From WSJopinion: The regime’s focus on the origins question alone all but screams a truth of the Covid-19 virus, writes Perry Link. Why were the authorities so swift and conspicuous?
While the Biden administration plays for time, some lawmakers believe sanctions would be the faster route to establishing whether the origin of covid-19 was a lab-leak in Wuhan, China. Image: Roman Pilipey/ShutterstockI am as eager as anyone to follow the world’s virologists as they try to determine how Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan, China. But as a longtime student of Chinese Communist political language, I will need considerable persuading that the disease came from bats or a wet market.
Many years ago a distinguished Chinese writer, Wu Zuxiang, explained to me that there is truth in Communist Party pronouncements, but you have to read them “upside down.” If a newspaper says “the Party has made great strides against corruption in Henan,” then you know that corruption has recently been especially bad in Henan. If you read about the heroic rescue of eight miners somewhere, you can guess that a mine collapse might have killed hundreds who aren’t mentioned.
A few years ago another outstanding Chinese writer, Su Xiaokang, brought me one step deeper. You Westerners, he explained, are too hung up on the question of whether propaganda is true or not. For the regime, truth and falsity are beside the point. A statement might be true, false or partly true. What matters is only whether it works. Does it advance the interests of the party? The top leaders hand out words and phrases for their minions to use, like trowels in a garden.
After the Communist Party locked down the city of Wuhan in winter 2020, a local writer named Fang Fang began recording the conditions and moods of the people around her and posting entries on the Internet. “Fang Fang’s Diary” quickly attracted a large following, and the author became known as “the conscience of Wuhan.” Michael Berry, a UCLA professor of Asian languages and cultures who was translating one of the author’s novels, went to work on her posts as well.
The book, “Wuhan Diary,” consists of plain truth-telling. It is unadorned, simple language that stood out in Wuhan only because no one else was daring to write anything. But the regime’s response was to attack Fang Fang more ferociously than any Chinese writer has been attacked since Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s.
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