Number 55: China 1986

Dispatches from a quarantined city: Waiting for Godot 

On January 23rd, 2020, the chinese government reacted to the outbreak of COVID-19 with a total lock-down of the province of Hebei and in particular its capital, Wuhan, where the virus had originally first appeared in the seafood market. In total 57 million people were affected in Hebei, and 11 million in Wuhan. To completely lock away a city of that size was a measure unprecedented in history. The lock-down of Wuhan would last for 76 days. 

Socialist statue at the car ramp to the Yangtse bridge in Nanjing

“the true test of a country’s level of civility has nothing to do with building the tallest skyscraper or driving the fastest car, nor does it matter how advanced your weapons system is or how powerful your military might be; it is also not about how advanced your technology is or even your artistic achievements, and it is especially not related to how lavish your official government meetings are or how splendid your firework displays are, or even how many rich Chinese tourists you have buying up different parts of the world. There is only one true test, and that is how you treat the weakest and most vulnerable members of your society.” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

Party poster in the city center of Chengdu

After the lock-down started, Fang Fang, a renowned 65 year old writer and long time resident of Wuhan started to write daily posts which she published on social media, a diary which would eventually have 60 entries and later was translated into English by Michael Berry and published in book-form under the titel “Wuhan diaries: Dispatches from a quaratined city“. 

„We have closed our doors so that everybody can continue with their lives“ (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

Market hall in Leshan and sale of meat in the streets 

During the 76 days Fang Fang basically stayed in her apartment with her old dog. The first important topic of the diary deals with the consequences of the isolation. How to get supplies while avoiding to go outside. Shops, many supermarkets and even some pharmacies were closed or were out of necessities like face masks. While the masks were mandatory they were not available. Online shopping only gradually became possible. Donations started to come in from other parts of China which were less affected. Neighbourhood comities started to take care of orders and distribution. After people were closed up in their apartments some had to wait until the middle of the night for their turn to pick up their groceries in the courtyard or lift them up to their balcony in baskets. Fang’s dog started to stink and the apartment became messier by the day. 

“During times of stability, our lives are ordinary and routine, and the peace and quiet of the monotonous everyday gradually conceals the great kindness and the horrific evil that humans are capable of.” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

In the streets of Leshan

In the beginning the hospitals and their staff in Wuhan were overwhelmed by the outbreak. People were waiting in long queues at the hospital entrance to be admitted. Some died in the waiting queue or in the hospital after being admitted because there were no doctors to attend them. Hospital staff turned sick and died. The diary gives an insight in the timeline how the epidemic was managed. After the city had been closed auxiliary hospitals were constructed quickly. Since the virus did not get out of control outside Hebei province it was possible to call medical staff from other provinces to assist the overworked staff in Hebei and Wuhan. 

Dumpling kitchen 

“This outbreak has exposed so many different things. It has exposed the rudimentary level of so many Chinese officials, and it has exposed the diseases running rampant through the very fabric of our society. These are diseases that are much more evil and tenacious than the novel coronavirus. Moreover, there is no cure in sight. That is because there are no doctors willing to treat this disease.” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

Street kitchen

Fang Fang never raises any doubts that the measures in their full extent and hardness were justified. However, her doubts increase with every diary entry why the administration was so slow in reacting to the outbreak. Why did it take 20 days until the government reacted? How could they organise a dinner for 40.000 party members without taking any precautions? The management of Wuhan central hospital forbade the spread of information about the seriousness of the outbreak and the situation in the hospital. Staff in the hospital were insufficiently protected. In consequence many specialists, nurses and managers got ill and eventually died. The property of the diseased was disposed of without giving their relatives a chance of retrieving items like mobile phones. Fang Fang does not criticize the measures when they were eventually taken, but the stubbornness of officials who tried to play down and ignore the outbreak initially and then reacted with a severity which did not take into account individual cases of hardship. 

