Introduction

The central Chinese city of Wuhan was the initial epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic and the first city to experience lockdown. The 11 million residents of Wuhan were locked down for 76 consecutive days, beginning in late January 2020. Fang Fang, a well-known Chinese writer as well as a resident of the city, published her personal accounts of the lockdown experience in the form of diaries on Weibo and WeChat, two of the most popular Chinese social media platforms. At the beginning, the diaries were well-received by Chinese netizens because of their bold critique of social injustice, corruption, abuse of power, and other sensitive issues in China that deterred the efficient government response to the pandemic. However, soon after the diaries were translated into English and German and published with a fast-track process overseas, Chinese public attitudes towards the diaries drastically swung against it. Many initial supporters turned to express their concerns and suspicions of the publication's intention. The prevailing opinion was that the writing sabotaged China's efforts to fight the pandemic and fed into conspiracy theories and wider anti-China political sentiment. The author was criticized as an opportunist and traitor who capitalized on the health crisis to enhance her own credentials. In Chinese social media, a polarized reception of the diaries emerged.

This chapter explores how the diaries have provided a rare discursive site for the Chinese public to engage in political deliberations and ideological debate about democratic liberalism and populist patriotism which co-exist in contemporary China. Empirical data include some key commentary articles about the diaries from both sides of arguments that circulated on WeChat and the responses these articles attracted. The chapter also explores some of the lived experiences during lockdown, as described in Fang Fang's diaries.

About the diaries

Even before the diaries caught the public's attention, Fang Fang was a respected novelist of realist fiction and was well known in Chinese literary circles since the 1980s. Her writing sympathetically portrays difficult experiences of ordinary people in China. From January 25 to March 24, 2020, Fang Fang posted 60 diaries on both Weibo and WeChat, written in colloquial language. Even though these original posts were constantly censored, many Chinese netizens helped to repost and circulate them on various social media platforms. This is why these diaries survived intact from Chinese censorship restrictions.