Fang Fang began her daily online 'Wuhan Diary,' documenting life inside the locked-down city during the COVID-19 outbreak.
On January 25, 2020, just days after the city of Wuhan was placed under an unprecedented lockdown to contain the emerging COVID-19 outbreak, novelist Fang Fang began publishing daily journal entries on Chinese social media platforms, later compiled into what became known internationally as Wuhan Diary.
Writing from inside the sealed-off city, Fang Fang offered an unfiltered, first-person account of the fear, confusion, loss, and resilience experienced by residents, at a time when official information was tightly controlled and often contradictory.
Her diary entries were read by tens of millions within China before being censored, and the collected work was later translated into English and other languages, making her one of the few individual chroniclers of the pandemic's ground-zero experience to reach a global audience.
The diary sparked intense controversy: hailed by many as an act of courageous truth-telling and criticized by nationalist commentators who accused her of providing ammunition to foreign critics of China. This episode cemented Fang Fang's role as a symbol of independent witness-bearing literature in the face of state censorship, drawing comparisons to other dissident-adjacent literary figures in authoritarian contexts.