In recent days, critics have pounced when officials in the city of Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, wore their protective masks incorrectly. In some cases, Chinese leaders appear to be acknowledging people’s fear, anger and other all-too-human reactions to the crisis, showing how the party can move dramatically, if sometimes belatedly, to mollify the public. Some of China’s more commercially minded media outlets have covered the disease and the response thoroughly if not critically. “It is still possible that the censorship will suddenly increase again, as part of an effort to control the narrative.”When China’s leaders battled the SARS virus in the early 2000s, social media was only just beginning to blossom in the country. The government covered up the disease’s spread, and it was left to journalists and other critics to shame the authorities into acknowledging the scale of the problem.

Source: New York Times January 27, 2020 15:22 UTC