China’s Censorship Helps Spread the Virus Consider the Spanish flu, which killed 50 million in 1918-19 as governments at war suppressed the news. By Paul Wolfowitz and Max Frost
https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-censorship-helps-spread-the-virus-11580071968?mod=opinion_lead_pos5
Xi Jinping has acknowledged that the “accelerating spread” of a new coronavirus from the central Chinese city of Wuhan is a “grave situation.” To stop the virus’s spread, the Chinese government has barred residents of Wuhan and nearby cities from traveling and blocked outbound flights, trains, buses and ferries. But if this develops into a catastrophe, the cult of personality around Mr. Xi and the Communist regime’s efforts to control information will deserve much of the blame.
For a precedent, look back to 1918, when the Spanish flu broke out amid World War I. In the U.S., government officials and the press did all they could to play it down lest it hurt the war effort. While the Los Angeles health chief declared there was “no cause for alarm” and the Arkansas Gazette described the disease as the “same old fever and chills,” people were dying by the thousands.
The name “Spanish flu” was a misnomer. In the countries where it originally surfaced—France, China and the U.S.—the news was suppressed by censorship and self-censorship to maintain wartime morale. (China sent only civilian laborers to the battlefield, but it declared war on Germany in August 1917.) Not until King Alphonse XIII of neutral Spain fell ill did news of the virus spread widely.
Between the spring of 1918 and early 1919, three waves of Spanish flu tore across the planet, facilitated by censorship and secrecy. The results were catastrophic: 50 million people were killed world-wide, including nearly 700,000 Americans.
Because the Chinese Communist Party cares more about its social control than the well-being of China’s people, a similar situation is imaginable today. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar has praised the Chinese authorities for being transparent and cooperative, including by publishing the sequence of the viruses they have isolated. But in other respects Beijing’s behavior has heightened the risk.
China has no independent media and strict censorship even in peacetime. The virus has spread to Xinjiang, where the government holds more than a million Uighurs in densely populated “re-education centers.” Beijing has blocked Taiwan—which has three confirmed cases of the virus—from participating in a World Health Organization discussion of the outbreak.
Meanwhile, Chinese police are interrogating people for “spreading rumors” on social media about the virus. Two days before Wuhan’s government disclosed the severity of the outbreak, it hosted potluck banquets for more than 100,000 people. On Jan. 10, a government expert told the state network CCTV that the virus was “under control” and a “mild condition.” Wuhan’s bestselling newspaper didn’t put the outbreak on its front page until nearly three weeks after the first cases.
Analysts suspect the actual number of infected is thousands higher than the currently confirmed 1,400. The lesson of 1918 is that secrecy can kill. Chinese communism now threatens the world with a massive medical disaster.
Mr. Wolfowitz is a scholar and Mr. Frost a senior associate in foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
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