The Subtle Muckrakers of the Coronavirus Epidemic Favorite 

The outbreak of the coronavirus has brought international scrutiny down on China’s political system. Again. A few commentators have applauded the efficiency of the Chinese Communist Party’s response, but most have zoomed in on its weaknesses. Some have even blamed the party itself for the outbreak, calling the disease a “Communist coronavirus” or “the Belt and Road Pandemic.”

Once again, China is largely being depicted as a monolith, and the party as though it exercises near-complete control, “crushing almost every wisp of freedom and oversight,” according to one columnist. But the party’s authority isn’t absolute. And to suggest that it might be is to obscure the dynamism that Chinese society has managed to preserve over the years despite the government’s tightening restrictions.

One of the hopeful things to have emerged from the coronavirus crisis is the creative coverage produced by China’s more outspoken information outlets and new voices on social media. Journalists and activists have demonstrated an impressive ability to mobilize in order to capture this complex story and, at times, challenge the authorities’ handling of the epidemic.

The dozens of articles published so far range from human-interest narratives about the plight of doctors, victims and residents in Wuhan — the city of 11 million at the center of the epidemic, which has been under lockdown since Jan. 23 — to more investigative stories about shortages of medical resources, deliberate information cover-ups and corruption at China’s Red Cross.

Caixin, a news group that owns one of China’s most respected business magazines, recently published an especially hard-hitting investigation, a four-part series produced by three dozen journalists. The first of those stories, a step-by-step account of the Wuhan government’s delays in revealing the extent of the unfolding crisis, reads like it’s part thriller, part scientific analysis. The article shows how the local authorities enabled a cover-up that lasted nearly a month by threatening or silencing whistle-blower doctors, downplaying the epidemic’s reach and concealing the fact that the virus could be transmitted between people. Drawing on interviews with scholars, doctors, patients and officials, the report demonstrates that human-to-human transmission was evident early on, contradicting the claim by city officials that infections were limited to people who had visited an insalubrious seafood and live-animal market.

Beyond Caixin — and Caijing, another magazine with a reputation for investigative prowess — other well-respected media outlets, including Xinjing Bao (Beijing News), Beijing Qingnian Bao Shenyidu (Beijing Youth Daily’s investigative reporting unit) and Zhongguo Qingnian Bao (China Youth Daily), and even lifestyle magazines like GQ China, Renwu (Portrait Magazine) and Sanlian Zhoukan (Lifeweek Magazine) have provided in-depth coverage of the coronavirus crisis.

But how have these outlets managed to break through the government’s control over information?

For one thing, that control is incomplete, and some stories slip through, at least temporarily. Policymaking in China is more fragmented than it might seem from the outside, with frequent gaps in implementation, especially between central and local authorities. Those cracks are one reason local officials can sometimes cover up their failings to hide them from Beijing. But they also create openings for critical reporting.

Local officials can only directly supervise the media outlets registered in their own provinces; they have little say over the doings of news outlets based elsewhere. Hence what could be called the practice of “extraterritorial” investigations — a longstanding feature of Chinese journalism. Most in-depth reports about the coronavirus epidemic have been carried by news outlets based outside Hubei Province, where Wuhan is located.

In times of crisis, the central authorities in Beijing have also deliberately granted the media limited space to uncover any failures. Temporary information openings are useful to the government: They can help it identify the sources of a problem, assess public sentiment and possibly, too, deliver an effective response — or at the very least, allow it to project an image of managed transparency.

And then, predictably, the persistence of critical voices depends on their ability to carefully craft their reporting strategies. The current coverage of the epidemic — much like articles about the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake and coal mining disasters that I have analyzed over the years — tends to imply faultfinding indirectly. One popular approach is to veil criticism in human-interest stories about individual suffering. A moving interview with a doctor brutally attacked by a relative of a patient who died of viral pneumonia places no blame on anyone in particular; it simply reveals chaos and despair at the grass-roots level of crisis management. And yet behind the raw depiction of human tragedy seems to lie a tacit political message: If doctors cannot be kept safe, how then can they, how can we, fight the virus?

