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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
As rumours of a strange new illness in Wuhan spread via social media in China, 25-year-old citizen reporter Kcriss decides to travel to the epicentre of the disaster to try to find out what is really going on. He sees an ad for corpse carriers at a funeral home – Male or female, 16-50 years old, unafraid of ghosts - and decides to apply. He quickly realises that the official death figures bear no relation to what is happening in the local crematoria. But the brief moment when he can tell the truth to his followers on social media is soon over: he is discovered, followed and arrested by the security police – all documented live on the internet.
In this startlingly topical documentary novel, Liao Yiwu takes us into the heart of the crisis that unfolded in Wuhan and unpicks the secrecy and cover-up that surrounded the outbreak of the public health emergency that ravaged the world. Where did the virus come from and what happened in Wuhan? Protocols are buried and new lies cement the story of the party's heroic victory - propaganda that poisons people like the virus.
Also available as an audiobook.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
To the Reader
Notes
Prelude
Notes
1 A City Forced to Close
Notes
2 A Viral Prison: Made in France
Notes
3 Who’s Eating the Bats?
Notes
4 Li Wenliang is Gone – The Truth is Dead
Note
5 Daily Life in Isolation
Notes
6 An Asymptomatic Spreader
Note
7 Passing through No-Man’s Land
8 On Two Sides of the Border
Notes
9 The Virus Leaves the Country
Notes
10 Scientists against “Conspiracy Theories”
Notes
11 Unrestricted Warfare
Notes
12 His Imperial Majesty Arrives
Notes
13 An Illegal Border Crosser Goes Home
Notes
14 The Republic of Disappeared People
Notes
Epilogue
Notes
Appendices
How was Wuhan Written?
The Blank-Page Revolution
Poem
1. Rumor-mongering
2. The trial
3. The closed city
4. The hospital
5. Returning home
6. Isolation
7. The getaway
Notes
Addenda
1. Excerpts from a post by Wu Xiaohua, PhD
2. On the highly influential “three musketeers of citizen-media” during the lockdown of Wuhan
3. The most significant political case since the reopening of Wuhan
Notes
The Spirits of the Boundless Departed Have Opened and Closed This Book
Kcriss
Ai Ding
Michael Martin Day
Janice M. Englehart and David W. Novack
Amy Daunis Bernstein
Peter Hans Hoffmann and Brigitte Höhenrieder
Taiwan Yunchen Culture and Liao Zhifeng
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
To the Reader
Prelude
Begin Reading
Epilogue
Appendices
How was Wuhan Written?
The Blank-Page Revolution
Poem
Addenda
The Spirits of the Boundless Departed Have Opened and Closed This Book
End User License Agreement
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WUHAN
A Documentary Novel
Liao Yiwu
Translated by Michael Martin Day
polity
Originally published as 當武漢病毒來臨 Dāng Wǔhàn bìngdú láilín (When the Wuhan Virus Comes) by 允晨文化 Yunchen Wenhua/Asian Culture, Taiwan. Copyright © 廖亦武 (Liao Yiwu) 2020, 2021. All rights reserved by S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6300-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023947106
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
To the Reader
“Wuhan virus” is not a political term, but rather an objective description of the truth: Wuhan is the birthplace of the powerful virus that is harming the world today; or one could say: this virus was first discovered in Wuhan, and “Wuhan virus” is of the same nature as terms such as “Chernobyl nuclear leak,” “Fukushima nuclear disaster,” and “Ebola virus” (after the Ebola River in West Africa). The World Health Organization (WHO) designation of “Coronavirus disease 2019” (abbreviation: COVID-19) is an ambiguous one, a product of compromise. It deliberately avoids naming the origin of the virus, just as the SARS outbreak in China in 2003 also avoided naming the origin of the virus, and as a result most Chinese later forgot that the first SARS patient was discovered in Foshan, Guangdong Province.
For a time, the term “Wuhan pneumonia” was used by the local authorities in Wuhan, but this was later strictly banned by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CCP), which then took advantage of the pandemic to set off a wave of nationalism and xenophobia. The CCP also pushed countries all over the world to follow the WHO and refer to the “Wuhan virus” as “COVID-19,” which will also facilitate the falsification of history in the coming years. (This is what the Communist Party does best.) Maybe, after several years of ideological propaganda, the vast majority of Chinese people will only know that COVID-19 came to China from the United States, and that Wuhan was the first Chinese city to be infected – just as when describing the 1959–62 Great Famine in China, in which nearly forty million people starved to death, the official textbooks declare: “Under the leadership of Chairman Mao and the Communist Party, we defeated the three years of natural disasters caused by Soviet revisionism.” This also corroborates the brainwashing dictum of Oceania in Orwell’s 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”*
Notes
viii
:
“Who controls the past controls the future.”
