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A Wuhan Writer Takes On China’s Communist Machine and Becomes an Online Star


Debate rages over allowing independent voices after Wang Fang—known to millions as Fang Fang—documented life and death in locked-down city ravaged by coronavirus


By
Chun Han Wong

April 1, 2020

Soon after the top official in China’s coronavirus-ravaged metropolis of Wuhan urged residents to show gratitude to the Communist Party for containing the contagion, a local literary star penned a stinging rebuke.

“The government is the people’s government; it exists to serve the people,” wrote Wang Fang, a Chinese writer better known by her pen name, Fang Fang, in a social-media post. “Please take back your arrogance and humbly show gratitude to your masters—the millions of Wuhan people.”

The March 7 post was the 43rd entry in Ms. Wang’s “Diary from a Sealed City,” a somber account of life and death under mass quarantine in Wuhan that has garnered millions of views and won praise from readers for its authenticity—a remedy to the chorus of state-media triumphalism about the Communist Party’s battle against the deadly pathogen.

Ms. Wang’s diary has become a focal point of bitter online debate over the value of allowing independent voices that deviate from the official narrative being pushed with increasing assertiveness under President Xi Jinping.

A rare example of critical commentary about the pandemic, the diary also suggests that gaps still exist in the Communist Party’s system of information control for those deft enough to exploit them.

Government missteps in handling the initial outbreak were a regular theme for Ms. Wang, who repeatedly castigated local authorities for misleading residents into thinking that the disease wasn’t very contagious and could be controlled—a response that she believes cost countless lives.

China, which has reported more than 81,000 coronavirus cases and about 3,300 deaths, has declared success in containing local transmissions as imported infections accounted for most new cases in recent weeks.

The writer published her 60th and what she called her final entry shortly after midnight on March 25, hours after authorities said the city’s extraordinary lockdown would end on April 8. Supporters voiced their appreciation while critics renewed accusations that the writer was spreading rumors and undermining national unity.


“Thank you, Teacher Fang Fang, for withstanding the tempest of smears and abuse, and for giving everyone a world of rational thinking,” one user of the Twitter-like Weibo microblogging platform wrote. “Persevere, we’re all here.”

Another user cheered the diary’s conclusion, saying Ms. Wang had been “brainwashed by American democracy, freedom and feminism.”

The diary was dogged by censorship over much of the past two months. Entries were repeatedly scrubbed from the popular WeChat social-media app, while certain posts that Ms. Wang published on Weibo were blocked.

Caixin, a respected Chinese business magazine, and Jinri Toutiao, a news-aggregation app, helped Ms. Wang circumvent censorship by publishing her diary on their platforms, where entries often garnered tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of views apiece.

Authorities appear to have allowed Ms. Wang’s diary to stay online as an “outlet for public emotions,” and an avenue for monitoring sentiment, said Wu Qiang, a Chinese politics researcher and a former lecturer at Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

Other critics, however, appear to have been silenced by the government. In February, at least two people disappeared after documenting conditions in Wuhan with online videos. A prominent Tsinghua University professor, Xu Zhangrun, also went quiet after penning a critical essay on President Xi’s handling of the coronavirus, according to friends and acquaintances.

“Closed households in a sealed city feel desperate, the people are crying amidst an epidemic,” she wrote. “We’re all suffering the same disaster, why rush to fry each other so.”

Ms. Wang often cited the Wuhan government’s initial claims that the disease wasn’t known to transmit between humans and that a contagion was “preventable and controllable.” She excoriated the Communist Party bureaucracy for dulling cadres to the needs of ordinary Chinese.

“This isn’t entirely an issue of moral character, but rather they are a part of a certain machine,” she wrote. “The rapid operation of this machine causes their eyes to stare only at their superiors and become unable to see the masses of common people.”

Her popularity compelled even state-media personalities to weigh in. Hu Xijin, chief editor of the nationalistic Communist Party tabloid Global Times, said her writings should be tolerated as a dash of color on the tapestry of stories documenting China’s battle against the coronavirus.

“When Wuhan faced its greatest difficulties, the ‘Fang Fang Diary’ prodded at the sore spot of our collective psyche,” Mr. Hu wrote on Weibo.


Ms. Wang alternated between invective and persuasion when dealing with her critics.

In response to an anonymous essay, purportedly penned by a 16-year-old, that suggested Ms. Wang was being ungrateful for the government’s epidemic response, she responded by describing how she overcame radical ideas that she was force-fed during the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution.

“You and your companions will have days like this in the future, in which you struggle against yourself to cleanse the trash and toxins that were poured into your teenaged minds,” she wrote.

In her final entry, she likened her “extreme leftist” critics to a coronavirus that is infecting and damaging Chinese society, while thanking her millions of readers for their encouragement.

“During these days, I’ve never felt alone,” she wrote to her 4.2 million Weibo followers, concluding with a quote from the Bible: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-wuhan-writer-rages-against-chinas-communist-machine-and-becomes-an-online-star-11585733403