In late January, when the city of Wuhan in central China was placed on lockdown to prevent the spread of coronavirus, Chinese people began to scour the internet for a trusted source of information about the poorly understood contagion.
Tens of millions soon landed on the social media posts of Fang Fang. The Wuhan novelist’s modest fame from writing historical fiction exploded as her diary entries quickly became the go-to unofficial account of events unfolding in the city. Fang, who was born Wang Fang but goes by her pen name, began chronicling daily life shortly after Wuhan was cut off from the world, keeping up a steady stream of posts until early April, when travel restrictions on the city were officially lifted.
Wuhan Diary is the insider’s story of the city’s fight against the virus. Fang’s simple account of what she saw, heard and felt serves to distil and amplify the trauma of a city in crisis. The collection of 60 entries, mostly written before the rest of the world had woken up to the threat of Covid-19, is also a painful reminder that the risks of contagion were clear in China, even as they were ignored in western capitals.
One reason the diary became so popular — and occasionally fell foul of China’s censors — was Fang’s willingness to directly criticise the incompetence of Chinese officials who downplayed the severity of the outbreak in its early days. “‘Not Contagious Between People; It’s Controllable and Preventable’ — those eight words have transformed Wuhan into a city of blood and tears filled with endless misery,” she wrote.
Her forthright criticism made her a target for nationalist cyber trolls on China’s conservative left, whose accusations that she was “betraying” her country intensified after the English-language publication of Wuhan Diary was announced in April. As a result, many of her later diary entries became attempts to rebuff her critics. She wonders, not without justification, whether her detractors ever read her work, which is critical of local officials but rarely touches geopolitics.
At times, Fang sounds very little like a fierce government critic. Many entries begin with a description of the weather and she is greatly concerned about her daughter’s eating habits. (“Her father and I are both vehemently opposed to her ordering takeout.”)
Fang is by no means a dissident. Rather, her status as former head of the Hubei Writers Association places her on the periphery of officialdom, a position that lends credence to descriptions of the pathologies in Chinese politics. “This outbreak has . . . exposed the rudimentary level of so many Chinese officials, and it has exposed the diseases running rampant through the very fabric of our society,” she wrote. In this way, Fang taps into a rich tradition of Chinese intellectuals who seize upon national calamity to push for social and political progress. Her work will be a lasting testament to the danger of Chinese officials believing their own propaganda.
Official failings only take up a small portion of Fang’s entries, however. She is perhaps most concerned with capturing daily injustices and pointing out how small failures can build into a tragedy. “A calamity is when the hospital is going through an entire folder of death certificates in just a few days,” she wrote.
Her focus on the everyday makes some parts of Wuhan Diary feel a world away from a headline-grabbing global pandemic. An international audience may at times need to read the footnotes to grasp what is going on. It is, after all, a diary by a Chinese writer for a Chinese audience. Jokes about pork prices are hard to translate.
Ultimately, Fang tells the story of a city — her city — and how it faced down coronavirus and survived, an achievement she hopes will not be forgotten. “Remember those everyday people who have passed, remember those who suffered a wrongful death, remember these grief-stricken days and sorrowful nights,” she wrote.
The thing she advocates for most often is not sweeping political change but for leaders in China and elsewhere to exercise “common sense”, get care to those who most need it and not repeat the same mistakes again. Unfortunately, her call has so far been ignored, as US and Chinese officials and pundits trade insults and peddle conspiracy theories about the virus’s origin.
In Fang’s words: “China’s lax attitude early on and the West’s arrogance shown in its distrust of China’s experience fighting the coronavirus have both contributed to . . . all humanity having been dealt a heavy blow.”
It is a simple but powerful message — one that wouldn’t go amiss in either the courtyards of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing or the corridors of the White House.
Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City, by Fang Fang, translated by Michael Berry, HarperCollins, RRP£12.99, 328 pages
Christian Shepherd is the FT’s Beijing correspondent
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