He appeared on social media, a solitary man in a surgical mask, warning of a deadly virus. His insistence that an epidemic was coming turned him into a folk hero in a country that prizes secrecy and crushes dissent. He died Friday in a hospital in Wuhan.
in a hospital in Wuhan, the center of an epidemic he warned about in December. Conflicting accounts about his condition echoed through official channels and across social media, adding another layer of confusion in a government that appears increasingly overwhelmed. Early reports of Li’s death were retracted when the hospital said it was working to save his life.Li left behind his wife, also infected with the coronavirus and pregnant with their second child.
People wear masks Jan. 24 in the Jingshan Park in Beijing. Two weeks into the coronavirus epidemic, there’s no sign that it’s under control. Within an hour of Li’s death, the trending topic “Wuhan government owes Dr. Li Wenliang an apology” on the social platform Weibo was censored. The most efficient organizations at coordinating donations have ironically been celebrities’ fan clubs, the only sort of grass-roots organization still allowed to exist under Xi’s crackdown on civil society as he moves to consolidate his power.
That has raised concerns from dissidents and grass-roots groups on the margins of Chinese society, but not shaken his power in the mainstream, in part because Xi has so adroitly mobilized Chinese propaganda and education to spur nationalism. Even with other recent challenges — a U.S.-China trade war, unrest in Hong Kong, Taiwan’s assertion of sovereignty, and global criticism over Xi’s detention of Uighur Muslims in concentration camps in Xinjiang — Xi has managed to hover above public criticism, often by blaming “foreign intervention.”But now Xi faces the biggest challenge yet to his rule and the party’s legitimacy: a preventable crisis that is striking Chinese families dead, shows no sign of stopping, and cannot be blamed away.
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