Wuhan, China as the epicenter and origin of COVID-19, has been locked down by the Chinese government since January 23, 2020. The city holds 11 million people and during the outbreak, about 6 million people were put under quarantine, and approximately 5 million left the city during a holiday break.
Many Wuhan people began keeping diaries during the lockdown. However, negative depictions of daily life in Wuhan are often subjected to censorship on Weibo, the popular social media platform in China. On WeChat, another popular social media platform, the diaries mostly circulate among friends.
However, Ai Xiaoming, an independent filmmaker and feminist scholar, and feminist activist Guo Jing, have shared their diaries on Matters News. Their diaries vividly reflect the emotions among common people during the sudden lockdown.
China’s control over the pandemic has been described as a “victory” or “success” by Chinese authorities and the World Health Organization, but ordinary peoples’ lives under such top-down control and surveillance measures should not be ignored — how people are atomized and reduced into a collective, as Guo Jing described in her diary.
Since December 8, with the index case, Chinese authorities insisted that the epidemic outbreak was under control. By January 20, it admitted to the human-to-human transmission of the virus. Ai and Guo’s diaries express how Wuhan residents were kept in the dark and unprepared when the government proclaimed the lockdown of the city.
Global Voices will publish Ai and Guo’s diaries from Wuhan in a series. The following words were written in the first week of the lockdown between January 23-28, 2020.
