Coronavirus: China deletes whistleblower's interview; people become watchdog and keep the truth alive

New Delhi, Delhi, India

At a time when the whole world is battling the unprecedented outbreak of coronavirus, China has come under the global spotlight, for all the wrong reasons.

And while China is known for wiping the facts, people of the country are trying hard to keep the truth alive.

Ai Fen is a Chinese doctor and director of the emergency department of Central Hospital of Wuhan. She is the first medical personnel to disclose the 2019–20 coronavirus epidemic to the outside world.

In March, she gave an interview to a state-run magazine in which she spoke about the Chinese Communist Party trying to hide the Wuhan virus.

The interview is now deleted and the doctor is also missing since the interview.

Meanwhile, in a valiant effort, Chinese people on the internet have found unique ways to bypass the censors and have rallied to keep the story alive.

The netizens in China saved a copy of the interview and are coming up with various ways to preserve it and spread it further.

One of the Twitter users made a video and inserted the interview text in Mandarin into the famous opening scene of star wars.

Another user produced the entire text backwards.

While another user recreated it by using emoticons.

"Censors keep deleting a story went viral about Ai Fen, a Wuhan doc who took pics of patient’s test results in late Dec and alert ppl. So Chinese netizens found their own ways: sharing in reversed order, as PDF, with an intentional misspelling of characters, and in emoji," Carolyn Zhang wrote on the micro-blogging site while sharing the emoticon version of the interview.

One more user-created the interview in Braille and posted on social media.  The QR code, Telegram codes version of the interview are also being circulated on the interview to escape the Chinese censors.

On December 30, 2019, Ai Fen received a test report of patients with unknown pneumonia. She circled the word "sars coronavirus" in red, according to the English translation of the interview published on a Chinese website.

When asked by a former medical school classmate, she took the report and shared it with her who is also a doctor.

That night, the report was circulated within the doctor circles in Wuhan, and those who forwarded the report included eight doctors who were disciplined by the police later.

Later, she was interviewed by the hospital disciplinary committee as she was the source of the report. The hospital accused Fen of spreading rumours as a profession.

The report shared by Fen became the first piece of evidence of the outbreak and the whistleblower, Doctor Li Wenlian had also shared the same report with the world.

Dr li later contracted the coronavirus himself and died in February this year.