i dont see it as 'silencing whistleblower'
that panicky doctor had a 50:50 chance of being right or crying wolf
I understand what you're saying, but I'd still disagree on this point.
Firstly, China crushes dissent, it's hardly a bastion of free speech.
Secondly, this is not the first time China has been threatened by a coronavirus. China has history here. The SARS outbreak - another coronavirus, very similar to CV19 - erupted in 2003 in China, and there was a
huge cover-up.
The Government Crusade Against SARS
As the virus continued to spread, China’s political leadership came under growing domestic and international pressures (Pomfret, 2003d). Despite the prohibition against public discussion of the epidemic, 40.9 percent of the urban residents had already heard about the disease through unofficial means (Haiyan, 2003). As mentioned above, news of the disease reached residents in Guangzhou through mobile-phone text messages in early February, forcing the provincial government to hold a news conference admitting to the outbreak. Starting on February 11, the Western news media began to aggressively report on SARS in China and the government’s cover-up of the outbreak. On March 15, the WHO issued its first global warning about SARS. While China’s government-controlled media was prohibited from reporting on the warning, the news circulated via mobile phones, e-mail, and the Internet. On March 25, 3 days after the arrival of a team of WHO experts, the government for the first time acknowledged the spread of SARS outside of Guangdong. The State Council held its first meeting to discuss the SARS problem 2 days after the Wall Street Journal published an editorial calling for other countries to suspend all travel links with China until it implemented a transparent public health campaign. The same day, the WHO issued the first travel advisory in its 55-year history advising people not to visit Hong Kong and Guangdong, prompting Beijing to hold a news conference in which the health minister promised that China was safe and SARS was under control. Enraged by the minister’s false account, Dr. Jiang Yanyong, a retired surgeon at Beijing’s 301 military hospital, sent an e-mail to two TV stations, accusing the minister of lying. While neither station followed up on the e-mail, Time magazine picked up the story and posted it on its website on April 9, which triggered a political earthquake in Beijing.
I would contend that after their experience with SARS, China wanted to avoid another PR disaster and tried initially to silence whistleblowers such as Li Wenliang. He did explicitly refer to SARS in
his warning:
On Dec 30, 2019, Li Wenliang sent a message to a group of fellow doctors warning them about a possible outbreak of an illness that resembled severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Wuhan, Hubei province, China, where he worked. Meant to be a private message, he encouraged them to protect themselves from infection. Days later, he was summoned to the Public Security Bureau in Wuhan and made to sign a statement in which he was accused of making false statements that disturbed the public order.
Quite possibly what happened was that China's security decided to silence him and others in order to avoid another PR disaster, but when it came to the attention of authority figures who had a bit of medical knowledge that's when they implemented the lockdown.
China was much much better than the West in the way they brought in the swift severe lockdown, based partly on the political system in the country, and partly on their experience of SARS. But I would argue that they were already paranoid about anyone mentioning SARS happening again, and that is why they suppressed the whistleblowers.
Either way, the overall point is still that the West is to blame for its own failings and shouldn't point the finger of blame at a country that overall (despite the initial suppression of whistleblowers) responded much better to the threat.