George Orwell,
Nineteen
Eighty-Four
, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977: 199.
PreludeThe Intruder
On February 26, 2020, twenty-five-year-old Kcriss* wakes up very early. As usual, he wraps himself in armor-like protective clothing, puts on his face mask and goggles, and looks off into the distance, like an astronaut on the moon.
He creeps downstairs, maneuvers into his car, and drives away. Taking a deep breath, he tells himself to be very careful, because today he’ll penetrate Wuhan’s super-sensitive P4 laboratory to attempt to solve the mystery of the Wuhan virus leak.
Kcriss wants to do it, so he’s doing it, regardless of the dangers involved. The city of Wuhan has been sealed off for more than a month. The sun shines along the way, the air is fresh, but there’s no life, nothing – the traffic lights are still working but the traffic police aren’t. After a fast drive, he arrives at Zhengdian Park, Wuhan Institute of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The P4 laboratory is in here and, as expected, it’s become a restricted military area, a large zone sealed as tight as an iron drum. He’s ordered to stop for inspection by two blue-clad figures carrying guns. Fortunately, all his documents are in order and his temperature is normal. Kcriss tells them he’s just passing by, and immediately reverses his car as ordered, not daring to utter the term “P4.”
Kcriss is frustrated, but unwilling to give up, he drives around the periphery of the giant iron drum. He looks around from time to time, pretending to be lost, but actually looking for a way in. No luck. The weather’s excellent, visibility is good, but the area is awfully desolate, there are no signs of life. Winter is not quite done. Several patches of man-made forest, appearing like psoriasis scabs on earth scratched by fingernails, show only brittle branches and dead leaves, and no trace of people, dogs, cats, or birds.
Kcriss parks his car in an alley, a short distance from a three-way junction leading to the highway behind him. In front, all the buildings are no more than three floors high, only the P4 laboratory – a cylinder attached to a larger rectangle – towers aloft into the sky, reminding him of the outer shell of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The nuclear radiation from Chernobyl was thought to be enough to kill off the entire European subcontinent within a few months. Tens of thousands of workers immediately descended upon the site when it began to melt down in April 1986, casting an incomparably huge shield to seal the ruins of the plant forever, as if closing Pandora’s box. But now, with what is, potentially, an opening of a similar box, the Wuhan virus has rushed out into China and spread beyond to every corner of the world, where every day the numbers of the dead rise. Can this Pandora’s box be closed again?
Kcriss has nothing to do but stay in the car and go online to watch Chai Jing’s scathing documentary about air pollution, Under the Dome, on YouTube. He’s seen it many times but still feels euphoric whenever he watches it. Time passes, and, oblivious, he gradually forgets where he is, also forgetting he lives in a police state.
A few dozen yards away at a third-floor window, several Domestic Security officers have been staring at his car. Initially, they think this is a contact point, and that a hidden agent will furtively appear, handing Kcriss a pile of information, but the plot they hope for does not unfold. Security Team leader Zhao murmurs, “Two going on three hours watching you in your car. You planning to spend the night here?” He beckons and asks his assistant Li to fiddle on the computer. Engrossed in Kcriss’s every move in the car as if it were a movie, Zhao says, “Zoom in closer. Hey, he’s pretty much acting the part of an operative of some sort. You can watch that long film about smog anywhere, instead he’s sitting in his car watching it here near the P4 lab. Something’s definitely up with this.”
The Skynet surveillance system has been in place across China for a few years already, so all Li has to do is click on the mouse and the hidden cameras on either side of the alley scan up and down, left and right. Two, then four split screens appear on the computer monitor. Eyes, nose, mouth, close-ups one after another. Kcriss’s pores are enlarged. “The corners of his mouth are foaming,” Li says, “he must be really lit. Such a handsome guy and he’s not out chasing girls – he must be gay.”
“You don’t know shit,” Zhao says. Then he signals everyone else in the room to gather round. Seven heads come together, zeroing in on the computer screen. One fat guy, Zhou, pipes up: “Team Leader Zhao, it’s been long enough. Bring him in.”
“Yes, take him back to the bureau and deal with him there,” Li agrees.
“Still more shit,” Zhao frowns. “You think he’s a local undercover filmmaker, like Fang Bin? That it doesn’t matter if we grab him and release him and a little footage ends up on the Internet?”
“What are you saying?” Li responds.
