China’s New Whistle-Blower Protection Laws: Lessons Learned?

9 min readOct 5, 2020

The wider implications of a low-key change to Beijing’s municipality laws

A Wechat user’s encryption of Ai Fen’s message from the Wuhan frontlines. Source: https://twitter.com/lotus_ruan/status/1237743332874432515/photo/1

We have now entered Autumn 2020 and daily life in China is, for all intents and purposes, back to normal. The only lingering signs of the disruption caused by COVID-19 earlier this year are the dwindling obligations in public spaces for temperature checks, track-and-trace QR codes and facemasks, though the latter remains voluntarily worn by most of the populace. Galleries, nightclubs and live music venues are all open as normal and no one here has lost any appetite for culture, low or high; something that should be heeded by my aesthete friends in the West who think the pandemic spells the end for the arts.

Indeed, China has been collectively basking in the glow of triumph over the outbreak since before the Summer had even begun. This sense of pride has been compounded by seeing the ongoing failure of other countries to deal with the outbreak, such as my home country of the UK which has just put a quarter of its population back under lockdown[1]. That daily life has been restored to relative normality here so successfully is in no small part due to the authoritarian system of governance that allows for the swift and total implementation of population controls. If an underlying narrative to the outbreak has been a contest of ideologies[2], then many here are chalking this up as a victory for China’s ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’.

This celebratory atmosphere was most publicly manifest in early September when Zhong Nanshan was awarded The Order of the Republic, China’s highest order of honour[3]. Zhong has been the country’s chief medical advisor throughout the outbreak, and receiving the order was the crowning achievement of an already distinguished career that included breakthroughs in the treatment of SARS in the pandemic of 2003[4]. He had visited Wuhan in early January 2020 and helped to identify the characteristics of the new virus, including the degree to which it was transmissible from person to person[5]. In the months that followed, he became the public face of the ‘peoples war’ on the coronavirus and has remained a figure of endearment for many here. His award symbolises more than simply one man’s achievement. It represents the victory in the War.

However, in early February, another doctor’s face became ubiquitous on social media, albeit for just a few days. Li Wenliang was a doctor at Wuhan’s Central Hospital, the epicentre of the outbreak. After staff at the hospital had been privately notified about the possible emergence of a SARS-like outbreak in late December, Li had sent a message to former medical student friends in a chatgroup on Wechat, advising them and their families to take suitable precautions. However, Li’s message did not remain within the confines of the chatgroup and went viral on social media, drawing the attention of Wuhan’s Public Security authorities who admonished him as a ‘rumour monger’ and issued him with an official warning[6]. Li passed away from the coronavirus on 7th February, resulting in an outpouring of grief and anger on social media[7] from the tens of thousands of people shut in their homes and uncertain of where the outbreak would lead.

Although the censors initially went into overdrive to block articles about Li’s death, after a day or so, they appeared to have given up. His death was given more official acknowledgement by The People’s Daily, a newspaper-come-government mouthpiece, who commemorated him as a foot soldier in the People’s War’; someone who had courageously tried to warn others about the virus. That these attempts were blocked by local authorities and he was reprimanded for his efforts were of course omitted from the article.

Li Wenliang seems all but forgotten at this point. As is Ai Fen, the doctor who had initially identified that an outbreak was occurring at Wuhan Central Hospital and had warned her colleagues, including Li. She too was reprimanded as a rumour monger, and a letter she had written detailing her ordeal with the authorities at that early stage of the outbreak went viral on Social Media in early March (giving rise to some spectacularly inventive ways of encoding the information to outwit the censors[8]).

Some[9] have put this apparent forgetfulness down to a willful act of collective memory loss, though this is to mistake a discrete ambivalence for dupe-ness. Talking with friends and colleagues now — all of whom are glad to have their lives restored to some sense of normality — there is a sense that these initial injustices by the authorities have been far outweighed by the successive actions of the government in containing the outbreak. The same tough, authoritarian approach that takes a tough line with ‘rumour-mongers’ is the same tough, authoritarian approach that has all but eradicated COVID-19 in a country with 1.4 billion people within its borders.

But the early mishandling of the outbreak at a critical point in its emergence has not been forgotten by the rest of the world, with some — most notably US President Donald Trump[10] — going as far as to blame China for the current global fallout. Many of course will point to this as a failing of the political system itself, where the raising of any inconvenient truth is perceived as a challenge to authority. China may have won The People’s War Against The Virus on its own turf, but in the contest of ideologies, few outside are ready to declare it the victor.

There are, however, signs that lessons have been internalised from these early mistakes and that Li’s death may not have been entirely in vain. In a previous article about my experiences during the outbreak lockdown[11], I asked — somewhat rhetorically — whether the official acknowledgement of Li’s death might invite deeper soul searching about the relationship between social order and public discourse. A change to municipal laws in Beijing in the past week might yield some answers to this question.

On September 25, 2020, the Standing Committee of the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress passed the “Beijing Municipality Regulations on Public Health Emergencies”《北京市突发公共卫生事件应急条例》act, effectively protecting whistle-blowers who raise the alarm about potential public health incidents. It states that:

“Any unit or individual has the right to report the hidden dangers of public health emergencies to the people’s government and relevant departments. For the reported hidden dangers of public health emergencies, after investigation and verification, the municipal and district health, the department rewards reporters and will not hold them accountable for non-malicious false reports.

任何单位和个人有权向人民政府及其有关部门报告突发公共卫生事件隐患。对报告的突发公共卫生事件隐患，经调查核实的，市、区卫生健康部门对报告人予以奖励，对非恶意的不实报告不予追究责任。[12]”

The final sentence is also significant in that it contains a provision that prevents the prosecution of anyone who reports concerns that are later proven to be false.

