Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject Politics - Topic: Public International Law and Human Rights, grade: 1, 0, The American University, Washington, DC (Department for Social Science), course: Seminar "Managing Pandemics in Globalized Societies", language: English, abstract: The COVID-19 response of China was not generally different than those of other countries - social distancing, contact tracing, lockdown, vaccination - however, Chinas authorities restricted the spread more effectively and prevented the second and third wave that nearly every other country experienced. Primarily responsible for this success was the very early and rigorously implementation of the measures above - however, the costs to achieve the currently low numbers were high. Since the early days of the pandemic until today, Beijing has strictly enforced limitations of civil liberties, accepting - and, as I will show in the following, even intending - violations of human rights and freedom of expression as well as increased inequality and discrimination of marginalized and especially vulnerable groups.
In this Policy Critique I will focus on two laws which criminalize the disruption of the public order in the analogous life and in the cyberspace which can be seen as new kind of public place. I argue that Article 293 of the "Chinese Criminal Law" and the set of cyberspace guidelines known as "Provisions on the Governance of the Online Information Content Ecosystem" were misused to suppress objective reporting and free speech during the COVID-19 pandemic.
For this I will provide some background information about the original intention of the laws and the problems they were designed to address as well as about the general situation of press freedom in China and its position on relevant treaties of the United Nations (UN). Afterwards, I examine their application and effectiveness during the first months of the Coronavirus pandemic. Using several examples of policies that based on those laws, I will show how they were misused to suppress the freedom of expression of the Chinese population, especially affecting medical staff, journalists, and human rights activists. In the following I will evaluate China's use of those policies, including potential consequences for neighboring countries and recommended reactions of the international community before I end with a short conclusion.
