Li Changqing Gets Three Years Imprisonment for Reporting Disease Outbreak

The Gulou District People's Court in Fuzhou city, Fujian province, sentenced Li Changqing, a deputy director at the Fuzhou Daily, to three years imprisonment for "reporting for the U.S.-based Chinese-language news portal Boxun that an outbreak of [dengue fever] had infected more than 100 people in Fujian in 2004," according to a January 25 Reuters report citing Li's lawyer, Mo Shaoping. Public security officials previously placed Li under residential surveillance on January 20, 2005, and formally arrested him on February 3, 2005, for "inciting subversion of state power," a crime under Article 105 of the Criminal Law. When the government indicted Li on December 30, however, the charge was "intentionally disseminating terrorist information while clearly knowing that it is fabricated, thereby seriously disturbing public order," a crime which was added as Article 291(a) in the Third Amendment to the Criminal Law adopted on December 29, 2001. Li was tried on January 19.

Mo said that authorities initially denied his requests to see Li, citing a regulation against visits to prisoners whose cases involve state secrets, according to a January 20 Washington Post report. They did, however, allow Mo to meet with Li twice after they changed the charge.

According to the Washington Post, Li told the court that his interrogators never asked him about the crime he was charged with, and instead focused on articles he published regarding Huang Jin'gao, a whistleblower who exposed massive government corruption in Fujian, and who Fujian authorities detained several days before Li. Authorities accused Li of helping Huang write an open letter describing death threats that he said forced him to wear a bulletproof vest, according to a January 19 press release from the Committee to Protect Journalists. In November 2005, the Intermediate People's Court in Nanping city, Fujian province, sentenced Huang to life imprisonment for corruption. Mo told the Washington Post: "From the beginning, the only thing they wanted was to punish Li for writing so many articles in favor of Huang."

The Washington Post said Li told the court that the dengue fever report was written by people who run the Boxun Web site, with his information serving only as a tip, and that the report turned out to be true. Boxun reported on January 17 that it had received an anonymous report on an outbreak of dengue fever in Fuzhou. The author reported more than 20 cases, according to Boxun. Boxun performed additional research indicating that the number of cases was higher, and on October 13, 2004, it published a report, entitled "Dengue Fever Breaks Out in Fuzhou, Over 100 People Infected, the Government Endeavors to Cover it Up, Causing Citizens to Panic." Only after Boxun published its report did China's state run media and government officials begin reporting on the outbreak:

• On October 15, Xinhua reported (in Chinese) that as of October 13, there were 30 cases of dengue fever in Fujian.
• On October 15, the China Youth Daily published an article (in Chinese) entitled "How Many Days Late Was Fujian's Report on Dengue Fever?" pointing out that there were an additional 18 suspected cases, and questioning whether "utilizing propaganda sources to leak out drops of information in one locale" was the appropriate method to disseminate information about the disease outbreak.
• In an April 10, 2005, speech (in Chinese), Chen Wenjia, deputy director of Fujian's health bureau, said that during 2004 Fujian province had 94 cases of dengue fever.

Based on these reports, it would appear that neither Li's nor Boxun's reports regarding the number of dengue fever cases was materially inaccurate.

Chinese authorities have attempted to cover up outbreaks of infectious disease in the past. As the CECC noted in Section III(c) - Free Flow of Information of its 2003 Annual Report, in December 2002, health care workers in Guangdong province began noticing people coming in with "atypical pneumonia," and by early January 2003 people were already engaged in panic buying at drug stores because of rumors of a "mystery epidemic." Chinese authorities did not begin to allow reporting on the SARS crisis until the disease began killing people in Hong Kong. In response to their cover-up and mishandling of the SARS crisis, Chinese authorities dismissed some senior officials and enacted regulations to discourage provincial and local officials from concealing information from the central government. These reforms were not intended, however, to relax the government's control over the news media or the free flow of information to the general public. Rather, the goal was to increase the flow of information to central authorities in Beijing, control how the press reported on the matter, and prevent private citizens from publishing opinions regarding the government's handling of the crisis. For additional information on this issue, see the CECC Topic Paper: Information Control and Self-Censorship in the PRC and the Spread of SARS.

In responding to avian flu outbreaks in poultry stock across China, as well as a growing number of human cases, Chinese health authorities have assured the public and international health officials that they have learned from SARS. Speaking in Washington, D.C., Qi Xiaoqiu, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, explained that, "from SARS, we see that no . . . information can be hidden," according to a November 1, 2005, report by the Associated Press. Chinese health authorities have reported avian flu outbreaks in poultry stock to international health officials in a generally timely fashion, as well as issued regulations to ensure accurate domestic reporting.