The article, which was hugely popular online, was taken down just hours after it was posted.

A news website run by the city authorities of Dongying, in the eastern province of Shandong, published an article late last month praising the online censor Guo Qiqi: She sleeps just four hours a day, and monitors the internet for 20. The article included photos of a policewoman whose job was to monitor Twitter and Facebook, which are blocked inside China.

The piece swept Weibo like a storm — but not as the authorities had intended. “Trying hard to build a Brave New World,” said one comment.

The censors can’t keep up, though: Maybe what goes up online must come down, but what comes down will go up again.

Which might explain why, in addition to trying to prevent people from openly discussing Dr. Li’s death, the information blackout in the early stages of the outbreak and the government’s handling of the crisis overall, the authorities are also trying to peddle an alternative narrative — and one that co-opts Dr. Li’s story.

As ever, the central government in Beijing is scrambling to project the image that it has everything under control. Instead of admitting to any large-scale inefficiencies or errors, it has sent a team to Wuhan to investigate Dr. Li’s death. Two senior provincial party officials were sacked on Thursday.

The government is also trying to cast Dr. Li’s death as the nation’s sacrifice — meaning, the Chinese Communist Party’s own.

The veteran epidemiologist Zhong Nanshan, who is credited with identifying the coronavirus that causes SARS and is widely revered, wept as he spoke about Dr. Li in an interview with Reuters this week. “The majority of people think he’s a hero of China,” Dr. Zhong said, in English, tears welling. “I’m so proud of him. He told people the truth at the end of December.” Many people share that view.