Covid-19: a rare account of the pandemic seen from Wuhan, by the writer Fang Fang

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Close-up on a rare document: the story of the coronavirus pandemic seen from the heart of Wuhan, where it all started. The newspaper of the Chinese writer Fang Fang has just appeared in its English edition, a text in which, far from the official speeches, it delivers a testimony in direct catch with the gravity of the epidemic which struck this city-martyr of the center from China.

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At the height of the pandemic, Wuhan lived under cover for 76 days. The seventh city in China completely stopped, its 9 million inhabitants confined and terrified by an uncontrollable virus, it is this new and unthinkable scenario, this bruised and panicked daily newspaper that Fang Fang tells from the inside, under the form of a journal gathering the 59 notes it published on Chinese networks from January 2020.

Born in 1955, Fang Fang has chaired the Wuhan Writers Association for over 10 years. She had made herself known by her novels in the mid-1980s, but never had any of her texts had such an impact: during the crisis, tens of millions of readers rushed to her writings, as if drawn by these fragments of life let loose in nature.

With simple words, she recounts her experience, the fears of her family, the city that empties and the street sweepers who continue to sweep the streets where no one passes, the recipes of cooking that we share, the songs that we sing to pass the time, small daily races. And then, as the days go by, the story changes. Concern for those close to him and the chronicle of an apocalypse atmosphere stem from very frank words about the failure of the Chinese authorities in the management of the disease.

An open-air prison

It is not a pamphlet, it is not a political platform, it is the opinion of an ordinary citizen who realizes that something is wrong. And as she writes, that "  the Communist Party executives responsible for crisis management have lost the thread  ". She says it without hiding, "  I have the impression that when they can no longer follow the directives of the central government, when the disease goes too fast for them, when you take away their script, there is no one left to drive the boat  . "

Fang Fang describes the overcrowded hospitals in Wuhan, his medical friends who can no longer bear it, the specialists called back in emergency and the services overwhelmed, against the martial declarations of Chinese President Xi Jinping advocating total war against the virus. "  We ran after the disease," she laments, "when we had known so many epidemics in the past. We should have learned from it. We have failed. Why ?  "

This very sincere questioning of a resident in the heart of the cyclone may seem commonplace in the West. In China, on the other hand, it was this carte blanche, this freedom of tone that made the difference and created a space of truth for its readers. There are repetitions in this collection, it could have been shorter and better shot. But from inside Wuhan, which will have taken the form of an open-air prison for more than two months, it has the merit of questioning without bias the actions of a government which lets no criticism pass. By itself, this civic engagement is enough to give dignity and reason for being to the 380 pages of the "Wuhan Journal".

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