Originally by Chen Jibing, published on "Dajia" via Tencent News
As I sit down to write this article, a heavy cloud of gloom is pressing down upon me and my family.
In the apartment building where I currently live, in a residential compound in Shanghai's Changning District, there is a household from Wuhan — five people in all. An elderly couple (grandfather and grandmother) had taken a young child back to Wuhan not long ago to celebrate the New Year there. Apparently sensing that something was wrong, they rushed back to Shanghai overnight, just hours before Wuhan's lockdown went into effect (on the evening of the 23rd, the eve of Little New Year, as it is commonly known).
The first two days were relatively calm, but from the afternoon of the first day of the Lunar New Year (the 25th), the grandfather began running a fever.
At this moment, the family has gone on their own to a nearby hospital for treatment.
The neighbors on either side are all uneasy, not knowing what will happen next.
Medical staff escort people arriving in Shanghai from key affected areas into a hotel for medical observation. Photo by Zhang Hengwei, China News Service.
1
I am a media professional with nearly 30 years of experience in journalism, so naturally I am especially concerned about the role the media has played in this epidemic, which seemed to sweep across the country almost "out of nowhere."
Looking back over how the news media responded to this outbreak of "novel coronavirus pneumonia" (hereafter "COVID-19" or "the novel coronavirus"), January 20 stands out as a very clear dividing line.
On the evening of January 20, Zhong Nanshan, head of the National Health Commission's senior expert panel and academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, was interviewed on CCTV News
Before January 20, the overwhelming majority of reporting on "COVID-19" came from official media in Wuhan and Hubei. Most of this reporting followed a single dominant tone that can be summed up in one sentence: the virus was of "limited harm" and "under control." For instance, some experts asserted with great confidence that this new virus could not spread "human to human," and so on.
During this period, eight Wuhan residents were also summoned for questioning over allegedly "spreading rumors" on social media.
Although the first patient had already appeared on December 8, 2019, for the more than 40 days that followed, it can be said that the news media's function toward the public was, throughout, one of "reassurance."
Naturally, not just in the rest of the country, but even locally in Wuhan itself, the mood remained entirely calm and untroubled.
The Wuhan Municipal Health Commission's first official notice was not issued until December 31, 2019. I do not think we should place too much blame on the Wuhan Health Commission for being slow to respond in this regard — discovering, isolating, screening, and confirming a completely new virus that humanity had never encountered before genuinely takes time.
News from January 1, 2020: a notice announces the closure and remediation of the Huanan Seafood Market.
Even so, the Wuhan Health Commission continued issuing only sporadic and vague notices afterward, and local media likewise reported on them in only minor, unimportant positions. To sum it up briefly: the number of patients had increased slightly, but the situation was not serious. Between January 5 and 11, the notices simply stopped altogether; from January 13 to 18, they resumed, but each one reported no new cases, no deaths, only patients who had recovered and been discharged.
News from January 19: experts say Wuhan's coronavirus pneumonia is generally treatable, and local media's coverage remained extremely optimistic in tone.
Some people noticed that these two periods happened to coincide exactly with the "Two Sessions" of Wuhan city and Hubei province. They joked, half-seriously, that this "novel coronavirus" was truly patriotic and politically savvy. In the spirit of celebrating the Spring Festival, Wuhan even held the Baibuting community's "Ten-Thousand-Family Banquet" on January 18, and on January 20 opened up 200,000 free cultural-tourism vouchers for residents to reserve...
But after January 20, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse.
From the moment media reports first revealed large-scale infection cases, to Wuhan's "lockdown" and its appeal for help, to numerous provinces and cities across the country activating Level-1 emergency response for major public health incidents (more ironic still, Hubei province activated its own Level-1 response even later than provinces like Zhejiang and Guangdong) — all of this happened within a span of just three or four days.
Starting from January 20, media engagement with this "COVID-19" epidemic entered what I would call its second phase. The defining feature of this phase, to borrow a phrase often used in official language, is that the "main battlefield of public opinion" shifted outside of Wuhan and Hubei, with the voices of local state media drowned out by the far louder, round-the-clock coverage of national media outlets.