“Look at this guy’s equipment: off-road Volkswagen, top-grade protective clothing, large-screen mobile phone with a high-definition camera, his gestures and movements. How does this compare to mere undercover filmmakers? Sure, they’re all working against the Party Central Committee, but Fang Bin pedaled a broken bicycle, and Chen Qiushi rode an old motorbike, the video they shot had no outdoor scenes … But this is outdoors. That guy Fang Bin filmed in a hospital, and the camerawork was straight and horizontal, like a corpse. He repeated the line ‘eight more dead’ at least eight times.
“With all this gear, it seems this Kcriss has some support. He’s been a moderator on both Phoenix TV and China Central TV [CCTV], and then he had the balls to resign! With that temperament he’s definitely a second-, third-, or some other generation descendant of Communist Party leadership. Just in case … in case he’s come down from above, from one power clique or another. I don’t know. Too many people are dead this time, there’s never been so many, nobody can take on that responsibility … Enough bullshitting. We’re Domestic Security here. It stands to reason that to ensure the restricted access to P4, any intruder can be picked up. But this handsome guy, let the National Security Bureau handle it.”
Zhao dials the phone of the local director of the National Security Bureau and exchanges a few words. The director says there’s not enough manpower, and National Security is a “hidden battlefront” anyway, always staying behind the scenes. They’d try their best to provide a thorough background on Kcriss and his hazard level. However, according to standard cooperating procedures, it’ll still be necessary for Domestic Security to act on the matter. Zhao declares that won’t do, that he’s a person within their purview. It’s time for the “hidden battlefront” to surface.
Domestic Security are experts at catching people, moving faster than lightning when necessary. Before the discovery of Kcriss, there were the two previous “citizen reporters,” Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin, who both managed to broadcast the Wuhan epidemic through social media. The first didn’t have time to leave evidence of his arrest, it simply evaporated, causing Chen’s mother to jump the Great Chinese Firewall, posting a “missing-person” notice every day; while the latter simply shouted “I’ve no fever, I don’t need you to isolate me,” repeatedly, from behind an iron grille and door, until they smashed them in and he was quickly pushed to the ground – the usual rough stuff at which National Security agents, with their higher education, are naturally inferior. As everyone knows, their strengths are in the high-tech field or “infiltrating the enemy” – so today, with a potential intrusion at P4, when the director of the local branch of the National Security Bureau commands agent Ding Jian to take two others with him to perform official duties, he also instructs them not to use a police car with the National Security emblem on it.
After a slight hesitation, Ding Jian takes his people down to the garage, finds a white off-road vehicle, and drives it out himself. By this time, Kcriss has been settled in his car for a few hours, his bottled water already finished. Still thirsty, with nothing around, he decides to go buy some water outside the P4 area. To his surprise, as his car exits the alley, Ding Jian’s vehicle is backing up towards him on the one-way street. Kcriss thinks it’s violating traffic laws, trying to cut corners by turning into the alley. But then the unmarked car skids to a stop, blocking the road.
With both feet, Kcriss smashes down on the brakes and two plumes of green smoke spew from his tires, his car screeching to a halt inches from the other vehicle. He reacts quickly, crunching the gears into reverse, back into the alley, speeding the wrong direction toward the other end. Terrified, and clocking about 200 kilometers per hour, Kcriss continues for quite a long while before finally exploding into the correct lane of a proper road. That his path is clear is pure negligence on the National Security agents’ part. Had it been Domestic Security, another car would have been blocking the other end of the alley. But still, Kcriss hasn’t been able to shake the vehicle chasing him, the National Security car’s loudspeaker blaring “Stop immediately! We order you to stop immediately!” all the while.
