January 23, 2021 is approaching, exactly one year after the city of Wuhan was closed due to the New Crown Epidemic. While there are tens of thousands of posts on Chinese social media Weibo and WeChat mourning and praising Dr. Li Wenliang, the “whistle blower,” another person who spoke out about the epidemic has received a very different treatment.
Fang Fang, a Writer from Wuhan, China, was controversial last year for writing Wuhan Diary. A year later, the criticism and abuse directed at her continues to pile up. Fang Fang had published a Weibo post on the last day of 2020, reiterating the point she made in the last article of her Wuhan Diary: the extreme left is a scourge-like presence in China. The status of the tweet received more than 5,000 retweets, most of which were critical. Many netizens called her a “party hater,” a “traitor,” and a “Western lapdog,” and others called on the Commission for Discipline Inspection to conduct an “incommunicado censorship” on her. The “isolation censorship”.
Across the ocean, UCLA professor Bai Ruiwen has also been affected. Bai Ruiwen is a leading American translator of contemporary Chinese literature and cultural researcher who has translated works by contemporary writers such as Wang Anyi and Yu Hua, and whose books include studies of contemporary Chinese film directors such as Jia Zhangke and Hou Hsiao-hsien. His translation of Wuhan Diary was published in the United States last year, when it was met with hostile attacks on social media.
Now, those angry readers are taking the opportunity of Wuhan’s first anniversary of the city’s closure to make a comeback. Bai Ruiwen told Voice of America, “There are all kinds of people, the fifty-centers, the pinkos, and those who are just out of patriotism. They saw the media reports and didn’t even bother to read the diary itself, so they had this judgment that I was a spy, that I was CIA. There were also some people who had a lot of power, like some big-name university professors, so there were all kinds of people, and they interacted with each other.”
Soon after the release of the English-language edition of The Wuhan Diaries, major Western media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian and The Financial Times, published reviews of the book or ran stories about it. The book has been or will be published in more than 20 countries, and in Germany it was once ranked in the top ten of the bestseller list.
The New York Times reviewed, “The book’s sharpest criticism is that Fang calls for accountability of government leaders who downplayed the danger of the virus and wasted three weeks allowing it to spread massively around the world. She may have lived a Life of silence during the city’s closure, but her writing is bold.”
Fang’s repeated calls for an accountable government drew a strong negative response from the Chinese government and some members of the public. Among their attacks on Fang Fang and Bai Ruiwen, the most common was questioning their failure to criticize Western countries and instead targeting only China.
In an interview with the Voice of America, Wuhan resident Chang (a pseudonym), 57, began by pointing out the disadvantages of the Wuhan government and the central government in fighting the epidemic, saying, “I hope the government will improve its bureaucratic mechanisms and not withhold reports and lies.”
But once Fang, who also criticized the government, was mentioned, Chang showed his dissatisfaction: “Are Western countries doing a good job? Why doesn’t she go and write about the New York or London diaries?”
Bai Ruiwen was similarly challenged as a translator. He said, “It’s been almost a year, and many people on Weibo still send me messages almost every day, saying when will you write your Los Angeles diary and hurry up with the American diary. But this has absolutely nothing to do with Fang Fang’s diary. Fang Fang was recording the situation at that Time. They treat Fang Fang as part of the anti-Chinese forces, and they also classify me as an anti-Chinese element. Fang Fang’s diary is not anti-Chinese; she gives credit to the Chinese government for the good things they do; she also speaks out when they make small mistakes.”
Xia Ming, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, believes that it is perfectly normal for Fang to be in Wuhan and to document the epidemic there, and that it is not unreported in the Western media, which are documenting the epidemic in the West. He said, “The American media are writing New York diaries and American diaries every day, and that’s the difference with China. China doesn’t allow local journalists to write local diaries.”
But like Chang, angry readers believe the diaries target China and can put it at a disadvantage in international politics. Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the Global Times, said the diary “will definitely be captured in international politics” and that “the Chinese people, including those who supported Fang, will pay for Fang’s fame in the West with that much more loss of interest on our part.”
Bai believes that the so-called “smear campaign against China” is an attempt by the authorities to find a scapegoat. He said, “The fact that she raised the issue of accountability may have upset some people, and they took such a step to divert attention and turn Fang Fang into a target of criticism, so there was a very big shift in the whole discourse. From the beginning of April when millions of people were Fang’s fans, all of a sudden the media suddenly portrayed her as the antagonist. This is a quick change. But I encourage all readers to go back to the original text, the diary is not a criticism of China. I’ve always treated it as Fang Fang’s love letter to Wuhan, which is full of concern for the city, for her friends and neighbors.”
Hu Xijin’s statement represents, or rather guides, the attitudes of some Chinese when he says, “The U.S. has launched a fierce attack on China’s resistance to the epidemic when it is so rotten.” Likewise, many Chinese have fallen into the trap of “so what” doctrine. While more or less acknowledging the problems with the Chinese system, they also question the Western system and believe that intellectuals such as Fang Fang are too one-sided in their criticism of the Chinese government.
