid one, with rumors that the virus has been known about by cab drivers in Wuhan since mid-December.
Today, a verified account on Twitter that I’ve never seen claimed that Indian scientists had discovered traces of HIV in the coronavirus. For all I know this is a totally scientifically illiterate thing to say. But there the claim is, with uncertain authority, which bolsters the conspiracy theories that the coronavirus is the product of a Chinese biological-weapons facility located near Wuhan.
Many goodhearted and decent people are on social media urging restraint. New contagious diseases are, of course, prone to induce panic. They warn us not to share any information that isn’t from a reputable public-health organization.
I wish the human mind could be reassured and calmed this way. Waiting for the official statements has actually worsened the pit in my stomach. For half the week there was speculation across unverified social media that the World Health Organization was dragging its feet because it didn’t want to embarrass China or imply that such a large and important country was responding poorly. Finally, on Thursday this week, the World Health Organization declared an international emergency. And in its statement, it cringingly praised China: “The Committee emphasized that the declaration of a PHEIC [Public Health Emergency of International Concern] should be seen in the spirit of support and appreciation for China, its people, and the actions China has taken on the frontlines of this outbreak, with transparency, and, it is to be hoped, with success.” Even the unidiomatic English grammar somehow has me imagining a Chinese official with extremely specific instructions dictating to the WHO.
The White House press briefing also contained statements emphasizing that the U.S. efforts to monitor and contain coronavirus are “complementing” China’s efforts. I’d rather have no comment appraising China’s performance in this crisis rather than ones that seem so forced and emphasized.
Maybe in the days to come, government authorities will get ahead of this public-health crisis and, like SARS, it will cause great anguish but not fundamentally disrupt the order of things. But our public officials need to think hard about how they communicate in a new world in which they are far from the only source of compelling information. Or perhaps the interruptions in the supply chain lead to major economic disruption worldwide and make everyone question the wisdom of placing so much critical industrial and commercial infrastructure in the middle of country that still contains hygiene practices known only amid extremely poverty, and a Communist government that regularly lies to the public, to itself, and to the world.
Until then, I’ll be nervously twitching through my phone and stocking up the pantry.
The Comprehensive Timeline of China’s COVID-19 Lies By Jim Geraghty
Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devastating-lies/March 23, 2020
Paramilitary officers wearing face masks to contain the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus walk along a street in Beijing, China, March 18, 2020. (Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters)
On today’s menu: a day-by-day, month-by-month breakdown of China’s coronavirus coverup and the irreparable damage it has caused around the globe.
The Timeline of a Viral Ticking Time Bomb
The story of the coronavirus pandemic is still being written. But at this early date, we can see all kinds of moments where different decisions could have lessened the severity of the outbreak we are currently enduring. You have probably heard variations of: “Chinese authorities denied that the virus could be transferred from human to human until it was too late.” What you have probably not heard is how emphatically, loudly, and repeatedly the Chinese government insisted human transmission was impossible, long after doctors in Wuhan had concluded human transmission was ongoing — and how the World Health Organization assented to that conclusion, despite the suspicions of other outside health experts.
Clearly, the U.S. government’s response to this threat was not nearly robust enough, and not enacted anywhere near quickly enough. Most European governments weren’t prepared either. Few governments around the world were or are prepared for the scale of the danger. We can only wonder whether accurate and timely information from China would have altered the way the U.S. government, the American people, and the world prepared for the oncoming danger of infection.
Some point in late 2019: The coronavirus jumps from some animal species to a human being. The best guess at this point is that it happened at a Chinese “wet market.”
December 6: According to a study in The Lancet, the symptom onset date of the first patient identified was “Dec 1, 2019 . . . 5 days after illness onset, his wife, a 53-year-old woman who had no known history of exposure to the market, also presented with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the isolation ward.” In other words, as early as the second week of December, Wuhan doctors were finding cases that indicated the virus was spreading from one human to another.