Apart from this frenzied pursuit, the road that seems to lead to freedom is endless and features no signs of life. The drooping red sun slowly sets on the endless procession of lifeless buildings. Once upon a time, the hundreds of square miles of the Jianghan Plain were full of vehicles and people, boats and goods. Wuhan, famous historically, has been the largest and most important water and land transportation hub in China since ancient times. On the map, it’s at the center of the heartland of China, with transportation routes extending in all directions like capillaries, intertwined, pulsating, flowing, like the blood in God’s palm. The Beijing–Canton Railway and the Yangtze River are like two major arteries, enabling the societal operations of this authoritarian empire. In 1966, the seventy-three-year-old monster Mao Zedong orchestrated the death of Liu Shaoqi, then the president of the country, and unleased the catastrophic Cultural Revolution upon hundreds of millions of Chinese people. He chose Wuhan as its launchpad and had himself drifted a few miles in the water of the Yangtze before coming ashore here, where ten years earlier, in 1956, he’d written these lines of poetry: “I have just drunk the waters of Changsha/ And come to eat the fish of Wuchang” … and two lines he’d written as a boy in 1917: “Confident of a life for two hundred years, I’ll swim for three thousand miles.” The swim caused a sensation, and the local Red Guards Battle News erroneously reported that the latest scientific test results showed that the physical health of Mao, the reddest of the reddest red suns among the world’s people, could be maintained for at least a hundred and fifty to two hundred years …
Today, this and a number of similar Wuhan myths have blown away with the wind; instead, the opposite, myths of truth, like the underground “grapevine news” of the Cultural Revolution, spread among the people. One such example: the P4 team extracted the SARS virus from a bat, and after cooling treatment and by way of an “intermediary host,” this new coronavirus was spawned using “artificial intelligence.” Infected patients have no fever and no cough at the start, then there is a slight fever and cough, and it’s not until later that breathlessness rises and falls suddenly like the crest of a wave, before falling to the bottom of the valley of death in the blink of an eye. Another myth of truth that has arisen on Chinese-language websites overseas is that the “Wuhan virus” is the “ultimate biochemical weapon” for dictatorship to defeat democracy. Originally, it’s said the first target was a recalcitrant Hong Kong, but like the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the former Soviet Union, there was an accidental leak and uncontrolled proliferation due to loopholes in the bureaucratic system. This was followed by suppression of “rumors” about the disease in the name of national interests, deceiving the public, and losing the opportunity to quickly close the Pandora’s box, so that the initial plan to seal off Hong Kong and put it under martial law instead became the fate of Wuhan.
Wide-eyed Kcriss has also heard all kinds of P4 rumors. Because Wuhan is sealed off, the P4 within its borders has become a politically taboo topic many Wuhan people suspect in their hearts but dare not voice out loud. Kcriss truly cares little about life and death, just as on the early morning of June 4 over thirty years before, a poet named Liao Yiwu wrote “Massacre”* with the gunfire and screams of the Tiananmen massacre still echoing in his ears … the subsequent pursuit and imprisonment were inevitable, but, fuck it, how could he repress the righteous recklessness of his youth! So now, in an SOS distress video lasting just over thirty seconds, with a car nearly taking flight and white-knuckled hands about to lose control of the steering wheel, Kcriss testifies: “I’m on the road, I’m now being chased by National Security in a car that isn’t a police car … I’m in Wuhan, I’m driving fast, very fast, they’re chasing me, they must want to isolate me …”
Then he speeds up onto an overpass, slows a bit, and the vehicle behind comes upon him, scraping his car as it does. He flicks the steering wheel to the left, like in a spy movie, as the other car falls back. He steps on the gas, desperate.
Kcriss finally escapes into a parking garage beneath his apartment building, the electronic barrier coming down just behind his car as he speeds in and as the National Security car arrives. If it had been Domestic Security, they’d have smashed through the barrier. But National Security, who are slightly better educated, brake and call a security guard. This is a high-end residential area, the garage is very large, but due to the strict closure of the city, the power has been shut off for several days. Kcriss doesn’t dare turn on his car lights even though he can’t see his fingers in front of his face. Relying on his memory of the garage, he spends a while cruising around for a parking space in what is now a dormant beehive of vehicles. At the moment he shuts off his engine, the National Security vehicle drives by with its headlights on high beam. He lies down on the front seat and holds his breath. The National Security vehicle slows down, its headlights sweeping from left to right over his car, across his windows. It passes by and, like a weasel, Kcriss slips out of his car and lithely moves toward the elevator door, opening it with the induction card on his key. The elevator lights up and the National Security agents rush over.
Kcriss is now a couple of minutes ahead of the security agents as he sprints upstairs into his apartment and locks its very solid door behind him. Like a mouse forced into a hole by a cat’s claws, he dare not turn on the lights or take off his protective clothing, even though he’s soaked through with sweat. Instinctively, he turns on his computer, aims its camera at the door, and in the pitch-black darkness where there might be an explosion at any moment, the livestream begins …
Boom boom, boom, boom boom boom – incessant pounding on the door. Kcriss stands for a while by the door, then creeps to the other end of the room. Boom boom, boom, boom boom boom – the pounding continues unabated. Kcriss moves into an inner room, like a ghost, shrinking into a corner. At that moment, there are over eight hundred domestic netizens, also known as “the melon-eating masses,” who’ve jumped the Great Chinese Firewall and are now peering back into Kcriss’s apartment in Wuhan, commenting on his dark screen on YouTube:
– Open the door, I’m here to check the water meter.
