Why free speech is important

Remember, this all started with the suppression of free speech.

In early December last year, Dr. Li Wenliang posted to a group chat with other doctors about a mysterious pneumonia outbreak emerging in Wuhan City. To Chinese authorities, Dr. Li was like the man who shouts ‘fire!’ in a crowded cinema.

Except that there really was ‘fire.’ And instead of immediately turning on the lights, security personnel came down and stiff-armed the crier.

Police detained Dr. Li for “spreading false rumours” and forced him to admit that he had “seriously disrupted social order” and violated the law. The good doctor died in February from COVID-19, thus perishing in the same ‘fire’ that he tried to warn others about.

A couple of months later, the budding ‘fire’ that is the novel coronavirus became a ‘wildfire’ spreading across the globe. Again, it all started with suppression of free speech. It took a while before word got out about human-to-human transmission of the virus.

If there is one lesson we must learn from this pandemic, it is that the health and liberty of a society depends on free speech. An open society is better than a closed society. Science and enlightenment flourish in an environment of political liberty.

So important is free speech to the health and liberty of a society that an assault on one person or organization’s right to free speech is considered an assault on all the others.

Wrote British philosopher and author Anthony Clifford Grayling: “The principle of freedom of speech promiscuously allows bad free speech, ranging from the stupid to the malicious and dangerous. If it is genuinely dangerous to life, as for example in direct incitement to murder, it invites a case-specific limitation. But generally the remedy for bad free speech is better free speech in response.”

“True, malicious mud-slinging is damaging even if a libel action is won, but free speech does not come free, and in a mature society we have to recognize that benefits carry costs, and this is one of them,” says Grayling.

Now going back to this crisis we are in; we are now paying the much heavier cost of embracing China’s hybrid open-market system and totalitarian regime.

Western countries eager to tap China’s immense market and labor capital had welcomed China as a major player in the world market. In exchange, these countries turned the other way when it came to the shady reality of China’s totalitarian, one-party rule. It is not that Western governments do not have their own sins. But the difference with China from the West is that Western media are free to criticize their own governments.

Today, after claiming to succeed in the fight against the virus, China plays the role of a good samaritan – offering help to many countries by sending experts and sharing information. But the elephant in the room is China’s own record of stiff-arming their scientists and bullying complainants.

That is why I find dangerous the view that authoritarian or totalitarian systems can best deal with stamping out the pandemic quickly and at the least cost to human life. Proponents of such views would point to the supposedly worse situation in the United States which is now dealing with the supposedly higher number of patients and casualties.

Yet the same proponents would conveniently brush off any suspicion about China’s own numbers which it announced to the world without the scrutiny of a domestic free press and independent observers.

Lesson learned: there is no substitute to an open society for the survival and prosperity of humankind.