December 21: Wuhan doctors begin to notice a “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown cause.”
December 25: Chinese medical staff in two hospitals in Wuhan are suspected of contracting viral pneumonia and are quarantined. This is additional strong evidence of human-to-human transmission.
Sometime in “Late December”: Wuhan hospitals notice “an exponential increase” in the number of cases that cannot be linked back to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, according to the New England Journal of Medicine.
December 30: Dr. Li Wenliang sent a message to a group of other doctors warning them about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), urging them to take protective measures against infection.
December 31: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission declares, “The investigation so far has not found any obvious human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infection.” This is the opposite of the belief of the doctors working on patients in Wuhan, and two doctors were already suspected of contracting the virus.
Three weeks after doctors first started noticing the cases, China contacts the World Health Organization.
Tao Lina, a public-health expert and former official with Shanghai’s center for disease control and prevention, tells the South China Morning Post, “I think we are [now] quite capable of killing it in the beginning phase, given China’s disease control system, emergency handling capacity and clinical medicine support.”
January 1: The Wuhan Public Security Bureau issued summons to Dr. Li Wenliang, accusing him of “spreading rumors.” Two days later, at a police station, Dr. Li signed a statement acknowledging his “misdemeanor” and promising not to commit further “unlawful acts.” Seven other people are arrested on similar charges and their fate is unknown.
Also that day, “after several batches of genome sequence results had been returned to hospitals and submitted to health authorities, an employee of one genomics company received a phone call from an official at the Hubei Provincial Health Commission, ordering the company to stop testing samples from Wuhan related to the new disease and destroy all existing samples.”
According to a New York Times study of cellphone data from China, 175,000 people leave Wuhan that day. According to global travel data research firm OAG, 21 countries have direct flights to Wuhan. In the first quarter of 2019 for comparison, 13,267 air passengers traveled from Wuhan, China, to destinations in the United States, or about 4,422 per month. The U.S. government would not bar foreign nationals who had traveled to China from entering the country for another month.
January 2: One study of patients in Wuhan can only connect 27 of 41 infected patients to exposure to the Huanan seafood market — indicating human-to-human transmission away from the market. A report written later that month concludes, “evidence so far indicates human transmission for 2019-nCoV. We are concerned that 2019-nCoV could have acquired the ability for efficient human transmission.”
Also on this day, the Wuhan Institute of Virology completed mapped the genome of the virus. The Chinese government would not announce that breakthrough for another week.
January 3: The Chinese government continued efforts to suppress all information about the virus: “China’s National Health Commission, the nation’s top health authority, ordered institutions not to publish any information related to the unknown disease, and ordered labs to transfer any samples they had to designated testing institutions, or to destroy them.”
Roughly one month after the first cases in Wuhan, the United States government is notified. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gets initial reports about a new coronavirus from Chinese colleagues, according to Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar. Azar, who helped manage the response at HHS to earlier SARS and anthrax outbreaks, told his chief of staff to make sure the National Security Council was informed.
Also on this day, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released another statement, repeating, “As of now, preliminary investigations have shown no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infections.”
January 4: While Chinese authorities continued to insist that the virus could not spread from one person to another, doctors outside that country weren’t so convinced. The head of the University of Hong Kong’s Centre for Infection, Ho Pak-leung, warned that “the city should implement the strictest possible monitoring system for a mystery new viral pneumonia that has infected dozens of people on the mainland, as it is highly possible that the illness is spreading from human to human.”
January 5: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission put out a statement with updated numbers of cases but repeated, “preliminary investigations have shown no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission and no medical staff infections.”
January 6: The New York Times publishes its first report about the virus, declaring that “59 people in the central city of Wuhan have been sickened by a pneumonia-like illness.” That first report included these comments:
Wang Linfa, an expert on emerging infectious diseases at the Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, said he was frustrated that scientists in China were not allowed to speak to him about the outbreak. Dr. Wang said, however, that he thought the virus was likely not spreading from humans to humans because health workers had not contracted the disease. “We should not go into panic mode,” he said.
