{"id":13956,"date":"2020-02-08T21:50:34","date_gmt":"2020-02-08T12:50:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2020\/feb\/08\/if-china-valued-free-speech-there-would-be-no-coronavirus-crisis"},"modified":"2020-02-08T21:50:34","modified_gmt":"2020-02-08T12:50:34","slug":"if-china-valued-free-speech-there-would-be-no-coronavirus-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/?p=13956","title":{"rendered":"If China valued free speech, there would be no coronavirus crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Country could have contained spread of disease if only it had learned lessons from Sars outbreak <\/p>\n<p>The death of the whistleblower Chinese doctor Li Wenliang has aroused strong emotions across China. Social media is awash with posts mourning the death of a martyr who tried to raise alarm over the coronavirus but was taken into a police station instead for \u201cspreading false rumours\u201d and \u201cdisrupting social order\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Grief quickly turned into angry demands for free speech. The trending topic \u201cwe want freedom of speech\u201d, which attracted millions of views, and links to Do You Hear the People Sing, a song popularised in recent Hong Kong protests, were quickly censored by police.<\/p>\n<p> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2020\/feb\/08\/if-china-valued-free-speech-there-would-be-no-coronavirus-crisis\">Continue reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Country could have contained spread of disease if only it had learned lessons from Sars outbreak The death of the whistleblower Chinese doctor Li Wenliang has aroused strong emotions across China. Social media is awash with posts mourning the death of &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":411,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sns_share_botton_hide":"","vkExUnit_sns_title":"","_vk_print_noindex":"","sitemap_hide":"","_veu_custom_css":"","veu_display_promotion_alert":"","vkexunit_cta_each_option":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[41,918,50,1069,914,512,916,299,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asia-pacific","category-biology","category-china","category-coronavirus-outbreak","category-infectious-diseases","category-medical-research","category-microbiology","category-science","category-world-news"],"veu_head_title_object":{"title":"","add_site_title":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/411"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13956"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13977,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13956\/revisions\/13977"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eastasianews.net\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}