Chinese censors clamp down on media coverage as cases surge

SHANGHAI • As the number of coronavirus infections in China continues to surge without any sign of slowing down, the Communist government has clamped down on the news media and the Internet, signalling an effort to control the narrative about a crisis that has become a once-in-a-generation challenge for leaders in Beijing.

With frustrations running high across the country, China's leaders appear to be strengthening information controls after a brief spell in which news organisations could report thoroughly and many negative comments on the official response were left uncensored online.

In recent days, both state-run news media and more commercially minded outlets have been told to focus on positive stories about relief efforts, said three people at Chinese news organisations who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Internet platforms have removed articles that suggest shortcomings in the government's response or are otherwise negative about the outbreak. Local officials have also cracked down on what they call online "rumours" about the virus. The Public Security Ministry this week lauded such efforts, which have continued even after one person reprimanded for spreading rumours turned out to be a doctor sounding the alarm about early cases.

The government has shifted its strategy for information control in response to the changing nature of the public's discontent, said Dr Fu King-wa, an associate professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at the University of Hong Kong. In the early days of the crisis, online vitriol had largely been directed at the local authorities. Now, more of the anger is aimed at higher-level leadership, and there seems to be more of it overall, he said.

Late last month, for instance, after The New England Journal of Medicine published a research paper about early cases of the virus, Chinese Web users pounced on the fact that several of the authors worked for the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), saying they should have been informing the public, not furthering their research careers.

The researchers later said that all their data had already been made public before the paper was written.

At this point, Dr Fu said, more censorship "would not stop the public frustration".

The rapidly rising number of infections and deaths has put renewed pressure on the senior leadership. Hospitals near the centre of the epidemic have been overwhelmed, and people with flu-like symptoms have been turned away. Many cases have not been diagnosed because of a shortage of testing kits.

Still, the number of people in China who are recovering is rising as well. On Wednesday, a senior Chinese health expert attributed the large rise in number of confirmed cases to the fact that hospitals had been able to diagnose the virus more quickly. The number of suspected cases had dropped for the same reason, said the expert Li Xingwang.

The new curbs on information appeared to have been set in motion earlier this week, when President Xi Jinping and other senior officials said at a meeting that they would "strengthen control over online media" as one of several measures to maintain social stability.

After the meeting, a top official at the central propaganda department told state broadcaster CCTV his department had dispatched more than 300 journalists to the front lines in Wuhan city and Hubei province. Mr Zhang Xiaoguo said the department would make publicising the government's prevention-and-control campaign its "highest priority". It was unclear what news organisations the journalists would represent.

Employees at Chinese news organisations this week described a mandatory change of tone in their stories and fresh orders to hew to the official line. Journalists at the Xinhua news agency, for example, have been told to keep their coverage positive, according to internal instructions seen by The New York Times. They were ordered not to continue mentioning that the World Health Organisation had declared a global health emergency and not to cover every new case abroad.

Across the rest of China's news landscape, articles on a broad range of themes have been blocked or deleted online. They include reports in the financial news magazine Caijing about deaths in Wuhan that might not have been counted in the official tally and a first-hand account of a funeral home in Wuhan.

NYTIMES