Don’t get too mad at Wang Linfa; he was making that assessment based upon the inaccurate information Chinese government was telling the world.
Also that day, the CDC “issued a level 1 travel watch — the lowest of its three levels — for China’s outbreak. It said the cause and the transmission mode aren’t yet known, and it advised travelers to Wuhan to avoid living or dead animals, animal markets, and contact with sick people.”
Also that day, the CDC offered to send a team to China to assist with the investigation. The Chinese government declined, but a WHO team that included two Americans would visit February 16.
January 8: Chinese medical authorities claim to have identified the virus. Those authorities claim and Western media continue to repeat, “there is no evidence that the new virus is readily spread by humans, which would make it particularly dangerous, and it has not been tied to any deaths.”
The official statement from the World Health Organization declares, “Preliminary identification of a novel virus in a short period of time is a notable achievement and demonstrates China’s increased capacity to manage new outbreaks . . . WHO does not recommend any specific measures for travelers. WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the information currently available.”
January 10: After unknowingly treating a patient with the Wuhan coronavirus, Dr. Li Wenliang started coughing and developed a fever. He was hospitalized on January 12. In the following days, Li’s condition deteriorated so badly that he was admitted to the intensive care unit and given oxygen support.
The New York Times quotes the Wuhan City Health Commission’s declaration that “there is no evidence the virus can spread among humans.” Chinese doctors continued to find transmission among family members, contradicting the official statements from the city health commission.
January 11: The Wuhan City Health Commission issues an update declaring, “All 739 close contacts, including 419 medical staff, have undergone medical observation and no related cases have been found . . . No new cases have been detected since January 3, 2020. At present, no medical staff infections have been found, and no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found.” They issue a Q&A sheet later that day reemphasizing that “most of the unexplained viral pneumonia cases in Wuhan this time have a history of exposure to the South China seafood market. No clear evidence of human-to-human transmission has been found.”
Also on this day, political leaders in Hubei province, which includes Wuhan, began their regional meeting. The coronavirus was not mentioned over four days of meetings.
January 13: Authorities in Thailand detected the virus in a 61-year-old Chinese woman who was visiting from Wuhan, the first case outside of China. “Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health, said the woman had not visited the Wuhan seafood market, and had come down with a fever on Jan. 5. However, the doctor said, the woman had visited a different, smaller market in Wuhan, in which live and freshly slaughtered animals were also sold.”
January 14: Wuhan city health authorities release another statement declaring, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.” Wuhan doctors have known this was false since early December, from the first victim and his wife, who did not visit the market.
The World Health Organization echoes China’s assessment: “Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) identified in Wuhan, China.”
This is five or six weeks after the first evidence of human-to-human transmission in Wuhan.
January 15: Japan reported its first case of coronavirus. Japan’s Health Ministry said the patient had not visited any seafood markets in China, adding that “it is possible that the patient had close contact with an unknown patient with lung inflammation while in China.”
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission begins to change its statements, now declaring, “Existing survey results show that clear human-to-human evidence has not been found, and the possibility of limited human-to-human transmission cannot be ruled out, but the risk of continued human-to-human transmission is low.” Recall Wuhan hospitals concluded human-to-human transmission was occurring three weeks earlier. A statement the next day backtracks on the possibility of human transmission, saying only, “Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”
January 17: The CDC and the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection announce that travelers from Wuhan to the United States will undergo entry screening for symptoms associated with 2019-nCoV at three U.S. airports that receive most of the travelers from Wuhan, China: San Francisco, New York (JFK), and Los Angeles airports.
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission’s daily update declares, “A total of 763 close contacts have been tracked, 665 medical observations have been lifted, and 98 people are still receiving medical observations. Among the close contacts, no related cases were found.”
