Standing at the entrance of a convention center in Wuhan, looking at the sign “Life First, People First” at the entrance, Zhang Hai felt that it was a great irony.
Inside the exhibition center, nearly 10,000 square meters of exhibition halls and more than 1,000 exhibits are telling the story of a big country’s fight against the Epidemic.
For this exhibition, last December, Zhang Hai made a special trip back to Wuhan from the southern city of Shenzhen, but he was not in the mood to go inside.
“If it were true that life comes first and people come first, this kind of underreporting, this kind of criminal behavior in Wuhan would not have happened,” he told the Voice of America.
At the moment, the ashes of Zhang Hai’s father are still lying in the Wuchang funeral Home. Last January, his father went to a hospital in Wuhan for treatment of a broken leg and died within 15 days after contracting the New Coronavirus in the hospital.
Zhang Hai insisted that if the government had not deliberately concealed and downplayed the outbreak of the new coronavirus pneumonia at the beginning of the outbreak, his father might have avoided going to the hospital and would not have contracted the virus.
“You always emphasize what you achieved later, but you deliberately erase that critical point in Time when the earlier period was concealed, and that kind of behavior is disrespectful to these deceased people,” he said. “These deceased people were once living beings.”
Wuhan was the first city to report the New coronavirus outbreak and the first to seal off the city, a government call without warning that plunged the city of 11 million into 76 days of dead silence in the early hours of Jan. 23, 2020.
Saturday, the first anniversary of Wuhan’s city closure. A day earlier, “Wuhan Days and Nights,” a documentary depicting the city’s fight against the epidemic, was released in theaters across China. In the words of the official media, it is a tribute to the heroes who “fought against the epidemic and overcame the difficulties together during the war”.
From the publication of “The Great Nation Fights the Epidemic” in February last year, to the broadcast of the TV series “The Most Beautiful Adversary” in September, and the holding of a commendation ceremony and exhibition on the fight against the epidemic in October, Chinese officials are once again trying to turn the narrative of the epidemic around and portray an unprecedented disaster as a great victory for the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.
Such an effort may have paid off to some extent.
On the last day of 2020, the bustling Han River road was crowded with people. At midnight, the bells of the Hanjiang Pass building rang out, people released balloons and shouted “Happy New Year”, and the song “My Country and I” rang out in the night sky.
On this day, 27-year-old Wuhan state-owned enterprise employee Chen Chen joined more than 20,000 people in the New Year’s Eve concert to usher in the New Year.
At the beginning of the city’s closure, Chen, like others, watched the rising death toll with fear, cursing on Weibo how inactive local officials had not stepped down.
A year later, she said, looking back, the government has done a good job.
“At first, both me and people around me blamed the government and the country for pressing things so hard that we didn’t have a preparation, but I feel that Wuhan’s remedies are still good,” she told the Voice of America.
Work resumed in April, business largely resumed in May, and the tourist attractions were full during the November Golden Week. “Everyone was suffocating silly at home,” Tatsu said.
“The toughest time in Wuhan is over,” she said, “and I think I’ve come out completely.”
Not long ago, her aunt, who works at the hospital, told her that since last December, Wuhan’s medical staff is fully armed again. Protective clothing and caps that had been taken off in the summer were put back on.
Last week, two confirmed patients from Hebei province were confirmed to have been in Wuhan. Wuhan began another mass extermination, neighborhoods were semi-closed, and students were released early for winter break.
But Tatsu doesn’t worry. She feels the likelihood of another large-scale outbreak in Wuhan is almost nil.
“Now they say Wuhan is the safest city well, you don’t see a single person on the street who is not wearing a mask,” she told the Voice of America. “You go out without a mask and it’s like you’re not wearing any clothes, and people look at you with great surprise.”
But her Parents‘ generation was not as optimistic.
“My mom and dad, they’re both in their early 50s, and they’ve never had anything like this in all the years they’ve lived. They felt like a nightmare and were often afraid if Wuhan would be closed again and if the epidemic would come again.”
“Dr. Li, it’s another year, how are you doing over there? We all have to live hard. Go for it! Good night.”
Nearly a year after his death, Li Wenliang, the “whistle blower” of the epidemic, still has messages on his Weibo account. Some call it China’s “Wailing Wall”.
There are still people who have not forgotten, and there are still wounds that cannot be healed. But under the official theme of “victory against the epidemic”, some words can no longer be mentioned and some questions remain unanswered. For example, what is the source of the epidemic? How many people were infected and died? Where are the missing citizen journalists?
