Excerpts from Juliet Samuel: "Beijing is doing its best to muzzle its brilliant scientists"
From the Daily Telegraph, 9 May
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The most prominent face of China's whistle-blowers is Dr Li Wenliang, who tried to warn fellow clinicians about a new virus in late December. He was arrested for "spreading rumours", made to sign a pledge to stop and went back to work, where he caught Covid-19 and died. Before him, Dr Ai Fen had circulated information about the new disease and, despite a "heavy reprimand" from authorities, gave an interview to a Chinese magazine criticising her hospital's response, after which she disappeared and the interview was censored. There was a pair of nurses, Yingchun Zeng and Yan Zhen, who volunteered in Wuhan and published a letter in The Lancet calling for international help, only to retract the letter quickly afterwards. None of these fit the official narrative: that Beijing's response to the virus has been exemplary.
The pressure on scientists studying the virus and how to control it is just as direct. China is producing some good science, including "negative studies", in which a drug is shown not to work, which its scientists might have previously been reluctant to publish. China's scientists are making the most of the new atmosphere of global collaboration wherever they can. But its laboratories are undoubtedly also fronts in the propaganda war. Beijing has claimed to have a vaccine in stage two trials, but has published no data from stage one trials. Last month, according to University World News, Chinese authorities issued a directive requiring all studies on the virus, especially relating to its origins, to be vetted by political authorities before being submitted to scientific journals.
Unsurprisingly, the effect on free inquiry is chilling.
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Recently, the scientific community became incensed by the US government's claims that the pandemic started with an accident at a virus laboratory in Wuhan. Given China's corruption and secrecy, the claim looks politically plausible but, as far as a layman can discern, scientifically dubious. Virologists have studied the virus's genome and concluded it is not genetically modified and probably jumped into humans sometime last year, whereas the most closely related virus thought to have been kept at the Wuhan lab would have taken 50 years to evolve into the 2019 coronavirus. Without further evidence, the US's statements are just propaganda and probably damaging efforts to get at the real problem: the corruption and vested interests preventing a clean-up of China's lethal wild animal trade and wet markets.
Yet perhaps because of their professional habit of self-criticism, Western scientists tend to be happier to lambast the US than the regime that has presided over the catastrophe we face today. They are slow to admit that the Chinese Communist Party has no interest in an open investigation into the virus's origins, that it has itself promoted wild rumours that the virus started in the US military, and that it covered up knowledge of human-tohuman transmission of the virus for several weeks and convinced the World Health Organisation to obfuscate about it.
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If you ask a scientist about China, you will probably get an earful of praise. China gets science, they say. Its education system prioritises science, it produces excellent researchers and its laboratories are powerhouses in everything from genetics and artificial intelligence, to applied physics, materials science, and oncology. And they are right. When Chinese authorities decide a field is of strategic value, they shower scientists with money, prizes, titles, first-class plane tickets and unlimited resources. The effect is especially potent in places like the UK, where science is undervalued and underfunded.
But we only ever see a selection of the data, research and talent China could produce, because anything that contradicts the narrative of the Communist Party or threatens its legitimacy is suppressed. So the world's scientists might love China, but China's regime does not love science. It cannot, because it is threatened by science's very lifeblood: the pursuit of truth. No one understands that more than China's own brilliant scientists.