January 18: HHS Secretary Azar has his first discussion about the virus with President Trump. Unnamed “senior administration officials” told the Washington Post that “the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market.”
Despite the fact that Wuhan doctors know the virus is contagious, city authorities allow 40,000 families to gather and share home-cooked food in a Lunar New Year banquet.
January 19: The Chinese National Health Commission declares the virus “still preventable and controllable.” The World Health Organization updates its statement, declaring, “Not enough is known to draw definitive conclusions about how it is transmitted, the clinical features of the disease, the extent to which it has spread, or its source, which remains unknown.”
January 20: The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission declares for the last time in its daily bulletin, “no related cases were found among the close contacts.”
That day, the head of China’s national health commission team investigating the outbreak, confirmed that two cases of infection in China’s Guangdong province had been caused by human-to-human transmission and medical staff had been infected.
Also on this date, the Wuhan Evening News newspaper, the largest newspaper in the city, mentions the virus on the front page for the first time since January 5.
January 21: The CDC announced the first U.S. case of a the coronavirus in a Snohomish County, Wash., resident who returning from China six days earlier.
By this point, millions of people have left Wuhan, carrying the virus all around China and into other countries.
January 22: WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus continued to praise China’s handling of the outbreak. “I was very impressed by the detail and depth of China’s presentation. I also appreciate the cooperation of China’s Minister of Health, who I have spoken with directly during the last few days and weeks. His leadership and the intervention of President Xi and Premier Li have been invaluable, and all the measures they have taken to respond to the outbreak.”
In the preceding days, a WHO delegation conducted a field visit to Wuhan. They concluded, “deployment of the new test kit nationally suggests that human-to-human transmission is taking place in Wuhan.” The delegation reports, “their counterparts agreed close attention should be paid to hand and respiratory hygiene, food safety and avoiding mass gatherings where possible.”
At a meeting of the WHO Emergency Committee, panel members express “divergent views on whether this event constitutes a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern’ or not. At that time, the advice was that the event did not constitute a PHEIC.”
President Trump, in an interview with CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, declared, “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
January 23: Chinese authorities announce their first steps for a quarantine of Wuhan. By this point, millions have already visited the city and left it during the Lunar New Year celebrations. Singapore and Vietnam report their first cases, and by now an unknown but significant number of Chinese citizens have traveled abroad as asymptomatic, oblivious carriers.
January 24: Vietnam reports person-to-person transmission, and Japan, South Korea, and the U.S report their second cases. The second case is in Chicago. Within two days, new cases are reported in Los Angeles, Orange County, and Arizona. The virus is in now in several locations in the United States, and the odds of preventing an outbreak are dwindling to zero.
On February 1, Dr. Li Wenliang tested positive for coronavirus. He died from it six days later.
One final note: On February 4, Mayor of Florence Dario Nardella urged residents to hug Chinese people to encourage them in the fight against the novel coronavirus. Meanwhile, a member of Associazione Unione Giovani Italo Cinesi, a Chinese society in Italy aimed at promoting friendship between people in the two countries, called for respect for novel coronavirus patients during a street demonstration. “I’m not a virus. I’m a human. Eradicate the prejudice.”
ADDENDUM: We’ll get back to regular politics soon enough. In the meantime, note that Bernie Sanders held a virtual campaign event Sunday night “from Vermont, railing against the ongoing Senate coronavirus rescue bill. He skipped a key procedural vote on that bill.”
China Is Pushing a ‘Zero’ Myth on COVID-19 By Jianli Yang & Aaron Rhodes
Source: https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/china-is-pushing-a-zero-myth-on-covid-19-and-attacking-press-freedom/March 27, 2020
A woman wearing a protective mask walks past a portrait of Chinese President Xi Jinping on a street as the country is hit by an outbreak of the coronavirus in Shanghai, China, March 12, 2020. (Aly Song/Reuters)
The regime’s censorship and distortions are a threat to global public health as well as a violation of human rights.