– What’s happening in there? Even if you don’t turn on the lights, we know you’re there.
– It makes no sense to keep the lights off. With so many surveillance cameras, where can you hide?
– Everyone can see your bravery!!! You’ll encourage more of the 80s and 90s generations to come forward!
– Turn on the lights, it makes no sense to have the lights off like this. They know you’re at home, whether you turn the lights on or not, so it’d be better to turn them on and say something.
– This broadcaster is a post-90s guy who works in the media and used to be an entertainment program host on CCTV. He would have had a promising future but spreading the truth about Wuhan’s heavily infected areas is truly commendable! Please everybody, follow him and help him!
– Turn on the monitor and hide the camera a little further away – if they catch you, you’ll get it all on camera. Eat some bread or something first, so you’ll have strength to resist.
– This is how it is in the celestial empire.
– CCTV? Damn.
– Are the cockroaches still outside the door? You won’t fall into this trap again if you throw yourself down into the street.
–
Seriously, you should be prepared for anything, but it’s not a big deal. If you escape, you’ll be on fire on YouTube, and if you can’t escape, you’ll be on fire in the foreign media. Today I saw Chen Qiushi’s video in the Japanese news. Part of the reason why this is happening to you is because of him. He’ll support you tomorrow, or else he’ll regret not mentioning you! He has 270,000 followers all over the world, and they can certainly do more than the few thousand of us here. First, get a good night’s sleep and prepare for the fire. I personally hope you only catch fire on YouTube.
– Dress up as a god and play the devil, mobilize public opinion, really make a public figure of yourself! And if National Security catches someone like you? What do you care about security agents! Yesterday you’re chased by them, today your apartment searched, tomorrow who knows where the story leads?
– Isn’t it exciting? What are you afraid of ? Take it all on! You used to be cocky and all full of yourself, but a coward all along? What’re you doing wearing a mask?? What are you truly afraid of ??
– Go home, don’t cause trouble. Who knows how a mental retard like you will die.
– Get out of the waters you’ve stirred up, quick!
– Please don’t worry, at most all they want is to talk with you. Don’t be so suspicious, okay?
– Think about whether it’s worth it, there are so many scumbags here.
–
Safety is what matters most, so stop broadcasting.
– I also work in the media. If I didn’t have a wife and child, maybe I’d be with you. #Ashamed.
– Stop being silly … think about how to get out of this wolf’s den.
– Don’t be afraid, they won’t do anything to you.
– Brother, cheer up, stay strong, express what you want to express.
– Safety first, brother, stop broadcasting.
– Don’t frighten yourself, your video has nothing sensitive in it, at most they’ll just ask you to tea to warn you that you’re illegally over the firewall.
– Don’t be discouraged, lad.
– Get a move on and leave China forever.
– If you can’t escape, just sit down and talk. Or are you angling for political asylum, acting in a play you’re directing yourself ?
– Enough of the sarcasm here everybody! Hurry up and contact all the bigwigs you know.
– You must stay calm, otherwise you’ll be dragged to some pop-up hospital, and it’ll be tragic if you get infected. The people there will not save you …
– The security agents aren’t so insistent at the door now, maybe awaiting instructions from superiors, and they are almost certainly watching the live broadcast. But they’ll definitely cut the power and Internet when they attack again. So, you’ve got to make a plan ahead of time, think about countermeasures. Otherwise, take advantage of the time lag between now and when they receive exact orders, wipe all the information they might be looking for and take the initiative to open the door and ask them why they’ve come? Anyway, it’ll be contained, all out in the open, better than the silence once the power and the Internet are cut …
– Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin, Kcriss … nobody knows who the next to be “isolated” will be. If sharp criticism were to completely disappear, mild criticism would seem harsh; if mild criticism were also not allowed, silence would be seen as having ulterior motives; and if even silence is no longer allowed, it will become a crime if it were not praised enough; and if only one voice is allowed to exist, then that sole voice must be a lie
.
Distracted, Kcriss quickly scrolls down through the messages. His mobile phone is also vibrating constantly. He picks it up and puts it to his ear. It’s a local friend who’s helped him and has already fallen into the hands of National Security. “They know you’re inside and can’t escape. Open the door, okay?”
He cuts off the call, but his friend phones again. “Please, Kcriss, I’ve a wife and child …”
He sighs and stays on the line but puts the phone aside. He takes off his mask, strips off his protective clothing, lies down for a few moments, and then sits in front of the dark screen of the computer. As memories of the past flood over him, he can’t help crying.