“It’s controllable and preventable” 

“It’s not contagious between people” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary, citing officials after the outbreak of the virus) 

Reading stall in the street

The diary entries become more and more outspoken. This provoked the censorship. Her Weibo account was blocked. However, her posts on WeChat were forwarded faster than the reaction of censors. Some posts were read 20 million times. The posts also reached the outside world, and Michael Berry, professor at the department of Asian languages and Culture, started to translate them into english for publication in a book. This sparked a flood of mails from what Fang Fang calls the left wing boneheads of the chinese administration. But she is not silenced but fights back. She argues that her posts are immortalized by these reactions. They have been read and their content is spread by the boneheads themselves. And she gets help from officials in Beijing. Soon some of the incompetent bureaucrats in Wuhan and Hebei are dismissed. But others stay and they do not flinch. 

“Concealment is the brother of censorship” 

“Nobody ever tells you what rules you have broken to be censored” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

“The core of my philosophy boils down to independent thinking“ 

(Zhu Rongji, chinese premier 1998-2003) 

Finally the first positive news starts to come in. Restrictions are lifted, first in the rest of China outside Hebei, than in other towns of Hebei outside Wuhan. But the severe lock-down in Wuhan continues even after the numbers of infections in Wuhan go down. There are sufficient beds in the regular hospitals and the auxiliary hospitals are closed. The helping hands from other provinces are sent back home. As a gratification they are sent on leave to attractive vacation spots in safe parts of China or get lifetime free admission and accommodation to visit the top scenic attractions in the area. “These were the people who saved our lives”. But still the Wuhanese had to wait for the restrictions to be lifted. Many of the poor people living of their daily income from petty jobs were close to starvation. 

Woman sewing in the streets of Leshan

“When you are in the zone you do not always see all the things around you” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

Old man regulating the traffic at an intersection in Leshan

Wuhan is a town on the Yangtze river about halfway between Shanghai and Chongking. With 6300 km from the Tibetean Plateau to the China Sea the Yangtze is the longest river in Asia, the third-longest in the world and the longest in the world to flow entirely within one country. Its drainage basin comprises one-fifth of the land area of China, and is home to nearly one-third of the country's population. Under the tributaries of the Yangtse are the Jinjiang river which passes through the megacity of Chengdu and the Min and Dadu rivers which have their confluence at the town of Leshan. Both are in the province of Sichuan. I will recite an extract from the part of my diary about Leshan which I think gives a good impression about the life in china 35 years ago. 

“The place Wuhan has always been referred to as “river town” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

Sampans on the Min river in Leshan

The town of Leshan is famous for what supposedly is the world’s biggest Buddha statue. The statue of 73 m of height was hacked out of the sandstone in the 8th century and guards the confluence of the rivers in the hope it would calm the waters. Indeed, when we arrive, the floods are calm. As is the misty and smoky air above the town, which will not leave us for the rest of our stay in Sichuan. You can smell the air pollution. We read in China daily that even the government is finally aware that that is a problem. They announce that they want to get rid of the 17 yellow dragons around Shanghai…. The 17 big factory chimneys emitting a cloud of brown-yellow smoke. 

“Don‘t leave the world in the hands of the bastards“ (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

Different types of Sampans

We arrive on a bus from the foot of Emei Shan, which is close (corona story number 22). The schedule announced a bus ride of 1.5 h, but the driver, whom we christened “wang the terrible”, managed to do it in an hour. No mercy for the weak. In wavy lines he curves around the obstacles on the road without the slightest reduction of speed. He only briefly stops when a cyclist is hit. Too many of them anyway. The road under construction is terrible and it must even be worse for a cyclist. Road construction means they first deposit a layer of stones the size of a fist on the road and wait until traffic has evenly distributed them. Next is a layer of pebbles witch is distributed in a similar way, then sand and finally the tarmac. Everything is done by hand, there are no machines except of the dangerous looking three wheeled tractors powered by an unsecured transmission belt which can jump into the drivers face any moment. Sometimes these tractors are so overloaded that the only axle breaks. 

Sampan being pulled upriver in Leshan

Leshan is a small town for chinese standards. Streets lined with leafless trees. Mostly buildings with one wooden upper floor. Clothes hang in the trees to dry. Regardless the chill old people sit in bamboo chairs in front of their houses. Most of the little businesses operate on the street in open air. Dumplings are fried or cooked, bicycles repaired. Fried ducks and pig legs hang in the windows or trees. Somebody sells rat poison. Pelts lie on the table, promoting the effectiveness of the poison? In a desolate ruin we meet a painter with a crippled hand. He runs a calligraphy workshop. We buy paintings, brushes and ink pots. People wave at us, smile and point us out to their children. At the street corners old men with blue outfit regulate the traffic which basically is limited to cyclists and pedestrians and shout at everybody though megaphones who does not observe the unknown rules. 