Another approach is for reporters to draw heavily on expert commentary. This insulates them somewhat from any disapproval they are relaying. And given the high respect for scholars in Chinese society, presenting any criticism as the view of established experts also elevates and legitimizes it.

One Caixin report relied almost exclusively on experts to suggest that Wuhan officials had delayed releasing essential information about the outbreak — and improperly so, despite ambiguity about their formal obligations. The article was, essentially, the sketch of a legal case against the local authorities, and yet it managed to not come across as that. It concluded with a plea from two Beijing professors recommending that current laws be amended to prevent similar mishaps in the future. Cast as proposing solutions, the scholars appeared to be not condemning but offering constructive feedback. (At least at first: The report has since been blocked.)

For now, responsibility for the coronavirus crisis — as for other crises past — is being placed primarily on the shoulders of local officials. Pointing a finger at the central government is far more delicate: one, because that can quickly result in censorship and other punishment; two, because it usually is more difficult to establish blame higher up the ladder of authority. Western journalists are quick to criticize the whole of China’s political system for any of its shortcomings, but Chinese reporters tend to steer clear of sweeping judgments, focusing on specific culprits instead.

A recent Caixin article reported that the Hubei health authorities did not publicly raise the threat level of the outbreak until about 10 days after the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention had, at least internally. The piece doesn’t assign blame, leaving it to readers to decide whether this is the story of a local cover-up or national bureaucratic inefficiency.

Critical journalism in China has also spiked thanks to the more forceful role of social media in spreading, sometimes leaking, information. The Wuhan doctors who first warned about the suspicious illness used WeChat groups to disseminate their concerns. Their messages were later reposted and analyzed on the website of Phoenix TV and profiled in Caixin, among other outlets. The gruesome conditions at overcrowded hospitals and dramatic footage of body bags in Wuhan were recorded by citizen-journalists, nurses and patients. Social-media platforms relayed the surreal images of the city’s eerily empty streets and shots of people with banners blocking Wuhan residents from entering their towns — in one case even digging up the road to make it impassable.

And social media has been more than a vehicle for information: It has also spawned more journalism and a greater variety of voices in recent years. Some of the deeper coverage of the coronavirus crisis has come from nontraditional, online-only news sites, like Tengxun and Sohu, which officially aren’t allowed to carry out independent reporting, and so-called self-media (“zi meiti” in Chinese), self-operated social-media accounts that produce anything from entertainment to political commentary. Some of these platforms are now profitable, run by former journalists, and feature citizen journalism.

But the window for critical reporting in times of crises tends to be quite narrow, and it opens and shuts rather unpredictably. This is partly because officials practice what I have described elsewhere as “guarded improvisation”: With social stability as their ultimate aim, the authorities try to strike a fragile balance between political control and curated transparency, alternating between censorship or propaganda and allowing the media, or its surrogates, to press for accountability.

I found, for example, that news investigations into the earthquake in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province, in 2008 — more than 69,000 dead — were allowed only for a few weeks. After accounts revealed that poorly built schools had contributed to the death toll, the government blocked independent inquiries into the disaster.

Once a crisis seems like it could cause social instability — especially when public blame appears to shift from the local to the central authorities — the government starts reining in the media and tries to co-opt it into delivering a unified, official message. Even Hu Xijin, the editor of the nationalistic Global Times, has called out the Wuhan government for silencing whistle-blowers in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak. On the other hand, some critical articles about the epidemic — though not necessarily the hardest-hitting ones — have already vanished from the internet.

There is no telling how much longer Chinese journalists and concerned citizens will be able to report on and raise hard questions about the crisis. But it’s worth remembering that authoritarianism also is the mother of creativity. China’s efforts to steer, muffle or control the media have produced alternative news sources that subtly, indirectly skirt restrictions. And this, the authorities tolerate, to a point. Even under President Xi Jinping, the government is sensitive and somewhat responsive to bottom-up pressure from the people — their need to know, their calls for accountability. In China, too, as the coronavirus epidemic reveals, there is a social contract between the public and the party-state.