As I expected, however, the media coverage in this phase mostly followed a different but equally single-minded tone: declarations of resolve and paeans to good deeds and good people. In short, from January 20 onward, the primary function Chinese media performed for the public shifted from "reassurance" to "encouragement" and "inspiring emotion."
Let me put it this way: media reactions before and after January 20 were indeed quite different in many respects, but they shared one thing in common — in neither phase were they doing what a competent, qualified news media organization ought to be doing.
January 22, Guangzhou South Railway Station: many travelers are already wearing masks. Photo by Wu Weihong, Southern Daily.
2
These days, everyone keeps saying that information transparency is the best vaccine.
According to one report, two professors at the University of Washington built a data model, based on real-world cases, showing that when media coverage volume increases tenfold, the number of infections in severe public-health-threatening infectious diseases like SARS or COVID-19 falls by 33.5 percent. Just how scientific or accurate this kind of quantitative sociological research really is remains a matter of debate among experts and laypeople alike, but the conclusion that high-quality, free news reporting is an effective tool for preventing the spread of disease should be beyond question.
Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate in economics from India, once said that a free press is a rescuer in times of disaster.
After this outbreak of COVID-19, the World Health Organization also repeatedly stressed the extreme importance of information transparency. That is why CCTV anchor Bai Yansong repeated this same point on his widely watched interview program.
CCTV anchor Bai Yansong said on his program, "In the absence of a specific cure, information transparency is the best vaccine." During this outbreak, his conversation with Zhong Nanshan drew enormous public attention.
I won't invoke lofty phrases like "inalienable civil rights" here — for us, that kind of language feels too grand, too remote, too disconnected from reality. Looking at this purely from a practical, technical standpoint: ensuring that information flows freely and transparently brings enormous benefits when it comes to easing a crisis, defusing conflict, and solving problems — and, by extension, to social stability and even to the self-interest of those in power.
One fundamental reason for this is that people are, by nature, rational. Any social actor — whether an individual, a family, a business or institution, a social organization, and so on — makes a choice of action in response to any given event based solely on the information available to them. Only when information is sufficiently complete can the decisions people make align with their own individual rationality, and, in turn, better serve the public interest as a whole.
Based on the number of confirmed "novel coronavirus" cases reported outside China, and using epidemiological data such as the disease's incubation period, the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London built a transmission model that estimated: as of January 12, Wuhan likely had just over 1,700 potential cases (with an uncertainty range of 190 to 5,341); by January 18, the total number of potential symptomatic cases in Wuhan was likely around 4,000 (with an uncertainty range of 1,000 to 9,700)...
I would not dare claim that estimates of this kind are necessarily precise, but they at least carry a degree of scientific authority, and they align with how the outbreak later actually unfolded. If information like this had been fully and promptly conveyed to as many Chinese readers as possible — especially ordinary people in Wuhan — then we would never have seen the extraordinary sight, as late as January 20, of most residents on Wuhan's streets and alleys not even wearing masks, still cheerfully gathering everywhere. And if every single decision the Hubei and Wuhan governments made in responding to the outbreak, down to the smallest detail, had been reported to readers nationwide through the media, then, given China's current production and logistics capacity, we would never have seen the tragedy that unfolded after the "lockdown" — severe shortages of every kind of supply within Wuhan, hospitals overwhelmed, medical workers pushed past their limits, and donations from around the country all blocked at hastily closed transportation checkpoints.
January 23, an aerial photo shows Wuhan's streets standing empty. Photo by Zheng Ziyan, China News Service.
Beyond helping as many social actors as possible respond promptly and correctly to the crisis at the micro level (the most important response being self-protection), information transparency makes another crucial contribution: it can dramatically raise the degree and efficiency of society-wide participation in addressing a crisis, thereby driving decision-makers, through broad, thorough, and in-depth discussion, toward the optimal response at the macro level.
As mentioned earlier, Wuhan's "COVID-19" outbreak was first identified on December 8 of last year. Just one month later, Chinese researchers had already identified the cause of the virus and published its genomic sequence. Even international peers praised this as world-class scientific efficiency.