Ria (a pseudonym), who studied and worked in the United States for six years, was originally a strong supporter of Fang, but has changed her mind in the wake of the global epidemic. Speaking to Voice of America, Ria said, “[Are] Western countries more transparent? Maybe, but the results are just as bad. For the U.S., instead of ridiculing attacks on others, it’s better to focus on solving problems and preventing similar phenomena in the future. “
Haiting (a pseudonym), who grew up in Wuhan, was more concerned about the impact of the English version of “Wuhan Diary,” saying, “I could understand Fang’s diary at first, but why an English version? Every country has its own problems, and the U.S. wouldn’t have had 370,000 deaths if it had done a good job. If the U.S. had done a good job, the death toll would not have been 370,000.
Ziba (a pseudonym), who has lived and studied in Wuhan for four years, is even more pointed, saying she believes Fang Fang’s diary will “never turn Wuhan upside down”. She said, “In the future, if this book is published in large numbers and circulated forever, all Wuhan people will be put on a virus hat that cannot be removed; all Asian faces in the West will be discriminated against, insulted and damaged; the U.S. empire’s military will have a copy in hand, and even pre-war mobilization will be saved, and the ethical basis for beating you will already be deeply rooted in people’s minds.”
Noting that much of the controversy over the diary was imposed, Bai Ruiwen said, “It became a hot topic in U.S.-China relations, for example. But the book itself has nothing to do with U.S.-China relations; Fang basically never mentioned the United States, but the book was wrapped up in it. I think this is very unnatural. The book has nothing to do with political issues, but it has been used as a scapegoat by some people with political purposes. Including the so-called ‘passing the knife to the Americans’ is just ridiculous. The book invites too many conspiracy theories. For example, I have devoted my life to writing books about China, teaching Chinese Culture, and translating Chinese works, so why would I want to harm China? We wanted to do something positive and meaningful. To this day I believe that it is those who attack the diary who are trying to harm China, and they are the problem. If they think that issuing death threats to a translator will help China and its image, the reality in their eyes is distorted”
In addition to the overly politicized interpretation, what baffles Bai Ruiwen even more is the resentment of the Chinese government and some of its people toward dissent. He said, “If a government a country is really strong, it should be confident and inclusive. This inclusiveness is important. As Fang Fang himself has said, should the Communist Party fall because of a diary? Any government should have this inclusiveness, should allow different perspectives, different discourses, different individuals to express their views on things.”
Professor Sharmin believes that freedom of expression is particularly important in the context of the global pandemic. He said, “In the current global context of a new crown epidemic, every free flow of valuable information is life-saving. In the current situation, the Chinese government is faced with a virus it does not fully understand and has to go and act as a supreme judge to decide what can and cannot be sent, what things can and cannot be said, then the Chinese Communist Party is using new mistakes to cover up its old mistakes of dereliction of duty, which is what they always do”
On Weibo, a netizen named “Twilight in the Gap”, one of the few people who supported Fang Fang, commented under Fang Fang’s New Year’s thoughts, “Fang Fang speaks for the people at the bottom, criticizing the government’s shortcomings in responding to the epidemic, and promoting the government’s improvement of epidemic prevention measures! Yet those ordinary people at the bottom are not allowed to criticize the government on the grounds of Family sentiment, as if the government is run by them.”
But his statement was quickly drowned out by opposing voices, with netizen “Happy Shunfa” responding: “What parent is not at fault? Not to mention such a large family! The key is to see if he loves you! The same is true for the government.”
Bai Ruiwen said that the controversy over Fang’s diary is not just about the epidemic, but also about the fierce differences in Chinese people’s views on civil society. But the controversy has positive implications and can prompt people to think. Fang Fang’s diary, he says, “has stirred up a debate about civil society and a discussion among ordinary people about what kind of society they really want, whether it’s a society where ordinary people are free to publish their diaries or a society where they are not allowed to act without representing the interests of the state.”
From crowd praise to death threats, Fang Fang spent a whole year in the limelight of public opinion. Even the more rational people like Ria only recognize Fang as a chronicler. Rhea told Voice of America, “There’s no need to say that the family scandal is not to be told, but there’s no need to raise it to heroic heights either.”
But to Bai Ruiwen, Fang is the hero of his time. He told Voice of America, “So many Chinese intellectuals have the habit of protecting themselves in a clear-cut manner, leaving things alone when they encounter trouble, especially if they speak out and their families will be implicated. But Fang Fang was the complete opposite. She felt that this is what I should do, no matter how great the sacrifice, she still had to do it. I think in contemporary Chinese society, such people are becoming increasingly rare and valuable.”
Wuhan, Hubei province, is hosting a three-month-long special exhibition on the new crown, featuring more than 1,100 photos, 1,000 physical exhibits, 45 videos and 33 large-scale scenes, which have been covered by the Chinese official media Xinhua News Agency, CCTV and several local Hubei media.
The official Chinese funded documentary “Wuhan Day and Night” was also screened on January 22, and neither Fang Fang nor Zhang Zhan, the citizen journalist sentenced for documenting the Wuhan outbreak, were mentioned in these rare official first anniversary events.
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