Chinese president Xi Jinping has a new slogan: “Zero” — the goal of reducing to zero the number of cases of the Wuhan coronavirus, aka COVID-19. Reaching zero is crucial to achieving his broader goal of global leadership and domination. Xi must show the world that the totalitarian Chinese political system is vindicated by the defeat of the virus. The truth about COVID-19 inside China is the greatest obstacle to his ambition.
For years now, Beijing has tried to position China under the Communist Party as the champion and leader of a new, emerging, post-American global order. At the Davos conclave in 2017, Xi spoke of his government’s determination to play a responsible role in defending and contributing to multilateral efforts to “secure peace and reduce poverty.” He was applauded for opposing protectionism. All states, he intoned, should “view their own interests in a broader context” and “refrain from pursuing their own interests at the expense of others.” China has assiduously asserted influence in global institutions, especially United Nations bodies, where Chinese nationals lead four of 15 specialized agencies. In his speech at the special summit of G20 leaders on March 26, Xi showed his determination to build his own image as a world leader.
For him to succeed in his long march through the international community, he needs to have a reputation for success at addressing challenges such as COVID-19. As two veteran China watchers, Kurt M. Campbell and Rush Doshi, pointed out in a recent article in Foreign Affairs, one’s legitimacy as a global leader depends on domestic governance, the provision of global public goods, and the ability and willingness to muster and coordinate a global response to crises. To lead the world response to the pandemic, China must set an example for the rest of the world to follow.
The long-term plan hit a large speed bump with revelations about the regime’s malfeasance in covering up COVID-19, and the Communist Party’s efforts to turn the story around, making itself heroic, are well documented. But the plan could run aground if a second outbreak, which some experts warn is inevitable, occurs in China. In this situation, the regime is turning reflexively to traditional Communist tactics: propaganda and the control of information.
Neutralizing Independent Media
China has expelled reporters for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, sources it cannot control. The regime has clamped down increasingly on independent journalists as its domestic practices have become increasingly inhumane, especially with respect to its repression of religious minorities, including Uighur Muslims, who have been subjected to mass internment.
China ranks low in international measures of press freedom. Last year, in a survey of 180 countries with respect to media independence, media pluralism, and respect for the safety and freedom of journalists, Reporters Without Borders ranked China 177th. In “Control, Halt, Delete: Reporting in China Under Threat of Expulsion,” a new report from the Beijing-based Foreign Correspondents Club of China (FCCC), foreign journalists document practices that Chinese authorities have employed that have severely affected their reporting.
Beijing has delayed and placed restrictions on visas for foreign journalists. While the standard length of a long-term journalist visa, J-1, is one year, many foreign correspondents who have reported critically about the Chinese regime have received curtailed visas. In 2018, five correspondents received curtailed visas. In 2019, at least a dozen received visas for six months or less. Truncated visas require frequent renewal, and Beijing has made that process more arduous not just for the journalists but for their families as well. This practice is called out in the FCCC report.
Three correspondents from Wall Street Journal were expelled on February 19 over an opinion piece critical of Beijing’s handling of the COVID-19 outbreak. “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia,” the headline read. In announcing the expulsions, a foreign-ministry spokesman called the article “racist.” It was the first time in more than two decades that journalists holding valid credentials had been ordered to leave China, although since 2013 others have been expelled in effect, through non-renewal of their visas.
Beijing has also established red lines for foreign correspondents. In particular, anything critical of Xi Jinping and his family is forbidden. Last year, Beijing declined to renew the credentials of another Wall Street Journal reporter, who had reported about investigations, in Australia, into the activities of one of Xi’s cousins, who was suspected of involvement in organized crime and money laundering. In the FCCC report, the bureau chief of an English-language news organization is quoted as saying that the Chinese foreign ministry had explicitly told them that they would face the “anger of other arms of the government,” and not just the foreign ministry, if they wrote the “wrong pieces about Xi.”