News from January 16, 2020: Feng Zijian, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and an expert on the National Health Commission's panel, said that through close cooperation among the China CDC, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and multiple other institutions, together with the health authorities of Hubei province and Wuhan city, the pathogen behind the "pneumonia of unknown cause" occurring in Wuhan had now been preliminarily identified as a novel coronavirus — not SARS, not MERS, but a new coronavirus whose genetic sequence differs considerably from both.
News from January 16, 2020: Gauden Galea, the World Health Organization's representative in China, said that public intervention measures had brought the disease's spread under control.
In truth, it was not only in medical science that Chinese ingenuity and China's formidable economic strength today could have helped Wuhan from the very start — there were many other areas as well...
Yet by the point the outbreak has now reached, one can only say: a hand full of the best possible cards was somehow played into a losing hand.
3
There may well have been players who did even worse than merely "playing a winning hand into a loss."
On the afternoon of Lunar New Year's Eve (January 24), Wang Heyan, a Caixin reporter on assignment in Wuhan, posted on WeChat Moments saying that she and her colleagues, trying to verify reports that medical staff at a certain hospital had been infected with COVID-19, had gone through several doctors, one after another, only to be told each time that the Center for Disease Control had ordered medical staff not to accept media interviews and not to disclose any information about the outbreak — even when promised anonymity and source protection, they still refused to speak.
That same afternoon, someone also reported that after passing by the Huanan Seafood Market — the presumed source of the virus — and casually snapping a photo, four security guards immediately surrounded them, shouting angrily and demanding they delete the photo. Someone even tried to grab the phone, saying, "A Japanese reporter who took photos here yesterday was hauled off to the police station..."
On the first day of the Lunar New Year (the 25th), Wuhan's Changjiang Daily published an editorial on its new-media platform, Changjiang Rongmei, titled "Every Rumor You Spread Creates Needless Panic," continuing to sternly condemn rumors, claiming they were more harmful than the epidemic itself and could not be tolerated. "Once the novel pneumonia is cured, it's gone and that's that — but rumors are not like that; their harm is greater, and their damage to a city lasts far longer."
That same day, a veteran senior reporter at a Hubei newspaper was also disciplined over a Weibo post.
Clearly, some people still took it for granted that reassuring the public was the most important task at hand. Otherwise, they would not have deployed so much manpower to keep watch around the Huanan Seafood Market at a moment when supplies and personnel were desperately short everywhere else.
Because they, too, are rational actors.
You could certainly say that this is the disastrous result of outdated thinking. But then why have so many officials and administrators come to adopt this mistaken mode of thinking and behavior — that it is always safer to keep the public from knowing, or to let them know as little as possible, about the real situation? Most people attribute this to a cautious, conservative bureaucratic mindset that seeks no credit but merely to avoid blame. I see it differently, and I can offer a clear example to refute that line of reasoning.
As we know, officials across China today display an unprecedented enthusiasm for attracting investment and growing the local economy. But think carefully: large-scale inflows of foreign capital into a locality can also bring plenty of trouble, even social problems — conflicts between residents caused by forced demolitions, environmental pollution, and so on. And how well do officials really understand the true nature of this incoming capital? Perhaps it carries, deliberately or at least in practical effect, certain ideologically "discordant" elements.
Yet we rarely see officials timidly trying to keep out capital that might cause "trouble" simply because they fear taking risks. On the contrary, they always find countless ways to enthusiastically assist this incoming capital, guiding it toward whatever room for growth exists within the bounds of national policy — and in some extreme cases, some officials will even openly violate national laws and regulations to make this happen. Why is it that these very same officials show not the slightest trace of that same cautious, conservative mindset when it comes to attracting investment and boosting local GDP?
The key to this puzzle lies in how officials are evaluated. Economic development has been the primary goal pursued by Party committees and governments at every level, from the central government down to the localities, throughout the 40 years of reform and opening up — and this has meant that officials are evaluated above all on whether they have contributed to economic growth. Given this premise, an official eager to secure a bright career path will dare to take on almost any risk, so long as it helps accelerate economic development, because "economic development," this one shining achievement, can cover up a hundred other faults.
