TRUMP ON CHINA • PUTTING AMERICA FIRST
by a dangerous new virus were turning up in Wuhan hospitals. He urged his friends to protect their families.
When his warning circulated more widely than he intended, Dr. Li was upset and anxious—and with good reason. Supervisors at his hospital quickly admonished him for leaking word of the coronavirus cases. Dr. Li was then interrogated by the police, made to sign a “confession,” and threatened with prosecution if he spoke out again. Anyone tempted to believe this was just a case of overzealous local police, take note: China’s central government aired a news story about Dr. Li’s “rumor-mongering.”
Then Dr. Li did a big brave thing. He went public with his experience of being silenced by the police. The whole world paid close attention. By this time, Dr. Li had contracted the disease he’d warned about. His death on February 7 felt like the loss of a relative for people around the world. Dr. Li’s comment to a reporter from his deathbed still rings in our ears: “I think there should be more than one voice in a healthy society, and I don’t approve of using public power for excessive interference.” Dr. Li was using Hu Shih-style “plain speech” to make a practical point.
It takes courage to speak to a reporter—or to work as one—in today’s China. Even finding an investigative reporter in China, foreign or local, is getting hard. Citizen journalists who tried to shed light on the outbreak in Wuhan went missing, including Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Li Zehua. More foreign reporters were expelled in recent months than the Soviet Union expelled over decades. Dr. Ai Fen, a colleague of Dr. Li Wenliang who also raised the alarm about the outbreak in Wuhan, reportedly can no longer appear in public after she spoke to a reporter.
When small acts of bravery are stamped out by governments, big acts of bravery follow.
We have seen big acts of moral and physical courage recently by people pursuing the ideals that Hu Shih and P.C. Chang championed a century ago. Some are political insiders; some have devoted their lives to God. Others follow the long tradition of scholars serving as China’s
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