42 China The EconomistFebruary 22nd 2020
2 nightmare. Even in lightly affected regions,
hospitals remain closed to all but the most
urgent cases (a mother in Hubei is pic-
tured, previous page, pleading with police
to allow her daughter through a cordon to
get cancer treatment). Some people in Hu-
bei find it difficult even to travel to pharma-
cies to pick up essential medicine. A chari-
ty worker says he calls up local officials to
alert them to the needs of disabled resi-
dents. But the bureaucrats are often flus-
tered by the calls, he says, because they are
so overworked.
Many Chinese say they are afraid of
catching covid-19 and that the govern-
ment’s measures are a necessary price to
pay for the protection of their health. But
there are also many who believe the au-
thorities’ response to the epidemic was
bungled, especially in the days leading up
to the lockdown in Hubei when officials
were slow to acknowledge the virus’s
threat. The Communist Party worries that
public anger could threaten social stability
(the need to maintain it was a big theme of
Mr Xi’s recently published speech). Cen-
sors have been struggling to control online
criticisms, which surged earlier this
month following the death from covid-19
of a doctor who had been reprimanded by
police for warning of the danger. Access
has been throttled to foreign virtual private
networks, which some people in China use
to circumvent the “great firewall”.
Mr Xi is also waging war on another
front: against overseas critics (see next
story). On February 19th China ordered
three of the Wall Street Journal’s China-
based reporters to leave the country. It is
the largest expulsion of accredited foreign
journalists in China in decades. Officials
say it is in response to an opinion piece en-
titled: “China is the real sick man of Asia”.
That headline caused widespread offence,
for it repeats a slur used by western and
Japanese imperialists about China. The
Journalsays it did not realise this, and that
its words were a play on an old cliché used
of the Ottoman Empire and commonly re-
vived in headlines about various countries.
The Economist, the Guardianand the Finan-
cial Timeshave all called Britain “the sick
man of Europe”, notes the Journal.
Mr Xi will probably not have to worry
about embarrassing questions at the annu-
al session of China’s parliament, the Na-
tional People’s Congress. It is due to start in
early March, but senior delegates will meet
on February 24th to discuss whether to
postpone it. They are expected to do so.
China’s leaders will not want to send the
wrong message by convening the congress
at a time when many Chinese are effective-
ly confined to their homes and when offi-
cials (which many of the nearly 3,000 dele-
gates are) should be on the front lines,
fighting the epidemic.
But the publication of Mr Xi’s speechcould be a sign that he is confident of vic-
tory. It revealed that he was giving orders
on containing the virus as early as January
7th, two weeks before what had hitherto
been his earliest-known comments on the
outbreak. By letting this be known, the
party may want to show that if there was
any coverup at that early stage, it was the
fault of local officials, not his. The outlines
are becoming visible of the party’s strategy
when the war is eventually over. 7A
s the crisisdeepened over the out-
break of covid-19, China’s leader, Xi
Jinping, convened a meeting of the coun-
try’s most powerful body, the Politburo
Standing Committee. One topic the seven
men discussed on February 3rd was how to
manage publicity. Officials, they agreed,
must “tell the story of China’s fight against
the epidemic, and show the Chinese peo-
ple’s spirit of unity and togetherness”. In
response, Chinese diplomats have been
turning to a medium that most of them es-
chewed until just a year ago: Twitter.
Blocked in China, it is fast becoming a fa-
voured tool for the Communist Party as it
tries to amplify its voice globally.
Two academics who study the Chinese
foreign ministry’s use of social media,Zhao Alexandre Huang and Rui Wang,
found only 17 Chinese diplomatic Twitter
accounts in October 2018. Now they count
more than 80. They are being used to pro-
mote the heroic work of China’s doctors
and nurses and relay messages of support
from Western leaders. “No winter lasts for-
ever, every spring is sure to follow,” said
China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman,
Hua Chunying, on February 14th in her first
ever tweet. They also go on the offensive.
“You speak in such a way that you look like
part of the virus and you will be eradicated
just like virus. Shame on you,” said Zha Li-
you, China’s consul-general in Kolkata, In-
dia, in a tweet on February 16th aimed at a
critic of China’s handling of the outbreak.
Such spontaneous name-calling by Chi-
nese diplomats was unusual until recently.
But since Mr Xi became China’s leader in
2012, he has encouraged his diplomats to
be more robust in their efforts to boost Chi-
na’s “discourse power”. The Economistslid
into the direct messages of several Chinese
envoys to ask why they were turning to
Twitter. Li Xiaosi, the ambassador to Aus-
tria, replied that Mr Xi had “asked Chinese
diplomats to tell China’s stories well and
present a true, multidimensional and pan-
oramic view of China”. Mr Zha, in Kolkata,
wrote that telling the “true story” of China
was his “sole purpose”.
Before the epidemic, such diplomats of-
ten used Twitter to dismiss reports of hu-
man-rights abuses in Xinjiang. “Many
westerners’ #COUNTER_TERRORISM logic:
I drop bombs in sovereign countries which
caused huge civilian casualties, I’m pro-
tecting human rights!” tweeted Cao Yi, a
Chinese consul in Beirut on January 2nd.
“You set up education&training centers to
prevent extremism which made #Xinjiang
free of terrorist attacks, you have no hu-
man rights!”
The tweets get noticed. In July one of the
country’s most outspoken Twitter-dip-
lomats, Zhao Lijian, who has about
240,000 followers, posted a message say-
ing that white people avoid a mostly black
district in Washington. Susan Rice, a for-
mer American ambassador to the un,
tweeted that Mr Zhao, who was then the
deputy chief of mission in Islamabad, was
a “racist disgrace”. She called on Cui Tian-
kai, China’s ambassador in Washington, to
“do the right thing and send him home”. Mr
Zhao fired back that she was “shockingly
ignorant”. But Mr Cui asked that word be
conveyed to Ms Rice that he did not ap-
prove of Mr Zhao’s tweet, that Mr Zhao did
not work in Washington and that his Twit-
ter account did not reflect China’s stance.
The offending tweets were soon deleted.
Mr Zhao has since relocated to Beijing,
where he is deputy chief of the foreign
ministry’s Information Department. Part
of the provocateur’s duties: getting more of
China’s envoys to tweet. 7China finds a use abroad for a medium
it fears at homeDiplomatic rhetoricDiscovering