Growing the economy requires a stable social environment, and most officials are perfectly aware, deep down, that social stability ultimately depends on narrowing the gap between rich and poor and building a fair, just rule of law — but that is an extraordinarily difficult undertaking, one that demands enormous investment and yields results only slowly. Raising GDP, by contrast, can potentially deliver immediate, visible results. Of course, social stability truly is of paramount importance, and something the central government has repeatedly emphasized as a top priority — but at the level of many local officials, that goal naturally gets reduced to something much simpler: as long as nothing goes wrong. And because Chinese officials are evaluated by their superiors rather than by the local public, this notion of "nothing going wrong" gets further redefined, in practice, as "nothing that superiors find out has gone wrong." Following this logic to its conclusion, in many localities, "social stability" effectively becomes equivalent to "stability as it appears in the newspapers (or on television screens)" — and the natural end result is that, whatever happens, the first instinct is always: "this must not be reported."
The cost of this approach — something like plugging one's own ears while stealing a bell — is that more and more social tensions accumulate and settle beneath the surface, only to erupt again and again through major crises like this COVID-19 outbreak. What's worse, this style of management not only fails to achieve real stability, it single-handedly manufactures social conflicts that need never have existed at all. By the time everything finally comes to light and erupts, it has usually already produced consequences too tragic and too late to undo.
Last night, many people found themselves mocking a certain press conference, and questions of individual accountability have become the dominant theme of public opinion. But we ought to recognize that even if individuals are made to bear the necessary responsibility, so long as the underlying administrative mindset does not change, we can hardly expect the next test to be weathered safely. The painful lessons of SARS are not so distant — but is humanity's most painful lesson of all not precisely that we never learn any lesson from history at all?
The Book of Documents, in its chapter "The Great Declaration," says: "Heaven sees as my people see; Heaven hears as my people hear."
Being deaf and blind is itself a kind of contagious disease, and no one is immune to it.
4
Now let us turn to the other side of this coin: the news media.
On the afternoon of Lunar New Year's Eve, I happened to see a conversation unfolding in a WeChat group made up of several dozen of my former colleagues from Wen Wei Po, my old employer.
One veteran, celebrated Wen Wei Po journalist — famous nationwide back in the 1980s, and also the colleague and elder I respect most — remarked, with real feeling, that this new outbreak of pneumonia ought to be exactly the moment for Wen Wei Po to truly show what it can do.
Tactlessly, I interrupted: first of all, today's Wen Wei Po is no longer the Wen Wei Po of his era. Broadly speaking, today's news media in general are not what news media once were in his time. And second, let's be honest — today's Chinese readers don't care in the slightest what Wen Wei Po publishes. No one expects to learn anything valuable or important from Wen Wei Po the way people did back in the 1980s, because for a long time now, Wen Wei Po itself has stopped caring about what Chinese readers actually care about. It has become a mutually reinforcing cycle.
At the end, I added one more remark specifically: I said all this without meaning to blame anyone. Over the course of my career I have worked for many news and publishing organizations, and Wen Wei Po was my very first job after graduating from university — the place where I worked the longest, and so it has always been the institution I feel the deepest affection for.
Nearly two years ago, around this same time, I published an article in this very column, titled "Real Journalism Is Dying, and What's More Terrifying Is That No One Cares." I lamented, back then, just how far the news media's ability to report on matters of major public interest had already deteriorated — and I used the metaphor of "a blind man riding a blind horse toward a deep pond at midnight" to describe a society that no longer has quality journalism.
At the time, I wrote, with deep and genuine anxiety: "Given the state of public discourse today, if we ever truly faced another SARS, the consequences would be too dreadful to imagine."
Unfortunately, that turned out to be a prophecy fulfilled — and in less than two years, no less!
My state of mind now is much the same as it was two years ago. I have no wish to assign blame to any particular party, and still less any ambition or grand plan to offer a solution to the current state of affairs. But I believe that once we have seen a dangerous scene unfold before our eyes, we ought always to speak up loudly about it. Only when more people pay attention, take it seriously, and join the discussion does the situation stand even a glimmer of hope. That earlier article drew more than a million reads on the Tencent "Dajia" platform, proof that readers do care about this grim and pressing reality. That, at least, offers me some small comfort — it shows that hope still remains.
