The truthtellers

Censorship in China

China’s internet ecosystem is heavily controlled by the government -- but users are always trying to find new ways to evade detection from the censors. Here’s how it works.

Meet the truthtellers

Chen Mei was perhaps an unlikely hero of the coronavirus pandemic.

A shy but passionate zoology graduate, he worked for a non-profit that helps people with hearing loss, according to his brother Chen Kun. He loved cats and kept a low profile online, said a friend who asked not to be named out of fear of punishment from the authorities.

“He was never the initiator of projects -- he always played the supporting role,” said Chen Kun.

But with Terminus 2049 he made an exception.

“You might have to be more cautious about this,” Chen Kun remembers telling his brother, reminding Chen Mei that if he could see his posts about Terminus 2049, then others could, too.

Even so, Chen Kun didn’t think his brother would be arrested as what he was doing was relatively conservative compared to other activists. But under China’s system of information control, the rules are always shifting.

It’s not always immediately clear where the red line is for censorship, and because the rules aren’t static, some people venture into gray areas in the belief that what they are doing will be tolerated by the government. They hope that they will be lucky enough to avoid censorship and potential punishment.

“It’s really unclear what is legal and what is illegal,” a friend of Chen Mei noted. “Why would archiving those articles be illegal?”

When Chen Kun got that fateful call on April 20 from his brother’s boss, he was in Indonesia, trying to avoid the pandemic. His brother Chen Mei had disappeared alongside Terminus 2049 co-founder, Cai Wei, and Cai Wei’s girlfriend, he soon learned.

At the beginning of May, Chen Mei’s parents received a notice via courier from police which confirmed their suspicions: their son was under residential surveillance at a designated location, a system whereby people can be held for up to six months without charge.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and State Council Information Office have not responded to requests for comment on case statuses of Cai Wei and Chen Mei, and fellow truthtellers Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin. They did not confirm how many people had been detained or prosecuted for sharing information on the pandemic. China’s Cyber Security Administration has not responded to a request for comment on whether archiving and republishing Chinese news reports is illegal.

Chen Kun had already spent time in detention in Beijing back in 2014. He said he was arrested after his girlfriend put up posters in the city supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Umbrella Movement. Authorities believed he ordered her to do it.

“It wasn’t my plan to study in Paris,” he said. “I would have gone back to China after the pandemic if it weren’t for my brother.”

He worries for his family left in China, including his mother, who the Chinese authorities have contacted to ask about Chen Mei’s political activities, although she knew nothing.

“I’m worried, but I don’t have any choice. I just have one option which is to speak out,” Chen Kun says.

Chen Kun says if people can only see the “whitewashed” version of history promoted by the Chinese government, there will be no way to learn from this current outbreak.

“Then what was the sacrifice of this year for?” he says.

The truthtellers’ legacy

It wasn’t enough to silence the truthtellers. The Chinese Communist Party needed to create its own storyline, both to cover up its initial missteps and to deflect the reputational damage caused by China being the country where the first cases were detected.

Its first step in February was to deploy hundreds of state media journalists to Wuhan to be its eyes and ears on the ground. Although their reports were often censored, they served a dual purpose of helping to gather information for the party, something that often happens during public emergencies in China, said Mary Gallagher, the director of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan and an expert in Chinese politics.

By March, daily cases had fallen to double digits and much of China had emerged from lockdown. By May, China had largely controlled the virus within its own borders and its coronavirus case numbers were quickly dwarfed by skyrocketing numbers in the United States and Europe.

In the following months, China seized on that success to push the narrative it had handled the outbreak better than almost any country -- proof its authoritarian response were a model to be admired and replicated. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs dismissed criticism that it had cracked down on journalists and doctors, saying: “The Chinese government has all along conducted its Covid-19 response in an open and transparent manner.”

With the official truth scrubbed from the Chinese internet, Beijing began to fill that void with alternative timelines that painted China in a more favorable light.

Officials promoted baseless arguments that the virus could have started elsewhere, including the theory US army personnel could have brought the virus to China when they came to Wuhan for the Military World Games in October 2019. In January 2021, Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying added legitimacy to the theory coronavirus might have come from another country when she called on the US to invite the WHO to visit American sites so they could study the origins of the virus. Last year, state media seized on studies which found evidence Covid-19 circulated in Italy as early as September 2019, portraying the report as evidence the virus didn’t necessarily originate in China, despite that not being what its authors suggested.

In October, China launched an exhibition in Wuhan, featuring interactive displays promoting the idea of a heroic response to the virus. Many of the truthtellers -- including Chen Mei, doctor Ai Fen, and university professor Zhang Yongzhen -- were nowhere to be seen. The whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang was included in a wall of martyrs, but his brief biography didn’t include that he’d been reprimanded for trying to warn colleagues about the coronavirus.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and State Council Information Office did not respond to a request to explain why Chinese officials had pushed the narrative that the virus originated outside China, and whether the government was concerned that its actions could discourage doctors and journalists from speaking out about future pandemics.

There’s evidence that these efforts have been effective within China. A study published in November by international research and data analytics group YouGov-Cambridge Globalism Project found that, in nearly all countries, the vast majority of people thought Covid-19 originated in China. But in China, more than half said the virus had originated in China, while a third thought it had come from the US.

Controlling the narrative has always been important to Chinese leaders, but censorship has tightened under President Xi Jinping, and the party’s ability to communicate its own perspective has improved. “The connection the (CCP) don’t want people to make is that freedom of speech can affect not just your livelihood, but your existence,” Gallagher said. “(Controlling the narrative) is a way for the Chinese government to demonstrate that it doesn’t need to change its political systems.”

That isn’t just a problem for people seeking free and fair information in China -- it impacts the world.

“How many doctors are going to come out and report the next one?” said Annie Sparrow, an assistant professor of population health science and policy at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Covid-19 has killed more than 2 million people worldwide -- knowing how the pandemic took hold remains key to preventing this from repeating. China's efforts to limit free expression among journalists, activists and doctors may mean losing precious information about how the virus spread initially, Gallagher said.

“That seems very short-sighted,” Gallagher added. “This is going to happen again.”