Shenzhen, the mainland’s southernmost city that borders Hong Kong, has enacted similar municipal laws[13]. Wuhan will almost certainly enact similar laws since lawmakers there were the first to propose such measures[14]. However, given how Beijing is more than a mere synecdoche for political life throughout the rest of the country, it is a fair assumption that similar protections should be available anywhere they are put to the test.

Such measures can only be welcomed for future pandemic prevention. Despite early-warning measures put in place after the SARS outbreak of 2003, it is clear that, in late 2019, these were entirely ineffectual due to the inability of medical staff to raise the alarm[15]. With some irony, Zhong Nanshan’s own advice at the time was that “honesty is needed” rather than “information blackouts”[16]. In theory at least, the new laws mean that the Li Wenliangs and Ai Fens of a future outbreak should be able to report their concerns without fear of reproach.

In practice, this may prove to be more difficult. A legal blogger[17] notes that the whistle-blowers must only go through official channels to report their concern, which may, in fact, delay getting information out to the wider public. While the article announcing the new laws exonerates Li, his actions indirectly alerting personal contacts would not have been covered by the law. The blogger also notes that what constitutes a false report and when it might be classified as such could be hard to ascertain. Regardless, this must be considered a step in the right direction, and perhaps only another potential public health incident will prove its efficacy.

That these new municipal laws have gone by underreported — and almost unnoticed by the public at large both inside and outside of China — is intriguing. To the best of my knowledge, the reliably (and relatively) outspoken Caixin has been the only official media source to report on it, though both English and Chinese[18] versions of the article are paywalled on its website. Several independent authors have published articles to Wechat about the new laws, though these have unremarkable view counts. Indeed, I only became aware of the story myself due to a summary of the Caixin article having been included in Bill Bishop’s (no relation) Sinocism newsletter, a comprehensive roundup of all things China; however, it does not appear to have been considered remarkable enough to attract his usually erudite commentary.

This may be because there are so many other larger stories surrounding China currently, such as Tik Tok’s woes in the US and the troubling melees on the Sino-India border. But I suspect the downplaying of this news is deliberate too, possibly an attempt by an authoritarian political system to enact change without ‘losing face’. While the new laws are, of course, a much-needed remedy to a serious problem, to admit there was even a problem goes counter to the current celebratory narrative within China. Outside of China, it would be admitting there was a problem to begin with, and one suspects it is not the nature of the CCP to admit fault.

There is also potentially something of a cultural significance to the emergence of these new laws. Beyond Communist ideology, authoritarianism is culturally inscribed into daily life here due to the more ancient influence of Confucianism. The relationship between authority and subject is strictly delineated, and the influence of the former upon the latter almost entirely unidirectional. Anthropologically speaking, this has its pragmatic roots in maintaining social stability, or ‘harmony’ to give it its more ‘cultural values’ flavour. In this sense, any form of ‘rocking the boat’ is contraindicated, regardless of the reason.

A local friend of mine recently asked on her Wechat feed how social change occurs in China if ‘rocking the boat’ is disallowed. I suspect the government here are more sensitive to the public mood than they would ever let on. For example, the jailing of feminist protesters in 2015[19] was followed in 2018[20] by new government guidelines to address discriminatory recruitment practices and harassment at work. While homosexuality remains largely hidden from mainstream public view, changes to the legal guardianship law in 2017 has sanctioned same-sex civil partnerships in all but name[21]. The desire for social change may originate from below, but in a ‘People’s Democracy’[22], the change itself must at least appear to come from above.

While Western-style democracy is not possible or even desirable for China, the top-down nature of social order will increasingly run counter to the dynamic, rapidly changing nature of life here. The country has become increasingly authoritarian under President Xie Jing Ping, which itself may in part be a reaction to witnessing the chaos that Western democracies have descended into over the past decade. This form of governance is suitable for maintaining social order yet, as the outbreak demonstrated, such rigidity creates its own ‘internal contradictions’ to borrow a phrase from the Maoist-Marxist indoctrination here. The silencing of whistle-blowers in late December 2019 was certainly not conducive to stability in any form. It will be interesting to see whether the new laws are the first indicators of a more fluid and open — yet hopefully still harmonious — society to come.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54304659

[2] https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2020/03/19/they-are-explicitly-binding-an-ideological-contest-to-an-argument-about-the-virus-the-us-china-spat

[3] https://www.cgtn.com/special/China-holds-awards-ceremony-for-role-models-in-COVID-19-fight.html

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20101220160039/http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/china/2010-12/06/c_13637285.htm

[5] https://www.npr.org/2020/04/15/835308147/meet-dr-zhong-nanshan-the-public-face-of-the-covid-19-fight-in-china

[6] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3049561/dr-li-wenliang-who-was-he-and-how-did-he-become-coronavirus-hero

[7] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3049489/coronavirus-outpouring-grief-and-anger-after-death-whistle

[8] https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanhatesthis/coronavirus-covid-chinese-wechat-censored-post-emojis

[9] https://medium.com/@KevinOnChina/china-a-nation-with-no-memory-e924c33e3980

[10] https://www.nytimes.com/live/2020/09/30/world/covid-19-coronavirus/in-a-chaotic-debate-trump-blamed-china-for-the-outbreak-and-biden-criticized-the-administrations-response

[11] https://medium.com/@simonrbpaul/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-lockdown-my-two-months-of-self-quarantine-in-south-9d7bf4a8c991

[12] http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2020-09/27/content_5547686.htm