After that article was published, I also said, in a conversation with the editor of the "Dajia" column ("An Exclusive Interview with Chen Jibing: Why 'Journalism Is Dead' Went Viral, and What Public Nerve It Touched"), that traditional media had failed to provide readers with what I call "real journalism" — but the new media that sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain also failed to fill this serious void, as some had once optimistically hoped or expected it would. On the contrary, because the rise of new media has caused an explosive growth in the sheer volume of information in the media marketplace, while people's attention remains as limited as ever, new media has instead "diluted" even the occasional pieces of high-quality journalism that traditional media once managed to produce.
I have not discussed new media directly in this article, but I think that anyone who has watched how new media responded to this "COVID-19" crisis over these past weeks will already understand the picture clearly enough. By rights, the seventeen years since SARS have coincided with the explosive growth of mobile internet, and today's information and news-dissemination technology ought to have advanced by leaps and bounds compared to back then. And yet, what we have witnessed shows no real improvement at all.
One point deserves adding here: throughout this crisis, new media has offered an overwhelming abundance of opinions and emotional reactions — some fair-minded, some perhaps not very sound at all. But it is a basic fact that new media has provided almost no valuable first-hand information whatsoever.
Of course, I do not mean to place any blame on new media for this either. I have already explained the reasons behind this in detail, both in that article from two years ago and in the interview that followed it.
Still, whatever the case, it has been genuinely heartening to see the contribution made, and the reputation earned, during this crisis by the small handful of responsible traditional media outlets like Caixin, and by professionally rigorous new media platforms like DXY (Dingxiang Doctor). Let me say something that perhaps does not belong in this article: as someone with some personal history connected to Caixin, I feel proud of it.
5
Since I have already brought up new media, or social media, let me finally give in to the urge to say something about the whole question of so-called "rumors."
Rumors, at their mildest, cause needless distress; at their worst, they cause all kinds of real damage. This is why people despise rumors, and why the authorities, for various reasons, often actively work to crack down on them.
But as with many other things in this world, action taken purely out of good intentions, without careful process or scrutiny, often fails to achieve its well-meaning original purpose — and can sometimes easily produce the exact opposite effect. Punishing "rumors" indiscriminately is exactly this kind of action; it can produce unexpectedly severe consequences.
A so-called "rumor" is simply information that is later proven false, or incorrect. In this sense, rumors accompany our social life at every single moment. A weather bureau forecasts heavy rain at 3 p.m. somewhere, and the predicted downpour never materializes... this too could be considered a "rumor." The ordinary people or businesses who changed their original plans out of concern for the storm will suffer real losses as a result — at the very least, this mistaken forecast will have caused them some inconvenience.
The reason I have deliberately inserted the phrase "later proven" before "incorrect information" is that whether any judgment or prediction is correct can only ever be confirmed after the fact.
In my view, those who reflexively call for harsh crackdowns on "rumors" suffer from a kind of "20/20 hindsight" fallacy — they habitually take a conclusion that only became clear after an event had run its course, and imagine, without a second thought, that it must have already been perfectly obvious at the time.
In an open society, insecurity is an ever-present shadow. And in today's age of globalization, "non-conventional" security threats — large-scale infectious disease, terrorism, and the like — loom especially large. A good society ought to encourage its citizens to actively participate in matters of major public governance, rather than encouraging everyone to retreat into cold indifference and keep their distance.
Imagine a passenger in a bustling station hall who notices a suspicious black plastic bag, and after watching it for a good while sees no sign of anyone claiming it as their own... If he is a public-spirited citizen — or even simply a "busybody" — he might well call the police or fire department to report it.
If he doesn't know the emergency hotline number, or calls and no one picks up (and is that really such an uncommon occurrence?), he might instead take a photo with his phone and post it to Weibo or WeChat Moments, adding a few speculative comments of his own.
If that Weibo or WeChat post gets widely shared, it could cause quite a bit of panic, and as the information spreads through repeated retelling, it might well get exaggerated and embellished along the way, eventually becoming almost unrecognizable from the original.
Experience tells us that in most such cases, things later turn out to have been a false alarm. In other words, this passenger has spread a "rumor," one that has caused significant social impact. Following the same "20/20 hindsight" logic I criticized earlier, he ought to be severely investigated and punished for it.
