Coronavirus: 300 propagandists sent to Wuhan

Xi Jinping has dispatched a platoon of 300 propagandists to Wuhan to ‘strengthen public opinion guidance’.

China's President Xi Jinping. Picture: AFP

Chinese Communist Party general­ secretary Xi Jinping has dispatched a platoon of 300 propagandists to Wuhan to “strengthen public opinion guidance”, as the official number of ­fatalities from the new coronavirus approaches 500.

Vision of 300 journalists, who all work for the state-controlled media and answer to the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Propaganda Department, were beamed into hundreds of millions of homes on Tuesday night during the flagship 7pm news bulletin on state broadcaster CCTV.

“We will co-ordinate the propa­ganda of epidemic prevention and control and the propaganda of major themes such as winning the all-round well-off ­society and fighting against ­poverty,” Zhang Xiaoguo, a director at the Central Propaganda Departme­nt, said as vision showed mask-wearing state journalists arrivin­g at an airport in Wuhan.

Workers arrange beds in a convention centre that has been converted into a temporary hospital in Wuhan. Picture: AP

Over the past fortnight, Mr Xi, the President, has repeatedly spoken­ of the need to control the narrative of the Chinese central government’s battle with the virus, which has almost 25,000 official cases in mainland China, has shut down much of the world’s second-biggest economy and threatens to scuttle major setpieces in the country’s political calendar.

Some Chinese journalists are bristling at the instructions.

Cheng Yizhong, a former editor of Southern Metropolis Daily who was removed from the job in part due to the paper’s coverage of the 2003 SARS outbreak, told The Australian that the Chinese Communist Party had worsened the current crisis with its control of the media. “All Chinese are suffering the bitterness of CCP monopoly over power, resources and truth,” said Mr Cheng.

There have been reports — first on social media and later in rare pockets of the Chinese media — that local officials in Wuhan suppressed case numbers from mid-December to early last month.

On January 1, Wuhan police punished eight people for “spreading rumours”. Most of the eight were doctors who had been discussing the spread of a new SARS-like illness in WeChat, a social media platform similar to Facebook. “Your acts have severely disturbed social order, gone beyond the limit of law. They are illegal acts!” Wuhan district police told doctor Li Wenliang, according to the admonition notice.

The Supreme People’s Court last week criticised the police team’s decision. Dr Li has in recent days been hospitalised after acquirin­g the new coronavirus while treating patients.

On Wednesday, the respected Beijing-headquartered media outlet Caixin reported that thousands of guests at a massive annual banquet­, attended by 40,000 families and held late last month, had since been stricken with the virus.

Widespread social media posts criticising officials for not cancelling the banquet when they knew about the spreading virus have been deleted by state censors.

“Who is behind the dark curtain­ of the cover-ups?” asked Mr Cheng.

Richard Horton, editor-in-chief of The Lancet, said the medical journal had “received messages from Chinese journalists struggling to report accurate inform­ation from state authorities”.

“The public needs to hear more advice from experts,” he quoted a Chinese journalist as saying.