At this moment in Berlin, thousands of miles away, an exiled writer named Zhuangzi Gui is also staring at Kcriss’s live dark screen, unbeknownst to him, and, like all the “melon-eating masses,” he can’t resist writing a message:
The story of Kcriss is tragic and inspiring. This land of our ancestors, this hometown that has been mentioned countless times in our ancient texts, is the dream of my father’s generation and not the Communist Party’s, nor that of atheistic boors like Mao Zedong and Xi Jinping. If twenty-five-year-old Kcriss still has the courage to create and smash an egg against the stubborn stone of dictatorship, what reason have we to despair?
We want to seize back the homelands and hometowns deep in everyone’s heart, regain our normal everyday anger, compassion, and love, reclaim our ordinary human nature and temperament, and recapture the appreciation of beauty that has left our hearts beating in anticipation countless times, like the hermit-poet Tao Yuanming over 1,500 years ago sighing in a poem over Jing Ke, the would-be assassin of the first emperor of the Qin Dynasty six hundred years earlier: “A gentleman will die for one who knows his worth;/ With sword in hand I leave the capital of Yan,” …
I say thank you to this Kcriss, born in 1995, the hope of China’s future is in you.
After sending his message, Zhuangzi Gui does an Internet search on “Kcriss” and is startled by what he finds: it turns out that this handsome twenty-five-year-old graduated from the Communication University of China and was promptly hired as the host of CCTV’s Fashion Carousel, where he became a big star with millions of social media followers. He often traveled to various parts of the country, setting trends in food and tourism. He could be seen squatting in the desert eating grilled meat, or standing on a boat fishing: “Wow, this is the first time I’ve held such a big fish.” “Wow, chicken grilled with watermelon, I’ll eat the soup first …”
Zhuangzi Gui feels this doesn’t sit right with Kcriss’s role as an “intruder,” so he switches over and watches the young man’s “Disobedience TV,” a personal channel he founded on YouTube after he resigned from CCTV in 2018. The essence of the title was that he refused to comply with CCTV, as evident in his opening remarks for his first vlog: “Yo! Hello everyone, my name is Kcriss, just call me Kcriss….The most important title I seek is to become the number one vlogger in China.” Next, he performed some rap, hip-hop, and backflips, and showed some film of himself traveling around the world on a motorcycle. He also put on sunglasses and imitated his idol, the American vlogger and filmmaker Casey Neistat. On the wall behind him were posters of the American singer Bruno Mars and Apple founder Steve Jobs.
A WeChat message changed Kcriss’s life.
On New Year’s Eve 2020, like hundreds of millions of other Chinese, he is watching the Chinese New Year Gala on CCTV. This year’s theme is “Coming Together to Fight Pneumonia.” Then Kcriss’s phone vibrates:
The doctors at Jinyintan Hospital haven’t eaten a thing all day, and now have solicited food donations from our association. Can you believe this? I really can’t believe it, but I have to believe it. I only know that at this moment doctors don’t have any new protective clothing, so they don’t eat all day because they don’t dare take off their protective clothes as they won’t have clean ones to put back on. Now our association is contacting the hospital and preparing to send over convenience foods – how is this a suitable atmosphere for watching the Spring Festival Gala! Outsiders have absolutely no way of understanding the despair in Wuhan at this moment. Patients are dying on the floor without being treated because all the supplies are running out. Watching the shouting of those slogans on TV news feels ridiculous. What’s next? Everyone will have to rely on themselves! Only themselves! The only thing this great nation is capable of mobilizing effectively is a variety show …
A sense of shame wells up in Kcriss and he immediately decides to go to Wuhan to get to the bottom of things.
First he calls his father, seeking support, but to no avail. So, he goes online and invites some former classmates from the Communication University to join him, proposing to organize an epidemic investigation team, but few respond. Eventually two decide to participate. Confucius says: “If one travels in threes, one will surely teach me something,” so Kcriss is secretly pleased with this.
However, a few days before his departure from Beijing, one of his prospective teammates is locked into his twentieth-story bedroom by his ever-vigilant parents, who take shifts guarding him, refusing all negotiations; while the other sends a message saying that upon his return from a vacation in Indonesia, it was discovered he’d had contact with people from Wuhan while abroad and he was immediately isolated. And, so, in two days, Kcriss suffers two setbacks. Feeling frustrated, he decides to soldier on and shoulder the risk alone.
