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The official death toll from the outbreak of coronavirus in China keeps rising. And while the deadly virus spreads, public anger is building. So far, this has mostly been directed at officials in Wuhan, the city at the centre of the outbreak. Their shortcomings in dealing with the virus were confirmed by Zhou Xianwang, mayor of the city, who confessed this week that authorities had failed to make timely disclosures.
In fact, it took six weeks since the first reported case of the pneumonia in early December before the Wuhan government decided to sound a general alarm. The delay has prompted several thousands of angry people on social media in China to accuse the mayor of neglecting his city, and call for him to step down. Such outbursts of public dissent are rare in China, particularly during the rule of Xi Jinping, China's authoritarian leader.
But rarer still are public displays of disunity among the different levels of the Communist party hierarchy. But this is exactly what's happening this time. Even as the mayor of Wuhan offered to resign and face what he called the infamy of history, he also laid responsibility for the slow reaction to the virus at the door of the central government. He appealed to people to understand why Wuhan had failed to make timely disclosures about the severity of the virus. This was due, he said, to the fact that the city had to wait for authorisation to raise the alarm from Beijing.
Such authorisation took weeks to come. All this is stirring dark memories of China's last great pneumonia scourge. The Sars outbreak of 2003, which eventually killed some 800 people in 17 countries around the world. That crisis was also worsened by cover-ups and underreporting that lasted months. The fallout from Sars rocked the Chinese government, and resulted in the firing of the minister of health and the mayor of Beijing.
The current signs of disunity within Chinese officialdom hint at the intense pressures that arise during public health crises. As food prices surge, factories shut or go slow, and cities all over the country restrict the movement of people, there is no doubt that the coronavirus outbreak ranks as the biggest crisis that Mr Xi has had to face since he took power in 2012.
