Viral Diary

Abstract

A more detailed overview of Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary with special attention to how the book “went viral” and gained a massive readership in China of more than 50 million readers. This chapter asks the question: what was it that allowed Fang Fang’s voice to cut through all the noise and become, in the heart of so many readers, the voice of Wuhan? It also places the attacks against the book within a historical context that reaches back to Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art” and the long tradition of political attacks against writers and intellectuals who failed to fall in line with officially endorsed narratives. The author also draws comparisons between Wuhan Diary and Lu Xun’s iconic short story “A Madman’s Diary,” which was published almost exactly a century earlier. The chapter goes on to discuss the intellectual response to the diary from writers like Yan Lianke and Fang Fang’s brave cries for government accountability in the face of early missteps. The author also identifies several key pre-conditions that set the stage for the later campaign against Fang Fang; these include such factors as the robust Chinese readership following Wuhan Diary, the author’s calls for “accountability,” the “potentiality for amplification” (should her massive readership take up and amplify these calls), and a previous campaign that targeted Fang Fang’s 2016 novel Soft Burial.