The atmosphere in Beijing is also quite tense, with the government banning all gatherings and closing all meeting places, and access to residential areas is based on an “entry pass” system that limits the time and the people one can see. Despite this, Kcriss manages to visit with one Wuhan native who’d arrived in Beijing a generation before him. The two meet at the entrance gate to his apartment complex. Kcriss has his temperature taken and is sprayed with disinfectant before they are escorted to an elevator by a security guard. They go up to the twenty-fourth floor, enter the apartment, take off their masks, and wash their hands with disinfectant. His acquaintance’s wife makes tea, and they sit down. The older Wuhan native cuts straight to the point: “I think it’s dangerous for you to go now, and it doesn’t make much sense.”
“Why?”
“It won’t be long before Beijing becomes Wuhan, before all cities in China become Wuhan, all following the same path to lockdown. You might as well stay here, as you can do the same thing in Beijing as you would in Wuhan.”
“But Beijing is not the source, Wuhan is.”
“Wuhan is also not the source. It’s like the Yangtze River with its origin in the vicinity of Geladaindong Peak on the Tibetan Plateau. But the real source is just a small puddle. Can you find that puddle?”
“I’ll go and I’ll try. Current information indicates the earliest patient came from the wildlife trade stall area of the South China
Seafood Wholesale Market.”
“It’s sealed off. No clues to be found there.”
“I’ll try.”
“Don’t try!” the older man flatly says. “If you must go, act as an ordinary volunteer, try to help others as much as possible, and then take some not-too-sensitive videos along the way, so you can protect yourself and not cause trouble for others.”
Kcriss is silent, but his heart is on fire. He thinks of the Czech writer Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being describing the decisive moment for the protagonist Thomas, when after the Prague Spring of 1968 is suppressed by Soviet tanks and he goes into exile in France, with his lover Trisha remaining in Prague, he ignores his friends’ dissuasion, returning from Paris to her side and loses his freedom forever. No matter the age of the novel, Kcriss feels he’s in exactly the same situation, and at this moment, the truth is his Trisha and the city of Wuhan is his Prague.
The older man seemingly reads his mind and sighs: “Wuhan is much more terrifying than you can imagine. The officially publicized numbers of the diagnosed and dead are only a small part of the actual number. Many people have been infected but cannot get a diagnosis – even those with symptoms – let alone treatment. The hospitals are overcrowded, people can’t get a bed. Even if there is one, there’s no effective medicine, so how can a doctor treat the disease? There’s an acute shortage of materials, so what is there to treat it with? As a result, neither the officials nor ordinary people are sure of what’s going on. Every person you walk past might be asymptomatic or symptomatic, it’s just too dangerous! So, if you want to go, you must try to keep a distance from everyone. You’ll need a contingency plan in case you’re infected or suddenly have respiratory problems. You must bring enough of your own supplies: protective clothing, goggles, and even a helmet, things you’ll definitely find are not available in Wuhan. In addition, ethyl alcohol, disinfectant, and masks are all basics you’ll need to take. Also, how are you going to get into Wuhan? Someone will have to meet you, otherwise you’ll be in the dark, without transportation, no idea where to live …”
When Kcriss leaves the home of the older Wuhan man, it’s getting late and fire-red clouds cover most of the sky. Kcriss never returns to his own home in Beijing. Instead, he drives straight to the expressway to the south, traveling across half of China to Changsha in a day and a night. There, while waiting for a local friend by the side of a road, he crosses over the Internet wall to an overseas website and the first thing he sees is: “Why hasn’t Big Xi gone to Wuhan?” The answer is that his confidant, Cai Qi, secretary of the Beijing Municipal Committee, had the misfortune of contracting the Wuhan pneumonia while inspecting Beijing’s Xicheng District Health Department. And as the slightly feverish Cai Qi reported to Big Xi, even China’s Emperor of the Moment became a suspected carrier and had to be isolated in his residence in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai District. Kcriss has a good laugh about this and the weariness of his long journey suddenly vanishes.
His Changsha friend meets him carrying the news that all roads to Wuhan have been closed. And on midnight that day, February 12, the railway will also be shut down. The last high-speed train through Wuhan that will pass through Changsha that afternoon is all that is left. So, Kcriss immediately rushes to the Changsha South Station, where his friend advises him to buy a ticket for the stop after Wuhan, to avoid attracting attention.
Kcriss entrusts his car to his friend and, shouldering a large bag and dragging a suitcase, climbs up into a lightly populated carriage. He pulls out his smartphone and starts to make his first video. In it, he states he’s been to North Korea, a place haunted by ghosts in broad daylight, where he took a lot of film openly as well as some sneak shots. He guessed that working for CCTV offered him cover as the subjects of Fat Kim the Third* didn’t take any action against him … but this time it’s different.
