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HomeWeekly RoundupIn The Same Breath: Documentary's scathing assessment of China's COVID-19 response

In The Same Breath: Documentary's scathing assessment of China's COVID-19 response

When evidence began mounting of a deadly new coronavirus in China a year ago, authorities could have reacted with swift warnings about public safety. They didn’t. Instead, they banned social-media posts about the virus, stopped symptomatic people from entering hospitals, punished doctors who spoke of the risks and unleashed a stream of state-TV propaganda downplaying its severity.

According to a report in The Washington Post, that’s the narrative constructed by “In The Same Breath,” a scathing new documentary by the Oscar-shortlisted filmmaker Nanfu Wang. Wang’s movie argues that the alleged suppression led to an untold number of deaths and the virus spreading rapidly, as unaware people kept taking risks.

The report says in a surprising turn, the movie has been financed and creatively overseen by HBO. It will be aired by the Warner Media subsidiary on an as-yet undetermined date later this year, an uncommon decision by a media conglomerate to take on the government of the world’s largest entertainment market.

The documentary premiered on the night of 28 January, at the virtual Sundance Film Festival, where it is expected to stir up much attention as a damning indictment of the leadership of Chinese president Xi Jinping in the early days of the pandemic.

“We think of the virus as ‘it was an inevitable disaster and the government responded the best way they could,’” Wang, who was born 200 miles outside Wuhan, is quoted in the report as saying. “And that’s not the reality. No one can make the calculation of how many lives could have been saved if precautions and warnings were given on time.”

“Breath” seeks to paint a different picture of China’s response from the one circulating in some circles in which China handled the virus well. (Early on, a story in Nature offered "What China’s coronavirus response can teach the rest of the world” and in the fall the executive director for the WHO Health Emergencies Programme, Mike Ryan, congratulated "the front-line health workers in China and the population who worked together tirelessly to bring the disease to this very low level.”)

“Breath" argues that Xi’s government was eager to sweep away talk of COVID during the critical early period, both with suppression tactics and with propaganda dismissing the dangers. The film highlights many reports, well into January 2020, stating “no clear evidence shows human-to-human transmission” – even as victims are dying in the streets and thousands of people desperately upload their medical information hoping someone will see it and offer them care.

The Post reports that Wang’s film builds on the research of many journalists, including those of The Post, that implicates China in not moving quickly enough, offering ground-level visual testimony in a country from which many journalists have been ejected.

Wang, in New York, enlisted a team of guerrilla filmmakers to shoot subjects in China – a college student’s father and grandfather who died one day apart, or Runzhen Chen, who with her husband operated a medical clinic near the wet market at which the virus likely originated. Chen was unable to get care for her husband in January as one hospital after another turned him away, denying he was in danger. He died shortly after.

The report says though it pointedly criticises how US government officials and agencies managed the virus, it reserves some of its sharpest attacks for China’s free-speech suppression tactics.

 

[link url="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/01/28/china-hbo-covid-film/?"]Full report in The Washington Post (Open access)[/link]

 

[link url="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00741-x"]Nature article (Open access)[/link]

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