How American Journalists Watched China’s COVID-19 Crisis Unfold

Reporting on China has long been one of the most challenging and crucial of journalistic assignments, as I found as a long-term correspondent there. Today it can take years to obtain a visa to cover the country as a foreigner—and Chinese journalists are increasingly in danger of detention and prosecution.

This article is adapted from Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic by Mike Chinoy (Columbia University Press, 520 pp., $140, March 2023).

But in 2020 the danger was biological as well as political, as reports emerged of a mysterious pneumonia-like illness in Wuhan, the most populous city in central China. With a population of over 11 million, Wuhan is the capital of Hubei province and a major transportation hub, with river, highway, high-speed rail, and air links to the rest of China. The local authorities initially downplayed the outbreak, saying little and insisting there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission.

But on Jan. 23, with the just-identified COVID-19 virus spreading out of control, the central government imposed an unprecedented lockdown on the city. Under pressure from their anxious editors, the tiny handful of foreign journalists who had traveled to the city in the previous few days decided to leave. But Chris Buckley of the New York Times got on a train to Wuhan from Beijing.

Chris Buckley, New York Times: I’m thinking to myself, “Somebody is going to say, ‘Hey, turn around, you have to go back.’” It doesn’t happen. Eventually, we get to Wuhan. I had this image of the train station lined with police officers telling people to stay out of the city, and certainly keeping out reporters. But the station essentially had no security at all. I stepped outside, and there’s not much security either. I found a driver and started going round to the hospitals. You could tell it was getting serious because people were being wheeled into hospitals, or ambulances [were] arriving all the time.

Like Buckley, Amy Qin of the Times and Chao Deng of the Wall Street Journal also discovered that even though no one was allowed to leave, trains were still stopping in Wuhan.

Amy Qin, New York Times: You could talk to the conductor and ask them to let you off there. I was pretty scared, because at that point we had no idea what the situation was, or how dangerous it was. We didn’t know was how tight the lockdown was going to be, or how difficult it would be to get out. We did not realize until once we were there. Then it kind of dawned on us that if any of us get sick, and all the hospitals are very overwhelmed right now, what would happen? We couldn’t get medivaced out.

As the disease took hold, the reporters discovered, to their surprise, that they were generally able to operate without the usual harassment and interference.

Chao Deng, Wall Street Journal: It was bizarre. I did two weeks of unhindered reporting. The first week, it almost felt like I had walked into this place where access was almost unfettered.

Qin: At that point we didn’t know how transmissible the virus was. People were getting turned away from hospitals and going home and then infecting other family members. We met a family. They told us almost the entire family was sick except for the father, and one person had already died. We decided to write a story. I don’t know that that story was the trigger point where people were able to realize that, but looking back, several of the family members were sick right in front of us and had tested positive but had no symptoms at all.

Buckley: The horror stories really multiplied about a week in, and it began to appear as a much more serious crisis.

Journalists reacted to the risks of covering the outbreak in different ways. Alice Su had covered the Middle East before moving to Beijing for the Los Angeles Times.

Alice Su, Los Angeles Times: I spent a lot of time in Iraq and Gaza and the West Bank. I was more scared with COVID[-19] than I had been in hostile environments in the Middle East.

Gerry Shih, Washington Post: It was scary. It’s invisible. I guess that is probably the difference. In a conflict, I suppose you more or less know where the threat is coming from, and who is on what side. With the virus, everybody is vulnerable. It could be anywhere. It does sort of make you feel a bit freaked out.

Buckley: If you told me now you were putting me in a time machine and sending me back there, I’d probably be a lot more anxious. But at the time, I didn’t grasp how infectious it might be, and the idea of asymptomatic spread wasn’t an established fact then. Things like that would have probably made me a lot more anxious if I had thought about them. The other thing—it’s got nothing to do with heroics, but this is a great story, and I’m here, and there aren’t very many other journalists here, and I have got to make this work. There is an excitement to it.

By the end of January 2020, whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang, who had treated infected patients, was himself seriously ill with COVID-19. In Beijing, CNN correspondent David Culver and his local producer managed to reach him on the phone. In between coughing fits, Li described what was happening.

David Culver, CNN: He was being very candid about being punished for speaking out. He told us the timeline of when he initially reported it to his friends. He said he had got called in because someone had screenshot[ed] it and sent it out. So his name was tied to it. When that happened, he was told to sign a paper by the local police that said, “I will stop spreading rumors and lies.” He signed it. He went back to work and contracted the virus.

It was Li’s only broadcast interview. On Feb. 7, 2020, he died. His death triggered an outpouring of grief on Chinese social media.

Anna Fifield, Washington Post: [There was] this public outpouring of grief and anger over the fact that the government had tried to silence criticism and this brave one had died. I think the government must have been very worried.

Buckley: In terms of the government’s handling of public opinion, that was the real crisis point for them.

Culver: I think that was a night when, if we thought there was going to be a turning point for this country in one direction or another, that was it. You started to feel the uncertainty of social stability. It was rocking. There was an uneasiness in the air. It felt like something could shift.

New York Times tech correspondent Paul Mozur had been tracking how the Chinese government was using surveillance tools as the outbreak worsened. Some months later, a hacker group calling itself CCP Unmasked provided him with massive amounts of data they had retrieved from the Cyberspace Administration of China, including details on how the authorities reasserted control over the internet in the wake of Li’s death. Working with two other New York Times colleagues and a reporter from ProPublica, which had also been given the data, Mozur cowrote a long story with the headline “No ‘Negative’ News: How China Censored the Coronavirus.”

Paul Mozur, New York Times: When Li Wenliang died, [Chinese journalists and censors] are told at first, “Don’t do everything. Just get a part of it. Take down the severe ones, things that are calling for action, things that are over the top.” And then like a week later they come back, and they are like, “OK, people are mourning, but we need to go back and take down more. Look for candles. Look for other things that would be indicating respect for Li Wenliang.” We see this order to basically pull Li from any trending topics and bury articles about him in the archives.

At that point, within an hour, you can literally see how he basically just drops off the trending category. This was the moment that Xi Jinping has been building for. When it came, [the authorities] were able to effectively surf it and manage it in a way that was shockingly powerful. They pulled down everything, and people who tried to archive stuff got arrested. After a month or two, with enough propaganda about how China beat the virus and the world didn’t, things turned.