China must cast secrecy aside

Beijing’s achievement in building two fully equipped 1000-bed hospitals in less than two weeks to deal with the coronavirus outbreak shows there is much to praise in its handling of a profoundly challenging crisis. So does the way it managed to quarantine Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, and then 16 other cities with a combined population of over 60 million, despite Orwellian aspects of the process, with drones used to hunt down citizens without face masks. With a few delays, it has enabled countries such as Australia to evacuate citizens.

There is, however, a darker side to China’s handling of the emergency, which shows Beijing has not fully grasped the lessons of the 2002-03 SARS outbreak and the self-defeating attempts made then to cover it up. Friday’s death at Wuhan Central Hospital of 33-year-old Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist who was one of the first medical professionals who tried to sound the alarm about the “mysterious” virus, and then contracted it himself, reflects poorly on Chinese authorities. On December 30, Dr Li warned a small group of fellow doctors about a previously unknown illness that had caused seven patients at his hospital to be quarantined. Four days later he was arrested, hauled off to the notorious Public Security Bureau, and forced to sign a confession that he had been spreading “false rumours” that “disturbed the social order”. Chinese authorities had become aware of the new illness in early December, but did not disclose it to the World Health Organisation until January 1, when they claimed they had stopped it in its tracks and there was no evidence of human-to-human contagion. Ten days later, Beijing admitted that was false.

Between January 1 and January 20, as Rowan Callick wrote on Saturday, authorities downplayed the issue, with the Communist Party’s flagship People’s Daily not publishing a word about the outbreak. Officials also expunged or censored any online discussion of the issue. Not until around January 10 did they share details of the virus’s genetic code with the WHO.

It is not surprising that last Friday’s news of Dr Li’s death triggered “online uproar” in China. International news agencies estimated a staggering 1.5 billion views of posts in an online revolt against Chinese attempts to play down the issue. Among the posts were videos of the Les Miserables song, Do You Hear the People Sing?. Other comments invoked Article 35 of China’s constitution stipulating free speech, and phrases from For Whom the Bell Tolls. Xi Jinping, facing the most intense public anger since he took power in 2012, has declared a “people’s war”, dispatching 1400 military doctors to Wuhan.

Australia’s hope, Education Minister Dan Tehan said on Sunday, was for “some sort of a breakthrough” in the next few weeks with the coronavirus outbreak, amid concerns that 106,000 Chinese students — 56 per cent of those enrolled this semester — cannot enter Australia. Standard & Poor’s estimates universities could lose up to $3.1bn in fees if students are unable to study in the first semester.

But the Morrison government’s ban on inbound travellers from China is a sensible strand of the essential measures it has enacted to protect Australians from the spread of the virus. Holding Australian evacuees from Wuhan in quarantine on Christmas Island was an important precaution. To date, an Australian girl in quarantine on the island remains the only person among 270 Australians and permanent residents who has been tested for the virus. The test returned a negative result. Last week, 35 Australians were transferred to Christmas Island from an evacuation flight to Auckland. And on Sunday, Australia’s second flight from Wuhan landed in Darwin, carrying 250 people who are now in quarantine at an old mining camp outside the city.

With 37,552 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 813 deaths, exceeding the toll from SARS, Australia has no choice but to persevere with safety precautions that will cost the education, tourism and other export sectors dearly for the foreseeable future.