Ding. I glance at my phone as the screen lights up. As expected, it’s the BBC News app.
“Breaking: WHO declared coronavirus a global health emergency,” the screen reads.
I quickly skim through the article. It’s a brief update on the World Health Organization’s decision to upgrade the coronavirus threat as a global health emergency. It quotes WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who states the decision was prompted by concerns the virus might spread to countries with weaker health systems.
I immediately went to my WeChat, the Chinese equivalent of Facebook, for a very different version of the same incident. I knew China’s state-owned propaganda media outlets would paint a positive story. The article I found, written in Mandarin, claims that WHO praised China’s effort in battling the spread of the virus, and that Beijing has been in constant communication with WHO since the epidemic broke out.
Normally, I’d dig out the original WHO video to figure out exactly what was said in that statement, but I was having a busy day and didn’t continue the investigation.
But one thing is for sure; for most of my Chinese millennial friends, this is the only version they will ever read.
None of them will know of the eight medical professionals who discovered this new virus a month before our country chose to even publicly admit its existence. Nor will they know that those professionals paid a price for speaking out about this highly contagious virus without the authority’s permission. They were scolded and warned by police officers who said they were committing a crime by spreading rumors, and they were forced to publicly apologize, saying they made a mistake.
Most of my Chinese friends would say that “it is the way it is.”
Our country is too big to have a bottom-up governance. And if China implemented democracy, it would likely lead to chaos.
We, as a nation, must unite and help during this difficult time, instead of pointing fingers. Few of my friends might doubt the truth behind the theory before they self-censor themselves and remain silent on social media. The occasional outrage leaking out on other Chinese social media platforms will quickly get censored. Yet, clips of videos that slipped through the cracks gave me a glimpse of how desperate the situation is in Wuhan city.
The shortage of supplies has left people feeling hopeless. Patients are getting rejected from admission to the hospital; test kits for the virus are all sold out. For contingency, the government pledged to build two temporary hospitals from the ground up. And within 10 days, the first hospital was completed.
What could you achieve in just two weeks? China built two hospitals, housing 2,600 beds, in #Wuhan to help treat #coronavirus patients. Check out this video to find out #HowChinaCan pic.twitter.com/1qfwTreoGB
— China Xinhua News (@XHNews) February 5, 2020
“Only our (Chinese) government has the power to achieve this miracle,” one of the articles on WeChat reads, displaying pride in how fast the exact same government that tried to hide the outbreak can build infrastructure.
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The drastic contrast between what seems like an overwhelmed medical system and a lower-than-expected death toll makes me doubt how forthcoming Chinese officials are about the outbreak numbers, both in terms of the infected and the casualties.
So, what exactly is happening there? This is the question that I find myself asking whenever there’s an outbreak in China. And after navigating contrasting news sources, I know that’s a question that I’ll never find an answer for.
However, for most of my patriotic friends who consume news mainly on WeChat, the message is loud and clear: our government did nothing wrong and the rest of the world is racist against us.
They are not totally wrong about the second part. Fuelled by fear and ignorance, people on social media have been blaming us for the disease since the outbreak. A video of a Chinese woman, supposedly in Wuhan, eating a bat was widely spread online. It prompted the old narrative about the disgusting eating habits of the Chinese, regardless of the fact that the video was not even filmed in China but in Palau, and bat is not a delicacy in Wuhan.
This racism against the Chinese community has only made the blind patriots in my country even more loyal to the communist party, if that’s even possible. The feeling of being subjected to racism triumphs whatever wrongdoing our government has done — at least, our corrupt leaders are part of us.
So here I am, scrolling through all my friends’ posts on WeChat about the coronavirus, feeling more saddened by the inaccurate news reports and the people who believe them than the actual event. In a few years, when my millennial friends become the driving force of our society, what will our country look like?
Lu Xu is a SaltWire Network employee. She graduated from journalism school at the University of King's College in 2018.
