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.”
"Social distancing a cruel joke in Himalayan cities "In Delhi, First Came the Pogroms. Then Came Coronavirus. "...Is Modi’s India Safe for Muslims?"" "
New Delhi’s lockdown has stalled the spread of the pandemic but a lack of planning has led to hunger, uncertainty, and panic.
By Kapil Komireddi | April 10, 2020, 6:58 PM
People in need stand in queue as volunteers distribute free food packets in Guwahati, India, during a government-imposed nationwide lockdown against the spread of the coronavirus on April 10. Biju Boro/AFP/Getty Images
The largest lockdown in history arrived with a four-hour notice. At 8 p.m. on March 24, Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, appeared on television for the second time in a week to announce that starting at midnight the entire country was going to be effectively curfewed to slow the spread of COVID-19. A land as populous and tightly peopled as India can become a feast for a disease that thrives on human proximity. Modi’s decision was necessitated by mounting casualties in countries with health care vastly superior to India’s and proliferating warnings of impending calamity by experts at home.
His decisiveness appears to have yielded some success: As of April 10, there were 6,039 active cases .. https://www.mohfw.gov.in/ .. of COVID-19 and 206 fatalities. (Although since there is no mass testing—fewer than 43,000 samples were tested .. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/42788-samples-tested-for-covid-19-in-india-so-far-icmr/videoshow/74920242.cms .. by the end of March—and because the symptoms of the disease are not often apparent, there may be many more unreported cases.) This success, however, is braided together with a great deal of misery that could, with some preparation, have been mitigated—if not averted altogether. The sudden exodus of millions of Indians eking out an existence in the cities to distant villages across India bespeaks the malign incompetence of a prime minister who, despite being in command of enormous resources, squandered crucial weeks.
- Modi’s response was mystifyingly relaxed even as the perils of delaying action were becoming apparent in the tragic experiences of other countries. -
Modi’s response was mystifyingly relaxed even as the perils of delaying action were becoming apparent in the tragic experiences of other countries. In the last week of February, he hosted a state visit for U.S. President Donald Trump. Its wasteful extravagance .. https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/ahmedabad-joint-rally-with-trump-will-be-historic-says-modi/article30897010.ece .. was worthy of the Kims of North Korea: Dozens of families living in shanties were served eviction notices and a wall was hastily erected to conceal them from presidential view. In March, Modi devoted his energies to toppling .. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/madhya-pradesh-govt-crisis-floor-test-kamal-nath-congress-bjp-1657768-2020-03-20 .. the government of Madhya Pradesh, the central Indian state governed by the opposition Indian National Congress party. Because the prime minister does not take questions from the press—he has not held a single real press conference in his six years as prime minister—it is impossible for those outside his impenetrable circle of confidants to ascertain his thinking. When it was announced finally that Modi was going to address the nation at 8 p.m. on March 19, panic swept through a country that was still recovering from the prime minister’s previous big 8 p.m. speech—in 2016—when he abolished 86 percent of all currency notes in circulation, plunging the country into chaos and precipitating the worst unemployment crisis in decades.
This time, however, Modi was soberer. He asked Indians to observe a “people’s curfew” during the day on Sunday, March 22, and applaud those working in front-line services—doctors, nurses, security personnel—in the evening. Most Indians obeyed his request and remained indoors. In the evening, however, many poured into the streets to celebrate.There were fireworks and festivities in some cities. Celebrities with large fan bases applauded .. https://www.dnaindia.com/bollywood/report-video-sonu-nigam-comes-out-in-support-of-pm-modi-s-janta-curfew-requests-shaheen-bagh-protestors-to-take-break-2817974 .. Modi’s “masterstroke” and spread the myth that the virus was going to be vaporized by the “reverberations .. https://twitter.com/free_thinker/status/1241020222208765952 ” of mass clapping. In 2014, the year Modi first entered office, India had placed a satellite in Mars’ orbit. The existence now of a market for the risibly anti-scientific piffle peddled by Modi’s admirers speaks to the depressing intellectual decline of the country. The curfew culminated in a farce. Still, given the unprecedented nature of the crisis, it was possible to give the benefit of the doubt to Modi: He was perhaps taking stock, buying time, and utilizing that time to mobilise India.
