For China, a shackle in battling the new corona virus is its information control

A joke on Chinese Internet has gone viral in the past several weeks. That the latest corona virus is patriotic because it only spreads in one province out of the other 33 in China, and outside of the mainland.

Then this week, people woke up shocking to find a sudden surge of cases infected by the new corona virus and more suspected cases in 14 provinces and cities. As of writing, there are a total of 324 confirmed cases, and six have died.

At least five countries including Thailand, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the U.S. have confirmed cases, and the situation could only get more concerning in the upcoming travels of China’s largest annual migration event—the Chinese Lunar New Year.

People are panicking. They have nowhere to find the information but to rely on government announcements and rumors. The situation highly resembles the time when the virus known as Severe Acute Respiratory Symptom (SARS) that took hundreds of lives globally in 2003.

Although researchers have identified the genetic sequence of the virus which could help identify infected individuals, there is no cure of the latest virus yet because no one knows yet where the new virus originates from.

Facing a new disease, it’s undeniably hard to identify and do it quickly. Yet China is making the problem harder to solve.

China should have learnt from its deadly 2003 SARS outbreak, when during months’ time people were emptying shops for Chinese-herbal-based ban lan gen and vinegar, which would latter turned out not helpful.

That frenzy was driven by the lack of accurate information and rumors because of the lack of top-down communication. The idea of wei wen, or maintaining stability in China’s political system, has made “conceal as many as possible and keep it at the local level” a natural immediate response to a crisis like this.

It might work on other less life-threatening topics, but not with something beyond control. Trying to control information has only become the shackle that slow us down facing something progressing and changing so swiftly.

Already, a focus of the current virus crisis has been on how hard it’s been to get correct information.

For more than half a month since the first 41 cases reported in Wuhan, the center city of the outbreak, there’s been little precaution taken to measure body temperature in highly-crowded places like train stations.

The public was also puzzled by what authorities called as “limited human-to-human” transmission, an indication that the infection might spread faster and more dangerous.

On the first day of the new year, 18 days before any local official statements, police detained eight local people for “spreading rumors about pneumonia.” It’s unclear what the latest situation of those eight people are.

An interview in 2017 with a key figure in the SARS outbreak perhaps gave the gist of what people worry about most. In it, the expert argues that China has suffered too much from information control.

The post, resurfaced two days ago, had gone viral on WeChat. The expert. Jiang Yantong, had also recalled how a big Beijing hospital worked around dodging checks from the World Health Organization such as putting patients on other department’s hospitalized sector, but not the respiration or infectious diseases.

In another article, a doctor at a Beijing hospital also observed his hospitals putting 29 patients on ambulances to dodge the checks.

Now both posts are no longer available because of “violation of regulation” a reason often used as an excuse to delete what authorities deemed as sensitive.

If there’s one thing that’s different than 17 years ago, it’s WeChat. With it, the tool connecting more than a billion users in China, the public should have become more updated with the info. Yet the tool itself has only become a warm bed for both rumors and information suppression.

Beijing News, a Beijing-local government-backed newspaper on Tuesday published a commentary questioning why local authorities have taken so long in establishing mechanism while failing to report the 14 infected. It asks to hold relevant authorities accountable.

It’s hard to tell whether authorities want to suppress the info or try to contain the fear.

People have noticed that some of the most important information does not even come from the authorities.

After the appearance of a widely-recognized hero during the SARS outbreak on China’s state-owned broadcast television last night, discussions are now all over WeChat and Weibo, another social media platform.

Zhong Nanshan, the 83-year-old respiratory expert gave three key pieces of information — So far 14 health care staffers have been infected, the disease can spread between human to human, wearing masks helps.

People seem to believe in Zhong’s comments more than that from the authorities. He was known for questioning the authority’s statements during the SARS outbreak and on multiple occasions when there’s an outbreak of a respiratory disease in the years after.

“All of those who have received good education in China know from deep down their heart that the biggest fear brought by SARS and Wuhan pneumonia is the uncontrollable behaviors of the bureaucratic class,” a Weibo post reads.

“Common citizens have no so-called civil qualities thanks to the technique of controlling one’s mind. It’s nearly impossible to put out the outbreak with the minimum cost as possible” reads the post that had garnered more than 200 reposes.

“China has the world’s best 5G and high-speed train technology, but in some aspects of governing, China is still at the middle century,” ends the post.

This is no standalone case. In a system where people feel constantly tricked and puzzled by the discrepancies of information they can get, it only makes the problem worse, and help spread rumors.

In time, public tends not to believe in whatever the government says. Another case would be the 2008 baby milk powder case which killed six babies and left many suffered from the aftermath. Ten years since then, people are still refraining from buying baby milk powder made in China.

As long as China keeps tightening its grip over information. The corona virus crisis in 2020 could only get worse than 2003.