Chinese Communist Party tries to hijack whistleblower’s legacy

The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to co-opt the legacy of a whistle-blowing doctor who died fighting the coronavirus.

A floral tribute for Li Wenliang left at Wuhan Central Hospital. Picture: AFP

The Chinese Communist Party has attempted to co-opt the legacy of a whistleblowing Wuhan doctor who died fighting the new corona­virus, which has now killed more people than the 2003 SARS epidemic.

After days of grief and anger over the death of 34-year-old doctor Li Wenliang, the state has embraced him as a hero in the “people’s war” against the virus — only five weeks after state media reported his “rumour spreading”.

“United we’ll keep on fighting against the virus and stop it from taking away our loved ones,” said the People’s Republic of China’s ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming, on Sunday in a post on Twitter, a social media platform blocked in China.

The enormous public response to Dr Li’s death — which was confirmed by his employer, Wuhan City Central Hospital, on Friday morning — sat uneasily with the careful messaging by President Xi Jingping’s central government about its leadership of the ­“people’s war” against the virus that has quickly spread to more than 37,500 cases and killed more than 813 people.

Citizens in the virus’ epicentre of Wuhan blew whistles in tribute to the doctor, a folk song was released lamenting the doctor’s death and hundreds of millions of posts were made across Chinese social media. State media delicately reported on the outpouring of grief but not the enormous clean-up operation state censors launched over views deemed to undermine “political stability”.

The China Daily reported ­“Nation mourns doctor” on its frontpage, while in its editorial it argued the “whistleblowing doctor’s battle must still be fought”.

The editorial — whose formulation was echoed in other state-controlled media — praised both “Li’s courage” and “the central government’s resolute actions” fighting the virus.

The China Daily also offered a modest self-criticism over the treatment of the late Dr Li, who was one of a group of eight doctors punished by Wuhan police on January 1 for “spreading rumours” about a SARS-like virus.

“That Li’s words of warning were not acted on immediately has exposed problems in the governance systems in some ­places,” wrote the state paper. It noted the central government had dispatched an investigation team to Wuhan in a “timely response to people’s calls for an investigation”.

China’s censors had a busy weekend as a group of Chinese academics published an open letter urging the government to protect free speech and apologise for Dr Li’s death. Tang Yiming, the head of the school of Chinese classics at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, said he and his fellow signatories spent a day discussing the content of the letter.

“The key point is freedom of speech — rights guaranteed by the constitution,” he said. “If the words of Dr Li had not been treated as rumours, if every citizen was allowed to practise their right to voice the truth, we would not be in such a mess.”