Coronavirus Survivors Want Answers, and China Is
Silencing Them
In Wuhan, where the
pandemic started, the police have threatened and interrogated grieving
relatives. Lawyers have been warned not to help them sue.
·
May 4, 2020
The
text messages to the Chinese activist streamed in from ordinary Wuhan residents,
making the same extraordinary request: Help me sue the Chinese government. One
said his mother had died from the coronavirus after being turned away from
multiple hospitals. Another said her father-in-law had died in quarantine.
But
after weeks of back-and-forth planning, the seven residents who had reached out
to Yang Zhanqing, the activist, suddenly changed their minds in late April, or
stopped responding. At least two of them had been threatened by the police, Mr.
Yang said.
The
Chinese authorities are clamping down as grieving relatives, along with
activists, press the ruling Communist Party for an accounting of what went
wrong in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus killed thousands before
spreading to the rest of China and the world.
Lawyers
have been warned not to file suit against the government. The police have
interrogated bereaved family members who connected with others like them
online. Volunteers who tried to thwart the state’s censorship
apparatus by preserving reports about the outbreak have disappeared.
“They
are worried that if people defend their rights, the international community
will know what the real situation is like in Wuhan and the true experiences of
the families there,” said Mr. Yang, who is living in New York, where he fled
after he was briefly detained for his work in China.
The
crackdown underscores the party’s fear that any attempt to dwell on what
happened in Wuhan, or to hold officials responsible, will undermine the state’s
narrative that only China’s authoritarian system saved the country from a
devastating health crisis.
To
inspire patriotic fervor, state propaganda has portrayed the dead not as
victims, but as martyrs. Censors have deleted Chinese news reports that exposed
officials’ early efforts to hide the severity of the outbreak.
And
as more voices overseas call for China to compensate the rest of the world for the pandemic,
the party has cast its domestic critics as tools being used by foreign forces to undermine
it.
The party has long been wary of public
grief and the dangers it could pose to its rule.
In
2008, after an earthquake in Sichuan Province killed at least 69,000 people,
Chinese officials offered hush money to parents whose children died.
Following a deadly train crash in the city of Wenzhou in 2011, officials prevented relatives from
visiting the site. Each June, the authorities in Beijing silence family members
of protesters who were killed in the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.
Now, some say the government is
imposing the same kind of collective amnesia around the outbreak.
Three
volunteers involved in Terminus2049, an online project that archived censored news articles about the outbreak, went missing in Beijing last month and are
presumed to have been detained.
“I
had previously told him: ‘You guys probably face some risk doing this project.’
But I didn’t know how much,” said Chen Kun, whose brother, Chen Mei, is one of
the volunteers who disappeared.
“I
had said that maybe he would be summoned by the police for a talk, and they
would ask him to take down the site,” he said. “I didn’t think it would be this
serious.”
Mr.
Chen said he had no information about his brother’s disappearance. But he had
spoken to the relatives of one of the other missing volunteers, Cai Wei, who
said that Mr. Cai and his girlfriend had been detained and accused of “picking
quarrels and provoking trouble,” a vague charge that the government often uses
against dissidents.
Reached
by telephone on Tuesday, an employee at a police station in the Beijing
district where Chen Mei lives said he was unclear about the case. The group’s
site on GitHub, a platform popular with coders, is now blocked in China.
Volunteers
for similar online projects have also been questioned by the authorities in
recent days. In blog posts and private messages, members of such communities
have warned each other to scrub their computers. The organizers of another
GitHub project, 2019ncovmemory, which also republished censored material about
the outbreak, have set their archive to private.
To
the authorities, it seems no public criticism can be left unchecked. The police
in Hubei, the province that includes Wuhan and was hardest hit by the
outbreak, arrested a woman last
month for organizing a protest against high vegetable prices. An official at a
Wuhan hospital was removed from his post after he criticized the use
of traditional Chinese medicine to treat coronavirus patients, which the
authorities had promoted.
The
crackdown has been most galling to people mourning family members. They say
they are being harassed and subjected to close monitoring as they try to reckon with their losses.
The
coronavirus killed nearly 4,000 people in Wuhan, according to China’s official
figures. Some residents believe the true toll is much higher. The government
fired two high-ranking local officials, but that is not
enough for many grieving relatives, who say they want fair compensation for
their losses and harsher punishment for officials.
Zhang
Hai is certain that his father, who died in February, was infected with the coronavirus
at a Wuhan hospital. He says he still supports the party but thinks local
officials should be held responsible for initially hiding the fact that the
virus could spread among humans. Had he known the risk, he said, he would not
have sent his father to the hospital for treatment.
Mr.
Zhang said several Chinese reporters who had interviewed him about his demands
later told him that their editors had pulled the articles before publication.
He posted calls online to set up a monument in honor of the victims of the
epidemic in Wuhan, but censors quickly scrubbed the messages. Officials have
pressed him to bury his father’s ashes, but he has so far refused; he says they
have insisted on assigning him minders, who he believes would be there to
ensure that he caused no trouble
“They
spend so much time trying to control us,” Mr. Zhang said. “Why can’t they use
this energy to address our concerns instead?”
In
March, the police visited a Wuhan resident who had started a chat group of more
than 100 people who lost relatives to the virus, according to two members of
the group, one of whom shared a video of the encounter. The group was ordered
to disband.
Mr.
Yang, the activist in New York, said at least two of the seven Wuhan residents
who had contacted him about taking legal measures against the government
dropped the idea after being threatened by the police.
Even
if the other plaintiffs were willing to move forward, they might have trouble
finding lawyers. After Mr. Yang and a group of human rights lawyers in China
issued an open call in March for people who wanted to sue the government, several
lawyers around the country received verbal warnings from judicial officials,
Mr. Yang said.
The
officials told them not to write open letters or “create disturbances” by
filing claims for compensation, according to Chen Jiangang, a member of the
group. Mr. Chen, who fled to the United States last
year, said he had heard from several lawyers who were warned.
“If
anyone dares to make a request and the government fails to meet it, they
immediately are seen as a threat to national security,” Mr. Chen said. “It
doesn’t matter whether you’re a lawyer or a victim, it’s like you’re
imprisoned.”
Some
aggrieved residents have pressed ahead despite the government clampdown. Last
month, Tan Jun, a civil servant in Yichang, a city in Hubei Province, became
the first person to publicly attempt to sue the authorities over their response
to the outbreak.
Mr.
Tan, who works in the city’s parks department, accused the provincial
government of “concealing and covering up” the true nature of the virus,
leading people to “ignore the virus’s danger, relax their vigilance and neglect
their self-protection,” according to a copy of the complaint shared online. He
pointed to officials’ decision to host a banquet for 40,000 families in
Wuhan in early January, even as the virus was spreading.
He
urged the government to issue an apology on the front page of the Hubei Daily,
a local newspaper.
In
a brief phone call, Mr. Tan confirmed that he had submitted a complaint to the
Intermediate People’s Court in Wuhan, but he declined to be interviewed because
he is a civil servant.
With
China’s judiciary tightly controlled by the central government, it was
unclear whether Mr. Tan would get his day in court. Articles about Mr. Tan have
been censored on Chinese social media. Calls to the court in Wuhan on Thursday
rang unanswered.
Liu Yi contributed research.
No comments:
Post a Comment