Criticism of the treatment of the Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang has also drawn the ire of the authorities. In 2018, Megha Rajagopalan, the Beijing bureau chief for BuzzFeed News, was unable to renew her visa. During her six years in China, Rajagopalan had reported extensively on human-rights abuses, including the detention of Uighurs and others in Xinjiang province. The Committee to Protect Journalists considers the government’s refusal to renew visas in such cases to be “acts of retribution.”
Last year, CNN’s Beijing correspondent Matt Rivers reported extensively on how, during his trip to Xinjiang province, he had been subjected to repeated visa checks, harassment by local officials, attempts by the authorities to block his reporting, and physical trailing. The FCCC report adds that Chinese authorities, through intimidation and explicit warnings, regularly pressure people to avoid speaking to foreign media representatives. Journalists and their sources are monitored by facial recognition and other surveillance techniques.
Of course, China also extensively censors new media. A Harvard University study found that Chinese authorities block as many as 18,000 websites, including many standard, independent sources of international news. Among the terms censored on the Internet are “human rights,” “oppression,” and references to Tiananmen Square and the dissident and Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo. The BBC, which had often reported critically on the Chinese government, is blocked in China. All books published in China are censored. The extent of censorship and control over the media by the CCP cannot be better described than by Xi Jinping himself, who in 2016 said, “All the media must bear the Party’s surname.”
Breaking the Media Blockage
The Zero campaign depends on censorship and makes it a universal political obligation for Chinese citizens to collectively deny their own public-health crisis. That China’s health statistics are manipulated for the Communist Party’s political benefit is not news. Local officials, medical personnel, and, indeed, the entire society need to participate in the deception. It is the newest of a string of impossible tasks that the Communist Party has demanded of the Chinese people, reminiscent of Mao’s absurd productivity quotas, and of his often-lethal punishments for failure. As Roger Scruton observed, “it takes infinite force to make people to do what is impossible.”
The government, which claims that virtually no new COVID-19 cases have appeared recently in Wuhan, has begun to relax the lockdown in Hubei Province. But while the Chinese regime tries to control perceptions of events inside the country, widespread anger and intensified distrust at the government’s moral and administrative failures is giving rise to a groundswell of citizen journalists attempting to break through the official propaganda machinery of CCTV, CGTN, People’s Daily, and Global Times and to expose what is happening.
The evidence they present about COVID-19 contradicts official narratives. Stories on Chinese social media, censored or removed almost as soon as they appear, reveal how local governments cover up new cases and how hospitals are ordered to report new cases as normal flu or pneumonia.
The stories indicate that Hubei Province, far from moving toward normality, is being locked down again by people and police in the surrounding provinces who know the real situation in Hubei. One video showed a riot that occurred when Hubei police tried to open the border with Jiangxi — people and police in Jiangxi revolted because they would be exposed to Hubei. The government brags about mass recoveries from the virus, but independent media have reported that up to 14 percent of those have tested positive again. The regime appears to be cooking the books on epidemiological statistics, to be not counting cases in which tests indicate infection but people are asymptomatic. Censors almost immediately removed a photo from the Caixin website showing a truck delivering 2,500 urns filled with the ashes of cremated people. Censors removed as well as an accompanying report that a truck had made another such delivery the same day.
In the past, the Chinese Communist Party’s restrictions on the free flow of information seemed to Americans and others in democratic countries to be a matter mainly concerning the freedom of the Chinese people, important as a matter of upholding the universal right to freedom of expression. But the regime’s distortions of the truth are now more than abstract problems for the international community. They are threats to global public health — indeed, matters of life and death.
Jianli Yang is the founder and president of Citizen Power Initiatives for China. Aaron Rhodes is the human-rights editor of Dissident magazine and the president of the Forum for Religious Freedom Europe.
