Reporters Without Borders (RSF), a nonprofit advocating for press freedom, has urged Beijing to free journalists and political commentators and stop censoring information about the novel coronavirus outbreak in China.
“Censorship is clearly counter-productive in the fight against an epidemic and can only aggravate it or even help turn it into a pandemic,” said Cédric Alviani, the head of RSF’s East Asia bureau, in the statement.
“Only complete transparency will enable China to minimize the spread of false rumors and convince the population to follow the health and safety instructions recommended for curbing the epidemic.”
Both Chen and Fang had been documenting the situation in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak in China, before they went missing.
That same day, his friend and martial artist Xu Xiaodong said in a YouTube video that Chen had been forcibly quarantined for 14 days, even though he didn’t have symptoms of the virus.
Xu, a former lecturer at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunication, was taken away by police in China’s southern city of Guangzhou on Feb. 15, after he wrote an essay blaming the Chinese leader for mishandling the outbreak response, according to The Guardian.
RSF lambasted authorities for having “significantly tightened their grip on social media and discussion groups where certain journalists and bloggers had dared to post independent reports.”
Zhang Xiaoguo, director of the news bureau at the Propaganda Department, announced during a news program on Feb. 3 that publishing propaganda about China’s control and prevention measures is the department’s top priority.
And on Feb. 4, Chinese news portal Sina reported that China’s central propaganda department plans to send more than 300 journalists to Wuhan and Hubei Province to cover the disease.
RSF criticized the regime’s efforts: “In recent weeks, Beijing has also instructed the media to cover the heroism of the responders rather than the suffering of the population or the shortcomings of the measures taken by the government.”
Beijing also censored early medical warnings about the outbreak.
Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist, was one of eight whistleblowers who first publicized information about an “unknown pneumonia” outbreak, on Chinese social media on Dec. 30, 2019. Four days later, he was summoned to a local police station where he was reprimanded for “rumor-mongering.”