Chinese authorities are facing public outrage over their handling of a fire that killed 21 people at a hospital in Beijing. The blaze broke out on Tuesday at the Beijing Changfeng Hospital’s inpatient department, which is located less than seven miles away from Tiananmen Square. According to state media outlet Xinhua News Agency, firefighters were notified of the fire at 12:57 p.m. local time and put it out by 1:33 p.m. Another 71 patients were evacuated and transferred to other facilities. However, footage and photos of the fire quickly spread on Chinese social media, showing patients climbing out of the building with improvised ropes made from bed sheets. The posts were swiftly deleted from platforms including Weibo and WeChat.
The censorship has fueled public anger over the dearth of media reports about the incident and how such a tragedy could have happened at a hospital, with one user on dissident-run tracking site Freeweibo.com saying, “it is really difficult to understand, hospitals have relatively stronger safety management and precautionary measures, and Beijing is our country’s first-tier city, how could such a large-scale fire lead to so many deaths?” Even Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the Communist Party-backed Global Times, was caught in the censorship dragnet. A Weibo post from Hu, which called for authorities to “trust the public” with information on the incident and criticized the removal of other posts, was itself taken down after a brief time online.
By evening, restrictions on information appeared to be easing, with state media outlets beginning to publish reports on the fire around 9 p.m. after online users questioned why the topic wasn’t appearing on trending search lists, along with a lengthy delay in reporting the number of deaths. A hashtag created to share information about the fire, #Fire at Beijing Changfeng Hospital that killed 21, did not reflect any data on Weibo as of Wednesday morning, though a differently-worded hashtag created later that didn’t state the hospital’s name showed over 6.2 million views of the topic. The cause of the incident is still being investigated.