Customers in the teagarden along the river in Leshan

“The head of our thinking has to rest on our own shoulders” (Yang Huang, chinese writer) 

Cook of the teagarden washing her vegetables in the foamy flood of the Min river in Leshan

There is a teagarden above the river. Once we have bought a cup of tea the waitress keeps coming to pour fresh boiling water on the leaves. A pleasant place to watch the life on the river. Next to the bank the greenish brown flood carries a thick layer of foam from a factory upstream. The cook of the teagarden washes her spring onions in the foam. We resist the temptation to order lunch and stay with the tea. We read that fish is getting scarce in the Yangtse because of pollution and overfishing. On the river primitive looking sampans. Those without engines have to be pulled upriver against a considerable current along a kind of dam. Otherwise they are poled upstream. The shippers live under a bamboo cover on the boat. Loading is done with baskets carried over the shoulder on a long pole. 

“Humans are quite tough after all” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

The big Buddha of Leshan

The Buddha across the river can be reached by ferry. A sampan serves as docking pier. A family lives in a wooden hutch on the prow of the sampan. We see four beds and a cooking spot. That is all they have. The area on the other side of the river is overrun by noisy chinese tourists taking loads of pictures. Some are Italian. Besides the giant buddha there are some pagodas and temples. I wonder how this has developed almost 40 years later. There aren’t hardly any tourists in the town proper. 

The foot of the Buddha

In the section about Leshan in my diary of the time I reflect about the live of the ordinary, working class Chinese. There is little pleasure and distraction. No vacation. It is not surprising that people are so curious when they see a foreign tourist. It is one of the few distractions. Few people have any property to speak of. In the few shops which have got them, televisions and stereo sets are surrounded by big crowds. Although all the hotel rooms have a television, few people seem to be able to afford one. Instead they flock to the public reading stands in the streets, sit down and read one of the paperbacks on display. People seem to love reading and even do so while walking in the streets. The teagardens are a recent development and also the drinking hall with chequered plastic table cloths and plastic flowers on the tables, where we sit and have a disgusting milky sweet lukewarm drink. Big loudspeakers connected to a measly cassette deck produce a terrible, distorted sound. On the walls posters promoting cognac with, unthinkable for the prudish chinese society of the time, scantily clad women. Obviously this place is too modern for a little town like Leshan. The locals have a short look inside, then carry on. Or they know how bad the drinks are. 

“We do not want to cause trouble, we want to earn a living” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

Photo masks and a photographer taking pictures with the giant Buddha in the background

But the number of “luxury” items for sale is increasing. There are sweets, cookies, cakes, tee and waffles. The consumption increases. The newspaper announces a 38% increase in average income for the next 5 year plan. 

Street cafe in Leshan

And there is the opulent food. At daytime we frequently stop at one of the foodstalls in the streets to have dumplings, which are especially delicious in Leshan. For dinner we meet a scottish couple working at the british school in Beijing. They know how to order the specialities. Fish, eel with spring onions, chicken with mushrooms and spicy pork with spring onions, vegetable and peanuts. Everything is flavoured with a spice called Mali, new to us. The warm dishes come with sides of “mali-ed” peanuts, seasoned cold slices of beef and a kind of cider which very much tastes like more. 

In the streets of Leshan

To get back to the hotel we have to survive in the sparsely lit streets. The ubiquitous cyclists have no lights. In fact, light on cars was forbidden until recently in china inside cities to avoid to blind the cyclists. The inside of buses is unlit. 

“The prevalent and most fundamental mission of a writer is to vanquish falsehoods, bear testimony to the truth of history and restore dignity to mankind” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

The big bridge across the Yangtse in Nanjing, railway below, road above 

On its way to Shanghai the Yangtse passes the town of Nanjing. The river always was a divide between the northern and southern parts of China. For a long time there were no bridges across the floods of the Yangtse between the town of Yibin in Sichuan and the mouth at Shanghai, a distance of almost 2000 km. Ferries were needed to cross. Eventually, in 1955-1957, with Soviet help, the first bridge across the Yangtse was built in Wuhan and a second in Chongking in 1959. The first, very similar road-rail, bridge over the lower reaches of the river was finished in Nanjing in 1971. The Russians had taken the plans with them after the rift with the Chinese over the doctrinal interpretation of Marxism-Leninism. The railway part of the bridge is 6772 m long. It finally closed the gap between of China’s most important railway between Shanghai and Beijing. Since the bridge was finished without Soviet help it was seen as the first big achievement and success of an independent communist China under Mao Tse-Tung. 

