The U.S. media has obtained thousands of confidential documents from the Chinese Communist government containing detailed information on the official manipulation of public opinion to conceal the outbreak.
The Chinese Communist Party’s concealment of pneumonia in Wuhan led to a major worldwide outbreak of the disease. Recently, the U.S. media obtained thousands of confidential documents from the Chinese Communist government, which contain detailed information about the official manipulation of public opinion to conceal the epidemic.
The New York Times and the investigative journalism group ProPublica recently obtained thousands of classified instructions and other documents from the Chinese Communist government from a hacker group calling itself C.C.P. Unmasked.
The documents, which came from the offices of China’s Internet regulator, the Internet Information Office, in the eastern city of Hangzhou, include more than 3,200 directives and more than 1,800 memos and other documents. The documents also include internal documents and computer code from China’s Yunrun Big Data Service Co., which developed software used by local governments on the mainland to monitor Internet discussions and manage large volumes of online comments.
Through its research of the aforementioned documents, the New York Times found that Chinese Communist authorities have been restricting information about the outbreak since early this year. A directive issued by China’s Internet Information Office in January required news sites to use only the government’s caliber and not to compare the outbreak to the SARS outbreak in China in 2002, even though the World health Organization pointed out similarities between the two.
A few weeks later, as the epidemic began to spread rapidly across China’s provinces, the Web site’s offices across the country began to take action. One directive to the Hangzhou Internet Information Office said the agency should not only control information internally, but also “actively influence international public opinion.
According to the document, authorities would give the office links to relevant articles that could be covered and ask them to promote them on local news portals and social media. The instructions even go so far as to list which links should appear on the front pages of news sites, for how long, and which headlines should be in boldface.
According to instructions from the Communist Party authorities, news outlets are not to use headlines such as “‘incurable’ and ‘fatal’ in their reports to prevent social panic.” The word “blockade” may not be used when reporting on restrictions on movement and travel. Several instructions also emphasized that negative news about the virus should not be publicized.
The news media were also told not to make a big deal out of reports of overseas donations and purchases of medical supplies. “Avoid creating the false impression that we rely on foreign donations to fight the epidemic,” one directive said.
It has been almost a year since the initial outbreak of Wuhan pneumonia in China, which has infected more than 76 million people worldwide and killed 1.68 million. An opinion piece published in the Washington Post on 14 December noted that Wuhan pneumonia has led to the world’s worst economic collapse since the Great Depression and the loss of freedom, all of which was caused by the Chinese Communist Party. The article emphasized that it was the Chinese Communist Party’s cover-up of the epidemic that led to the spread of the virus around the world.
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