A Chinese novelist who wrote a web-based diary detailing the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan has been censored by authorities and is a virtual prisoner in her home, the Sunday Times in London told the Sunday Times.
Fang Fang, 67, said she felt “a bit depressed” after pressure from Chinese authorities to ban her from working.
Within the early days of the 2020 pandemic, Fang’s virus diary from ground zero of the COVID outbreak provided first-hand insight into town that first faced major lockdowns.
Her posts on Weibo – China’s equivalent of Twitter – chronicled her struggles with living alone along with her dog, in addition to the dark side of China’s bureaucracy. They were read by tens of thousands and thousands of Chinese who looked beyond the official positions of the Communist Party, which initially downplayed the hazards of the virus.
Although she has faced a wave of criticism from the authorities in the past, she is now a virtual recluse and her books are banned, she said. Fang is the stage name of Wang Fang, who has lived in Wuhan since early childhood.
“I’m not allowed to participate in any social activities, I’m not allowed to publish any essays, publish any recent works of mine or reprint my old works,” she said in interview with the Sunday Times in London this week. “For a skilled author like me, that is the best punishment they might inflict.”
![A medical worker takes a swab from a resident for nucleic acid testing in Wuhan, China, December 10, 2022.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/wuhan-china-covid-01.jpg?w=1024)
![Workers move the body of a COVID-19 victim at a hospital in Wuhan, China, February 16, 2020.](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2022/12/wuhan-china-covid-03.jpg?w=1024)
In an email interview, Fang called the federal government’s treatment of her a form of “cold violence.”
“All these repercussions I’m facing are just because I recorded my experiences through the Wuhan lockdown and published a book called The Wuhan Diary,” she said. “I even have not broken a single law or a single rule. The entire thing is amazingly bizarre and completely unimaginable.”
After widespread protests earlier this month, the Chinese government was forced to backtrack on its zero-COVID policy.
Fang said she began writing her every day chronicles on the urging of the editor of a Chinese literary magazine. “It gave me the impetus to record things, I began posting a record of what was occurring,” she said. “The Journal appeared to comfort many readers.”
Fang received quite a few death threats, the number of which increased when Michael Berry, director of the Center for Chinese Studies on the University of California, began translating her posts into English under the title “Wuhan Journal: Dispatches from a Quarantined City.”
Now her phone is tapped and she or he is watched when she leaves the home, Fang told the London Times.