“You need to quarantine the virus, not the people” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary) 

River boats on the Yangtse in Nanjing

The reaction of the Chinese government to the virus was as late as radical. The intention was to get rid of the virus for good, exterminate it. And they did, for the time. Australia and New Zealand followed the chinese approach. This in contrast to most other democratic governments who try to seek a compromise between restrictions, economy and the freedom of the population. After Wuhan reopened on April 8th of 2020, life resumed. The number of reported cases of new infection in china stayed consistently low. While the rest of the world is fighting with a second or third wave, with problems in vaccination campaigns and incredible economic losses due to restrictive measures still ongoing after almost one year, social life and economy in China is thriving. Anybody who has doubts about the usefulness and necessity of restrictive measures should read this diary. Even so Fang Fang never draws any comparison there is absolutely no doubt left that only a consequent and forceful reaction on the outbreak can limit the spread.

“For a strong and acute virus like that nothing short of a complete containment can stop the spread” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary)

Laundry drying on a Sampan

A lot of questions similar to those asked by Fang Fang have to be raised against western administration. Why did they not raise earlier and heavier restrictions even so it was entirely clear from the chinese experiences that was going on​? Why can people still travel freely to and from places like South Africa, Brazil or inside Europe and there are few precautions like a lock-up quarantine in a hotel after return? Why did or even does it take such a long time to make masks compulsory? Why can people just leave quarantine without being checked or fined? In Wuhan everybody, even those with suspected infections were put into forced, guarded isolation. The flaw of the western system is that virus management is more a topic for the profiling of ambitious politicians than the actual taking of the measures which are really needed. The vaccination process will take many years. The shaky reaction of the western society already has and will cause more mutations which eventually will be resistant against the vaccination. It also raises more and more resistance the longer the restrictive measures last. The way how they deal with this crises is bound to lead to the creation of a permanent problem.

While huge amounts of money evaporates in economic losses it could better have been spent in immediate investments in a health care that is suitable to counter a virus attack. What China has done by resorting to resources from other parts of the country the western societies should do by training new staff, buying equipment and building hospitals. Why many of these countries maintain a useless military costing many billions annually, nobody ever has considered a standing emergency health force.

“The lives of 9 million people is more important than some privacy” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary)

Food stalls under the ramp to the bridge in Nanjing

One year after the first outbreak in Germany there is no sign for an end of the epidemic in the western world. This raises a big question mark about the efficiency of the measures taken in the countries of the democratic societies. Maybe even about the ability of the “free world” to cope with great challenges. There is an inherent flaw in the concept of democracy when the government representing the people cannot or is unwilling to take measures good for their voters or part of the voters do not obey the necessary instructions given by the government. Democracy is doomed when freedom, its most characteristic feature, leads to disobedience and destruction, which in a vicious circle will lead to more restrictions of freedom.

“Family planning is of great importance for a socialist country with chinese characteristics” Commercial in the streets of Leshan 

Poster promoting the one child family in Chengdu

However, even in China still today the threat of another wave of outbreak is not averted. To move between sectors the chinese population has to present a health code. While cities in the western world are plagued by riots in China critical voices are silenced. Not everybody is a prominent writer like Fang Fang. Some people have disappeared and nobody knows their whereabouts.

“The only way we can conquer this virus and free ourselves from its grip is for all members of humankind to work together” (Fang Fang, Wuhan Diary)

Link to the previous post 

https://h-s-coronastories.blogspot.com/2021/01/number-54-guatemala-1994.html 

Sources 

Fang Fang, Corona diary, Harper Audio, 2020 

Trouw, Wuhan kent geen slachtoffers, alleen maar overwinnaars, Trouw, 23.1.2021 

NOS online, 13.1.2021, 22.1.2021