But if a society consistently treats its public-spirited "busybodies" this way, then over time, fewer and fewer people will bother caring about the public good, and everyone will "rationally" choose the path of least trouble — better to avoid getting involved at all.
Their first instinct upon seeing anything suspicious at a station will be to leave that troublesome place as quickly as possible, and to say absolutely nothing about it to anyone else. But even if only one out of a hundred such reports turns out to be genuine, the incalculable loss of life and property that would result from ignoring it far outweighs the inconvenience of the other ninety-nine false alarms.
The vast majority of ordinary citizens do not possess the specialized knowledge needed to accurately judge and properly respond to traffic accidents, flammable or explosive materials, earthquakes and tsunamis, medical emergencies, and the like — the only way they can participate in this kind of public event at all is by spreading information the moment they encounter it. I believe this was precisely the original intention of those eight Wuhan residents accused of "spreading rumors" — and the facts have shown that even if what they spread was mere speculation, once it circulated, its overall impact on society was, more often than not, a positive one.
As I have already said, most of these kinds of "warning" messages that people send out may later be proven false. But if we fail to distinguish between deliberate rumor-mongering and reasonable speculation, we end up blocking off society's channels for learning about potential safety hazards altogether — and that, in the end, causes far greater harm than the "rumor" itself ever could.
Just as we have already seen play out in how this Wuhan pneumonia outbreak has unfolded.
Beijing's subway stands empty during the Spring Festival period. Photo via China News Service.
I am certainly not suggesting that society should simply let rumors run wild unchecked. There are, indeed, plenty of people who exploit rumors for illicit personal gain, posing a real threat to the interests of others and of society as a whole. Such people fully deserve to be punished.
But I want to make one point clear here: when it comes to cracking down on "rumors," the proper stance should be passive (reactive) rather than active (proactive). By a "passive (reactive)" stance, I mean this: no one should be allowed to rashly declare some piece of information a "rumor" before it has produced any visible, concrete consequences.
This is because a "rumor," by definition, must cause some kind of loss to certain members of society, whether that loss is material or psychological. If a specific social actor believes that some particular "rumor" has harmed their interests and caused them a loss, they should be encouraged to seek redress through legal means. They can sue the "rumor-monger" in court, demanding compensation for their losses, and the court will render its judgment after a proper process of investigation and argument. If the consequences of a "rumor" are severe enough, prosecutorial authorities can also step in and bring criminal charges against the "rumor-monger."
Let us not forget: the reason a "rumor" needs to be punished at all is that it has produced real consequences. If I invent some sensational rumor at home to tell my wife, and she doesn't believe a word of it and never repeats it to anyone else, then my so-called "rumor" amounts, at most, to nothing more than a harmless joke.
In the legal sense, "consequences" must already have manifested and be demonstrable — not some unprovable, merely "potential" possibility. If someone posts something on social media that may contain false information, and none of the people who might conceivably suffer a loss because of that post ever come forward to assert their own rights, then that alone tells us that — whether or not it was technically a rumor — it produced no actual real-world consequences.
In such a case, if the authorities rashly step in to severely punish the "rumor-monger," this violates the most basic principles of the rule of law.
Conclusion
This article took me two full days to write, in an effort to keep pace with the latest information as it unfolded.
Just as I was finishing this piece, the serum test results came back for my Wuhan-born neighbor in my apartment building: positive.
In other words, he has now been confirmed as one of Shanghai's newly added cases of "novel coronavirus pneumonia." The relevant authorities have instructed the rest of his household (who show no symptoms) to continue self-quarantining at home. The neighbors on either side are now even more uneasy, even less certain of what will happen next.
Upon learning of this confirmed diagnosis, my very first thought was this: if his hometown of Wuhan had spent less effort on "cracking down on rumors to reassure the public" and instead disclosed everything it knew, truthfully, as early as possible, then this family would clearly never have considered going back to Wuhan to celebrate the New Year in the first place... and everything that has since happened in our apartment building (including all the further trouble that might still be brewing, even unfounded accusations and disputes among neighbors who once got along perfectly well) would never have happened at all. This residential community would now be a picture of genuine peace and stability — real peace, real stability.
And is society as a whole really any different?
Written January 25-27, 2020.