Families of COVID-19 Patients in Wuhan Hold Chinese Government Accountable

The families of the Wuhan victims said they were being monitored by the authorities and warned not to speak to foreign media
Some families commemorate one year of the death of their loved one due to COVID-19
China dismissed that the WHO team was carrying out an "investigation" saying they had to follow a "prior consensus"
Many residents feel hopeless and want to know the source of the transmission of COVID-19 following the deaths of their closest people, even though Wuhan has not reported any new deaths from the virus since April last year.

Update Virus: COVID-19investigation

The residents urged the Government who was covering up the source of infection in the city to be arrested, because their "lies and ignorance" had caused the development of a new virus there.

Check: WHO Family KP in Wuhan

This week, Zhang Hai, 51, from Wuhan who currently lives in Shenzhen city, commemorated one year of his father's death.

Zhang's father, a patriotic veteran honored for his involvement in China's first nuclear test in the 1960s, contracted COVID-19 at a Wuhan military hospital after fracture surgery in mid-January last year.

Supplied: Zhang Hai: Zhang Hai holds one of his father's last photos taken at the hospital in Wuhan.

Zhang doesn't pick up nearly all the phone calls from strangers, because he thinks the calls could be from the government asking him to stop disclosing things online.

However, he still voiced his views as a form of sorrow for his father's passing.

He uses personal experience to highlight how media reports in China have helped cover up other social justice issues following the epidemic.

Last November, Zhang's lawsuit against the Municipal Government of Wuhan and Hubei Province was rejected by the Hubei High Court, which stated that Zhang was not eligible to sue the Government.

The Wuhan government turned off the ABC's phones when asked for comment and did not reply to emails.

The Hubei High Court has been contacted several times but has not responded.

Zhang said he had requested that the court provide an official statement that the case was discontinued, but this was rejected

Her story was never reported by the mainland Chinese media, and her five accounts on the Chinese social media Weibo have been permanently banned.

Weibo has also been asked for a response by ABC.

"I am an ordinary citizen in this country, but I have dignity and rights," said Zhang.

"However, the more someone talks and criticizes the government, the stronger is the surveillance and persecution it receives."

Zhang said the WHO investigation was "the only hope" for him.

He said he wanted experts to understand "how significant their work and responsibilities" are to the families of more than two million victims worldwide.

"I would never forgive myself if I didn't speak up for my father, who can only be a victim for eternity," she said.

Produced by Natasya Salim from an article in English which can be read here .

A nine-month Associated Press investigation of state-sponsored disinformation conducted in collaboration with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, shows how a rumor that the U.S. created the virus that causes COVID-19 was weaponized by the Chinese government, spreading from the dark corners of the Internet to millions across the globe. The analysis was based on a review of millions of social media postings and articles on Twitter, Facebook, VK, Weibo, WeChat, YouTube, Telegram and other platforms.

Chinese officials were reacting to a powerful narrative, nursed by QAnon groups, Fox News, former President Donald Trump and leading Republicans, that the virus was instead manufactured by China.

China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs says Beijing has used its expanding megaphone on Western social media to promote friendship and serve facts, while defending itself against hostile forces that seek to politicize the pandemic.

“All parties should firmly say ‘no’ to the dissemination of disinformation,” the ministry said in a statement to AP, but added, “In the face of trumped-up charges, it is justified and proper to bust lies and clarify rumors by setting out the facts.”

The battle to control the narrative about where the virus came from has had global consequences in the fight against COVID-19.

By March, just three months after COVID-19 appeared in central China, belief that the virus had been created in a lab and possibly weaponized was widespread, multiple surveys showed. The Pew Research Center found, for example, that one in three Americans believed the new coronavirus had been created in a lab; one in four thought it had been engineered intentionally. In Iran, top leaders cited the bioweapon conspiracy to justify their refusal of foreign medical aid. Anti-lockdown and anti-mask groups around the world called COVID-19 a hoax and a weapon, complicating public health efforts to slow the spread.

“This is like a virus, like COVID, a media pathogen,” said Kang Liu, a professor at Duke University who studies cultural politics and media in China, comparing the spread of disinformation about the virus to the spread of the virus itself. “We have a double pandemic -- the real pathological virus and the pandemic of fear. The fear is what is really at stake.”

SPREADING RUMORS

On Jan. 26, a man from Inner Mongolia posted a video claiming that the new virus ravaging central China was a biological weapon engineered by the U.S. It was viewed 14,000 times on the Chinese app Kuaishou before being taken down. The man was arrested, detained for 10 days and fined for spreading rumors.