- All of India’s entrenched inequities—of caste, of wealth, of religion— have been on vivid display since the lockdown was announced. -
What passed for the emergency aid package was for the most part a rescheduling of preexisting cash and food grant arrangements to poorer citizens. The union government in New Delhi will pay only a small share of the expense; much of the money will come from state governments. Left out altogether from its purview are the estimated 45 million migrant workers: the men and women who serve the needs of first-world India’s inhabitants as chauffeurs, servants, cleaners, cooks, and construction hands. This oversight may have been the result of carelessness rather than callousness. But that distinction means nothing to the millions of Indians who find themselves abandoned by the state and left to starve. All of India’s entrenched inequities—of caste, of wealth, of religion—have been on vivid display since the lockdown was announced. The chief justice of India, petitioned by activists urging him to direct the government to pay the wages of stranded migrants, wondered .. https://twitter.com/barandbench/status/1247401498893357056 .. why they needed wages when they were being fed. The lack of thought has led to chaos .. https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/south-asia/supply-chaos-and-fears-of-food-shortages-in-india-amid-coronavirus-lockdown .. and severe shortages. Trucks have piled up on the roads. Even the supply chain of medicines .. https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2020-03-25/india-shutdown-hits-medical-supply-deliveries-key-in-virus-fight .. has been disrupted.
Contrast the feeble planning that preceded the enforced isolation of 1.3 billion people with the attention that went into burnishing the cult of Modi once the lockdown came into effect. Even though a disaster relief scheme to collect donations from the public has existed for decades, the prime minister created an opaque new charitable trust—christened the Prime Minister’s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund to create the abbreviation “PM-CARES”—on March 28 and began soliciting contributions for it. Emergency supplies have been glazed with Modi’s face. And the prime minister’s office proceeded to produce a series of slick short films in dozens of languages—including Italian, Russian, and Mandarin—in which a slim, animated avatar of Modi is shown performing yogic calisthenics. Staff at foreign embassies in New Delhi have been invited .. https://theprint.in/diplomacy/govt-prescribes-yoga-with-modi-for-foreign-envoys-battling-stress-of-covid-19-lockdown/392117/ .. to relieve stress by doing “Yoga with Modi.” This isn’t the first time Modi has deployed crude propaganda in a moment of mass panic. In 2013, when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, his office publicized the “rescue and relief operation” supervised personally by Modi to evacuate 15,000 pilgrims stranded in the foothills of the Himalayas. The Times of India eulogized Modi as India’s “Rambo” and praised his “trademark style of micro-management.” The entire story was a fabrication .. https://www.sify.com/news/rambo-modi-story-a-hoax-times-of-india-clarifies-news-national-nhpnFNacbjesi.html .
The coronavirus has struck India at a time when social cohesion is at its weakest in decades. The reservoir of inner strength societies draw from in times of crisis were depleted in India on surviving the crises engineered gratuitously by Modi over the past six years. India’s minorities, especially its Muslim community, have every reason to look askance at a sectarian establishment that has sought to portray them as a fifth column and pushed legislation they fear could render them stateless. The civic conditions necessary to mount a public-spirited campaign have been shredded by the exclusionary policies pursued by Modi’s Hindu-first Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
- The coronavirus has struck India at a time when social cohesion is at its weakest in decades. -
The tragedy unfolding in India is inseparable from the pulverization of democratic norms under Modi. The opposition Congress party rang the alarm bells on COVID-19 as early as February. Its former leader, Rahul Gandhi, spent weeks warning .. https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/modi-govt-not-taking-coronavirus-threat-seriously-says-rahul-gandhi-1645753-2020-02-12 .. the prime minister of the impending devastation. But Modi operates not as an elected leader accountable to people but as a potentate; his thinking is always shrouded in secrecy, and his disdain for information that might contradict him is apparent from his methodical subversion of institutions—from independent media to the judiciary—that might serve as a check on his power. Parliament, the elected sovereign of India, no longer debates ideas and policies. It exists as a forum for the promulgation of the prime minister’s vision. Congress leaders, unsurprisingly, were not granted an audience. But now that they have been vindicated, the BJP has begun vilifying them for apparently “playing petty politics.”
Reproval of national leadership can seem inappropriate in a pandemic that has ravaged hundreds of countries. Modi is being tested as none of his predecessors was, and the natural impulse is to rally behind him. Yet it would be a dereliction of citizenly duty to sidestep discomfiting realities. And the most blinding reality is this: Modi is uniquely unsuited to this moment. His presence in India’s highest political office has, if anything, worsened the country’s predicament. India, in desperate need of expert disaster management, is paying the cost of electing a self-enamored image manager.
Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India.
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