Li Wenliang

We don’t yet know the full story of the coronavirus outbreak in China. Even so, it already has a tragic hero: Dr Li Wenliang. His name is known around the world now, but the details of what happened to him are telling. On December 30 last year, Li warned fellow medics on a WeChat group that seven patients had been quarantined at his hospital in Wuhan. They had some kind of coronavirus. A few days later, after screenshots of his messages were posted to the wider internet, he was summoned by the Wuhan Public Security Bureau. The secret police presented him with a typed confession stating he had lied. He signed it. He had to. The police document was sententious but chilling: ‘Your behavior severely disrupted social order... We advise you to calm down and reflect carefully.

Should we blame China for the spread of coronavirus? And how should the West respond if the communist regime did cause the pandemic by lying about the virus as it emerged? I spoke about these questions to the dissident author Ma Jian, who has been described — by another dissident — as ‘one of the most important and courageous voices in Chinese literature’. His novels have been called — by a critic — ‘a powerful corrective to the self-interested Western view of China’. Ma believes that the economic miracle in China that has given us cheap goods in the West is also bribing the Chinese to forget their past and infantilizing them in their relationship with their rulers.