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Coronavirus pandemic
ChinaPolitics

Wuhan mayor under pressure to resign over response to coronavirus outbreak

  • Zhou Xianwang tells state broadcaster the government’s ‘warnings were not sufficient’ in interview that prompts online backlash
  • He is slammed for allowing Lunar New Year gathering of more than 40,000 people to go ahead on Sunday

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Video clips of an interview with Zhou Xianwang, mayor of Wuhan, have drawn thousands of angry comments on social media. Photo: Weibo
Sarah Zhengin Beijing
The mayor of Wuhan, the central Chinese city where a new coronavirus first broke out, is under growing pressure over the government’s response to the outbreak after he admitted its disease prevention efforts fell short.

Zhou Xianwang, the 57-year-old mayor of the Hubei provincial capital, is weathering what will likely be the toughest crisis of his career, with a flood of calls for his resignation after he told state broadcaster CCTV that the city’s “warnings were not sufficient”.

During the interview on Tuesday, he was grilled on whether the city had reacted “too slowly” to the spread of the virus, if timely information had been shared, about hospital staff getting infected, on allowing a mass gathering to go ahead in the midst of the outbreak, and the delayed cancellation of public events for the Lunar New Year.

“From the perspective of continued understanding of the situation, it is only at this time that everyone realises it is so dangerous,” said Zhou, who has been mayor since September 2018. “If we knew at first from the virus spread that it would be so serious, finding effective control and prevention methods of course would be good, but the problem is usually we cannot realise the severity from the outset.”

Video clips from the interview posted on Chinese social media have drawn thousands of angry comments, with many accusing the mayor of “neglecting his duty” and calling for him to “step down”. Public dissent is rare in China, particularly as Beijing has clamped down on civil society in recent years to ensure the media, and social media users, carefully toe the official line.

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