Around 5 P.M. on December 30th, Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, messaged his college-classmates group on WeChat. He told them that “seven confirmed cases of SARS” were in quarantine at the hospital, then followed up with a correction: it was an unspecified coronavirus, which later became known as 2019-nCoV. Li wasn’t authorized to share the information, but he wanted to warn his former classmates—mostly fellow-physicians—so that they would know to protect themselves. He asked them not to share the news outside the group, but soon the chat had spread—via screenshot, with Li’s name attached—throughout and beyond Hubei Province, of which Wuhan is the capital. Li was irritated at first, but understanding.

Eight hours later, at one-thirty in the morning, Li received a phone call summoning him to the offices of the municipal health commission, where his superiors were attending an emergency conference; there, hospital leadership questioned him about the WeChat message. Later that day, while at work, Li was called to the “inspection section”—essentially a political arm of the hospital, which concerns itself with political transgressions, as opposed to professional ones—for more disciplinary meetings. On January 3rd, Li’s local police station called and informed him that he was required to sign and fingerprint an admonition letter for spreading “untrue speech.” Meanwhile, CCTV, the primary state broadcaster, had reported that police had contacted eight people in Wuhan who had spread rumors about a new, SARS-like strain of pneumonia. “The Internet is not a land outside the law,” the station warned its viewers.

The following week, Li treated a glaucoma patient who appeared to have an “unidentified pneumonia.” She had a fever, and a CT scan that showed telltale lesions on her lungs, known as ground-glass opacities. Several of the patient’s family members had begun showing symptoms similar to hers. On January 10th, Li began coughing; he ran a fever the next day and was hospitalized, and was given a diagnosis of coronavirus. The general public was still largely unaware of any outbreak.

It was not until January 20th that President Xi Jinping issued a statement on coronavirus, vowing to “resolutely curb the spread of the epidemic.” According to WeChat, which tracks usages of keywords on the platform, the index of mentions of “pneumonia” and “coronavirus” were in the low thousands just a couple of days before Xi’s announcement; they then skyrocketed to more than two hundred million each. On January 21st, the newspaper People’s Daily, an official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, reported two hundred and seventeen confirmed cases in Wuhan, Beijing, and Guangdong Province, and that the virus had spread to Japan, Thailand, and Korea. It was five days before the Lunar New Year, and millions were planning on travelling home or on their way already. On January 23rd, state media called on all Chinese families to cancel gatherings, and the government placed Wuhan on lockdown, halting all trains and flights from the city. Soon, similar restrictions were placed on more than a dozen surrounding cities, limiting the free movement of some thirty-five million people. The populace was urged to stay at home.

Li told his story anonymously to Beijing Youth Daily, a Party-affiliated newspaper, which published his account on January 27th and deleted it about an hour later. The following day, the Chinese supreme court published an article on its WeChat account clearing the eight unnamed “rumor-mongers” in Wuhan of any wrongdoing. “Although the new coronavirus is not SARS, the information they distributed was not entirely made up,” the court wrote. “Had the public heard this ‘rumor’ at the time, and, out of fear of SARS, started to wear facial masks, sanitize themselves, and refrain from going to wildlife markets, it might have been beneficial for preventing and controlling the epidemic.” An official from China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention later offered public praise for the “whistleblowers,” as they were now called. On January 31st, the Beijing-based magazine Caixin ran Li’s story using his real name. “A healthy society shouldn’t have only one voice,” he told Caixin.

Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, warned others about coronavirus on WeChat. He died, of complications of coronavirus, on February 6th. Photograph from Getty

On the evening of February 6th, Li died, of complications of coronavirus. His was one of 31,261 confirmed cases and 637 deaths to date, according to the official count. Party media, including the Global Times, announced Li’s death. Later that night, however, the phrase “Li Wenliang is still being rescued” began to trend on Weibo; stories circulated that Li had been placed on extracorporeal life support (E.C.M.O.), hours after his heart had stopped. The hospital, and state media, pronounced him dead again early Friday morning. Around 1 A.M. on February 7th, several variations of the hashtag “We demand freedom of speech”—a phrase previously unthinkable on the Chinese Internet—had appeared in more than ten thousand posts on Weibo and had gotten millions of views. Also trending were quotes from the HBO series “Chernobyl” (“Every lie we tell incurs as a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid”) and lyrics from “Les Misérables” (“Do you hear the people sing, singing the songs of angry men”). Before daybreak in China, all versions of these hashtags, as well as numerous detailed discussions of Li’s death, had vanished from Weibo. In their place, a message says, “According to the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the page is not found.”

Because of heavy censorship and a tight, top-down control of information, people in China are habituated to be cautious and apolitical in their online behavior. But the coronavirus seemed to weaken that conditioning. People like Li felt an urgency to share what they knew, and news outlets felt similarly emboldened to report out the information that the public was demanding, in defiance of a state propaganda apparatus that stresses positivity—and, failing that, euphemism—at all times.

After President Xi’s statement on January 20th, WeChat spilled over almost instantly with information, rumors, and conspiracy theories: that coronavirus was spread by snakes; that the American government had developed the virus as a biological weapon; that it could be prevented with antibiotics or honeysuckle or urine. Various public accounts on WeChat published Wuhan diaries and interviewed experts, including a Hong Kong epidemiologist who called on officials in Wuhan to “get to the bottom of what’s the worst-case scenario.” Caixin, known for its formidable investigative reporting, dispatched five staff reporters and two interns to Wuhan before the transportation ban took hold; overwhelmed with traffic, its news app crashed multiple times over twenty-four hours. (Last weekend, Caixin Weekly published an issue dedicated to its Wuhan coverage online, but could not distribute the print magazines, owing to unspecified “technical issues.”)

“In the past few years, since Xi started to regulate the Internet and control information and crack down on civil society—including many verified users with large followings—there have been fewer and fewer voices that question or criticize the government, and less and less discussion of public affairs,” Xiao Qiang, the director of the Counter-Power Lab, at the University of California, Berkeley, which studies digital freedom and censorship, told me. “This is the first large-scale eruption of opinions since then.”