A study released late last year by China’s public health department said the Wuhan New crown outbreak could be nearly 10 times the size of earlier published figures, meaning as many as 500,000 of Wuhan’s 11 million residents may have been infected.
“How many people have died in Wuhan because of this new crown is still a mystery so far,” said Zhang Hai, who arrived at the cemetery and took a video with a heavy heart.
“I feel that the Chinese people are particularly sad because they do not have a sense of reverence for life, including these deceased, and so far there is not a confession, there is not an account, let alone talk about those officials who should be duly punished for concealing the report in the first place, these are not. It gives me a feeling that life is particularly indifferent in the eyes of these powerful people, who do not treat you as a human being at all. I always believe that many things are not prayed for, but can only rely on themselves to fight, to speak out.”
Last April, Zhang Hai sued the Wuhan government for underreporting the epidemic, and the case made its way to the Supreme Court. He has been harassed by authorities since then. He said his Weibo account was blocked for six numbers, his WeChat was monitored and his phone was tapped.
“They even followed me when I went back to Wuhan. I changed places to live and three public security officers went to investigate the surveillance of the neighborhood. I feel particularly angry, I am just an ordinary person, not a spy, and not a person who is anti-Party, anti-your system. I always think I pursue the blame, I speak out is a patriotic act,” said Zhang Hai.
Zhang Hai is one of the extremely rare people who still insists on speaking out among the hard-hearted members of Wuhan’s New Crown Pneumonia. Police threatened him with jail if he didn’t stop speaking out.
“I’m a person who doesn’t like people threatening me, suppressing me, and especially intimidating me,” he said. “Since you dare to withhold reports and kill people, I dare to talk about it, and I talk about it everywhere.”
Zhang Hai told Voice of America that just because other Family members are not speaking out does not mean the anger in their hearts has disappeared. As the anniversary of their loved ones’ death approaches, they are particularly grieving, but they only dare to vent occasionally in WeChat groups.
“The Chinese government’s so-called success in ‘fighting the epidemic’ is actually built on the elimination of all voices questioning the government’s failure to prevent the epidemic and the persecution carried out under the pretense of stopping the spread of the virus,” said Wang Yaqiu, a researcher with Human Rights Watch’s China Department. “Suppressing victims of abuse and their families is tantamount to rubbing salt in their wounds.”
Right now, China is launching vaccinations against the new coronavirus in at least 75 cities, with plans to inoculate tens of millions of people before the Lunar New Year arrives in February.
China has also provided self-developed vaccines to Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey and other countries. Last week, Brazil released clinical data showing that the Chinese vaccine was only 50.4 percent effective, barely meeting the minimum threshold for internationally recognized vaccine effectiveness and significantly lower than the 78 percent previously announced by the Chinese side.
“I definitely won’t get it,” said Zhang Yi, a Wuhan resident, “and no one I know around me is willing to get it either.”
He pointed to the frequent problems with vaccines in China, citing the example of rights activist He Fangmei, who sued the government over her daughter’s disability due to vaccines and was arrested three months ago, and whose whereabouts are still unknown.
“Whoever wants to fight, it’s better to let the leaders fight first,” Zhang Yi said. “But maybe the leader is playing the imported Pfizer vaccine then.”
Speaking of the past 2020, Zhang Yi was a little sad, “We are living this year, living for living.”
“Too many human tragedies are staged in Wuhan, and we are sad to hear. So we are now just living first, living to witness history and see who lives to the end,” he said.
A few days after the interview, Zhang Yi was taken out of the country for a “tour” by the authorities. This is a common tactic used by Chinese authorities to target dissidents ahead of politically sensitive dates. A group of dissidents in Wuhan received instructions not to give interviews to foreign media.
On the eve of the anniversary of Wuhan’s closure, there was an epidemic in Shijiazhuang and other places in Hebei province, more than 800 kilometers away. Traffic was halted, neighborhoods were closed, villagers were relocated, square-cabin hospitals were being built at a rapid pace, and nucleic acid testing was being conducted for the entire population, as 22 million people were experiencing city closure version 2.0. Over the past week, officials have reported hundreds of new confirmed cases, entering the worst outbreak since March.
On Jan. 14, a team of experts sent by the World Health Organization arrived in Wuhan to begin an investigation into the source of the virus. For more than a year, the Chinese government has been using various tactics to obstruct the WHO’s investigation. The delayed official response in the early stages of the outbreak has resulted in a pandemic that has infected more than 90 million people worldwide and killed more than 2 million.
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