> There was an outbreak, but it was covered up for many weeks. Doctors that came out were silenced by the government.

Interpreting this as "silencing" implies that they had full knowledge of what it was and what its danger was.

In the early days, they literally didn't know that there is a new virus, they just saw a bunch of unknown illnesses. That could be caused by many things: problems in medical equipment, misdiagnosis, incompetent doctors, non-biological agents (e.g. toxins). There were also few cases. No, they didn't know what it was until late December. They also didn't know how dangerous it was until early January, when human-to-human transmission was confirmed.

> Doctors that came out were silenced by the government.

Okay let me ask you this: do western governments ever silence the media? The answer is yes: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/85440
The US government literally did that not too long ago.

Now, I'm not calling "hypocrite" -- that's not my point. But I will ask you this: might there be valid reasons for silencing?

One reason is to prevent panic, which can make things worse. If we accept the premise that sometimes it's acceptable to censor, then we arrive at the following question: under what conditions is it acceptable?

I can imagine that the following conditions would give some reasonable basis (and feel free to disagree with me): 1) the claims can cause widespread panic that makes things worse, and 2) there is no evidence that the claims are true.

Before late December in China, both conditions 1 and 2 are true. People still remember SARS and the panic that came with it. And mid-December there was absolutely no solid evidence that there's a new virus -- like I said, it could be a lot of other things, maybe even innocent things misdiagnosis.

You are free to disagree with when censorship is acceptable. Maybe you think it's never acceptable. That's fine. My point is: the situation is a lot more nuanced than just "OMG China is silencing doctors so China is evil". And it's always easy in hindsight.

And another thing to get things straight: that "whistleblower doctor" was not put in jail, nor killed. He was warned by the police not to spread rumors, and had to sign an NDA. That's it. Nothing really bad happened to him. It's sad that he later contracted the virus but that's a coincident.

The Chinese supreme court even ruled in his favor, saying that the police shouldn't have reprimanded him. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/08/opinions/coronavirus-boci...
I quote from CNN: [Weeks later, China's Supreme Court vindicated him and other "rumormongers" by saying, "It might have been a fortunate thing ... if the public had listened to this 'rumor' at the time..."]

Even CGTN, a state-owned media company, publicly admitted that the police's treatment of the doctor was wrong.

> Well. through January we were going through the shampeachment, which I think many people seem to forget about. This was keeping the government busy, when they should have been thinking about ways to combat the virus.

I'm sure all of that is true. But if anything, that just proves my point: freedom is speech should not be treated as a panacea. One cannot just say "oh if China only had freedom of speech then X would never have happened" -- no, your situation literally proved that freedom of speech doesn't prevent X from happening. It may help a little, but evidently it doesn't help much.

"But we were busy with other things" is not a valid excuse. There's always something else that keeps anyone busy.

> and we might have actually been able to prevent the spread to countries like Italy.

I'm surprised people can still claim this. This is a contradictory statement.

1. You say freedom of speech prevents the virus from spreading inside China, where there are no internal borders. So why did it not prevent spreading to Italy, a foreign country with a border, who even saw it coming 2 months in advance?

2. If Italy (or the US) evidently could not prevent it despite freedom of speech and being a much higher barrier for spreading than internal China, then why do you still claim that freedom of speech could have prevented the spread in China?

> I'm not sure why you are defending an authoritarian government that clearly prevented the world from knowing about a pandemic that has already killed thousands of people.

It's because that "authoritarian government" isn't what you think it is. You have a wrong image of what China is. It's not entirely wrong: there are cores of truth. But it's no more than that: a core. The full picture has been wildly exaggerated beyond any reason. Your image of China is a caricature, not reality.

> My guess is that you are one of the many people paid by the Chinese government to shill for them and spread propaganda.

Dude, check my profile history and my Github account. I'm a real person and I live in the Netherlands. I'm a normal person, who's had a western education, who genuinely disagrees with you because I know about the real China, not the fictive China painted by US media.

Not to mention that Europeans don't held the US in such a high regard as they used to. So it shouldn't be weird for you to see a European trying to kick American comments off their high horse.