They posted videos of the Les Miserables song, “Do You Hear the People Sing”. They invoked article No. 35 of China’s Constitution, which stipulates freedom of speech. They tweeted a phrase from the poem “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. The Chinese public have staged what amounts to an online revolt after the death of a doctor, Li Wenliang, who tried to warn of a mysterious virus that has since killed at least 637 people and infected about 31,211 others.
Since late Thursday, people from different backgrounds, including government officials, prominent business figures and ordinary online users, have posted numerous messages expressing their grief at the doctor’s death. News of Li’s death at age 34 became the top-read topic on China’s microblogging site Weibo on Friday, with over 1.5 billion views, and was also heavily discussed in private WeChat messaging groups.
The government even seemed to recognise the enormity of the country’s emotion, dispatching a team to investigate what it called “issues related to Dr. Li Wenliang that were reported by the public”, though without specifics.
Some users of Weibo, China’s Twitter-like social media platform, are saying the doctor’s death resonated because he was an ordinary person who was forced to admit to wrongdoing for doing the right thing. Li was reprimanded by the police after he shared concerns about the virus in a social messaging app with medical school classmates on December 30. Three days later, the police compelled him to sign a statement that his warning constituted “illegal behaviour.”
Wang Gaofei, the chief executive of Weibo, which carries out many of the orders passed down from China’s censors, pondered what lessons China should learn from Li’s death. “We should be more tolerant of people who post ‘untruthful information’ that aren’t malicious,” he said in a post. “If we’re only allowed to speak what we can guarantee is fact, we’re going to pay prices.”
“RIP our hero,” Fan Bao, a prominent tech investor, posted on his WeChat timeline.
The hashtag #wewantfreedomofspeech# was created on Weibo at 2am on Friday morning and had over two million views and over 5,500 posts by 7am. It was deleted by censors, along with related topics, such as ones saying the Wuhan government owed Li an apology.
It’s too early to tell whether the online anger and frustration will amount to much. There was palpable public outrage in a few past tragedies, including a 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province and a train accident in 2011. But it faded in those instances. Some people are more hopeful this time. Hou Zhihui, a commentator who has been detained twice for his online speeches, said, “This time, nobody can stay out of it. It’s impossible”.
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