People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, broadcast news of his detention in early February, showing the man, face pixelated, wrists shackled, and legs caged in a chair. It was a stern reminder to the citizens of China that fake news can lead to arrest and part of a broader effort by Chinese state media to debunk COVID-19 conspiracies.

But just six weeks later the same conspiracy would be broadcast by China’s foreign ministry, picked up by at least 30 Chinese diplomats and missions and amplified through China’s vast, global network of state media outlets.

During those six weeks, China’s leadership came under intense internal criticism. On Feb. 7, Li Wenliang, a Chinese doctor punished for circulating an early warning about the outbreak, died of COVID-19. The outpouring of grief and rage sparked by Li’s death was an unusual – and for the ruling Communist Party, unsettling -- display in China’s tightly monitored civic space.

Meanwhile, powerful voices in the U.S. -- from former President Trump to congressional Republicans -- were working to rebrand COVID-19 as “the China virus,” amplifying fringe theories that it had been engineered by Chinese scientists.

Social media accounts that appeared to be pro-Trump or QAnon followers pushed the disinformation, repeatedly retweeting identical content that claimed China created the virus as a bioweapon, researchers at the Australia Institute’s Centre for Responsible Technology found.

As U.S. rhetoric intensified, China went on the offensive. On Feb. 22, People’s Daily ran a report highlighting speculation that the U.S. military brought the virus to China, pushing the story globally through inserts in newspapers such as the Helsinki Times in Finland and the New Zealand Herald.

The New Zealand Herald said it has an “ad hoc commercial relationship with People’s Daily,” labels their content as sponsored and reviews it before publication. “Upon further review of the story that you have referred to, we have removed this particular item from our website,” a spokesman said in an email.

The Helsinki Times said it has a “barter-exchange” content agreement with People’s Daily, whose content it labels but does not vet. “We believe that the western media coverage is at times extremely one-sided and biased,” said Alexis Kouros, the editor of the Helsinki Times. “Even though People’s Daily is state-owned, like the BBC, we believe it is beneficial for the global audience to have both sides of stories.”

As China embraced overt disinformation, it leaned on Russian disinformation strategy and infrastructure, turning to a long-established network of Kremlin proxies in the West to seed and spread messaging.

“One was amplifying the other…How much it was command controlled, how much it was opportunistic, it was hard to tell,” said Janis Sarts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence, based in Riga, Latvia. Long-term, he added, China is “the more formidable competitor and adversary because of the technological capabilities they bring to the table.”

‘THE TRUTH AS I SEE IT’

In January, long before China began overtly spreading disinformation, Russian state media swept in to legitimize the theory that the U.S. engineered the virus as a weapon.

On Jan. 20, the Russian Army’s media outlet, Zvezda, announced that the outbreak in China was linked to a bioweapons test, citing a four-time failed political candidate named Igor Nikulin.

Nikulin claims to have worked with the United Nations on disarmament in Iraq from 1998 to 2003, including as an adviser to former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

But the U.N. has no record of his service. Richard Butler, the lead U.N. weapons inspector at the time, told AP he’s never heard of him. Neither has Hans Corell, who served as Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and Legal Counsel of the United Nations from 1994-2004, where he worked closely with Annan.

Nikulin said records of his U.N. work may have been destroyed and stuck by his theory that COVID is a U.S. bioweapon – a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. “What other proof is needed?!” he said in an email to AP.

Over the next two months, more than 70 articles appeared in pro-Kremlin media making similar bioweapons claims in Russian, Spanish, Armenian, Arabic, English and German, according to AP’s analysis of a database compiled by EUvsDisinfo, which tracks disinformation for the European Union.

Online journals identified by the U.S. State Department and others as pro-Russian proxies picked up the bioweapons narrative, enhancing its reach and resonance.

Russian politicians joined the chorus. Parliamentarian Natalia Poklonskaya argued that the novel coronavirus could be a biological weapon created “by those who want to rule the planet” to undermine China. Shortly after, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the nationalistic leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, suggested that the U.S. and its greedy pharmaceutical companies were to blame.

Meanwhile, Nikulin kept flogging his theory, which morphed as the pandemic spread from an attack on China to an attack on Trump. Despite his inconsistency and questionable bona fides, by April, Nikulin had appeared at least 18 times on Russian television. U.S. officials also said Russian intelligence had been covertly spreading COVID-19 disinformation, including claims that the virus was a U.S. bioweapon.

On Jan. 23, Beijing began to roll out the largest medical quarantine in modern history, sealing tens of millions of people at the epic