He arrives at Wuhan Railway Station after dark, passing through a passageway and the great hall, usually bustling with activity, but empty today. Kcriss walks behind two local travelers, teasing their children in the Wuhan dialect as he does so. He’s met by a friend outside the station, where they get in a van and his friend’s wife gives him some masks and disinfectant, despite their scarcity. Kcriss is very moved, and asks offhandedly if there have been deliveries of materials donated from various places in China. His friend responds: “What donations? During this epidemic, prices have soared, there’s been nothing that hasn’t cost money.” Kcriss says, “That doesn’t sound right. The Chinese Red Cross receives large amounts of medical and other critical supplies every day, and they should be distributing them to residents of various communities for free, according to the regulations.” His friend replies, “From SARS in 2003 to the Sichuan earthquakes in 2008 until now, official agencies have never failed to collect money. Whatever’s given to the Red Cross is flipped and the price doubles. Grab feathers off a flying goose as it passes, if you know what I mean.” Kcriss responds, “I understand. But even migrating geese should be stopped in flight, confronted, and made to pay for their passage. If the geese disagree, bring them down, pluck them, and make them into soup.” His friend laughs and says, “Your explanation’s very graphic. So, why,” he asks, “is the transliterated name of the WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ‘Tan Desai’?” Kcriss tells him, “‘Tan’ is a homonym for wine jar, ‘de’ means ‘morality,’ ‘sai’ means ‘plug’ or ‘clogged,’ so the full meaning of the name is ‘soaked in a wine jar all day, sense of morality blocked.’” His friend laughs loudly and says, “This African wino really has no sense of morality, just like the organization he heads. Together with the Chinese Red Cross, both institutions are drunk, like the Communist Party branch secretary who Big Xi dispatched to Wuhan, every day bragging about the great power of the government’s efforts to control the epidemic, especially the miraculous Chinese medicine antiviral drug Double Goldthread (Coptis Chinensis). I think it was the day before yesterday that Director-General Tedros was summoned by Big Xi, and his wallet and his balls were suddenly bulging afterwards. So much so that he’s learned to use Old Mao’s motto ‘a single spark can ignite a prairie fire’ to describe the spread of the Wuhan virus outside of China, duping everyone into continuing donations to Beijing …”
Everybody knows this type of humor is born out of bitterness, a characteristic of many cultures. Just like the the German joke in which a man asks for a song from an Iraqi refugee singer who’s lost his family, and after the Iraqi has sung his heart out, the German’s face goes blank and he says: “I asked you to sing, so why are you crying all the time?”
His friends take Kcriss to the check-in desk at a building that claims to be a guesthouse and say their goodbyes. He feels the building is too empty; he walks a few feet in the corridor and hears the echo of his footsteps in the distance. His predecessor Chen Qiushi had also come to Wuhan as a “citizen reporter” and had lived in a different building nearby. Chen was still broadcasting live from his room the night before he was arrested. At the end, he had croaked, “I am not even afraid of death. You think I’m afraid of your Communist Party??” – It was destiny.
Kcriss’s first live program features the high-speed rail and the sealed city, both inside and out, a sky alternating between light and darkness, and the Software Engineering Vocational College school building where school bags and textbooks are piled up after the district government aggressively requisitioned it for the Wuhan Pneumonia Mild Case Isolation Zone. But his anchor room is the same type as Chen Qiushi’s: a bedroom from where he broadcasts sitting on a bed. However, Kcriss’s camera shots, depth of field, and sound processing are all quite professional. He starts to record:
In the Internet era, the dissemination of information is no longer restricted by spatial distance. But with the outbreak of the epidemic, information has also broken out, though much is difficult to verify. Official reports about Wuhan leave us increasingly further from the truth.
I would like to use my eyes and ears to gather information and make judgments. Before coming here, a friend in the mainstream media told me that the government had made arrangements for all official media reporters to stay in a hotel next to Wuchang Railway Station so as to oversee their work and assign reporting tasks. If one has no official media credentials, it’s very difficult to engage in media work in this besieged city, it’s even a bit dangerous, as all the epidemic’s bad news is submitted to and reported by the central government …
Just as Kcriss is starting to feel confident, a phone call cuts in. It’s the building manager, who, in an anxious voice, asks him to come down immediately. Kcriss keeps shooting video on his mobile phone as he goes down, and the manager’s sister-in-law leads him outside to meet a mask-wearing policewoman sent from the local police station. Kcriss immediately takes advantage of his good looks, calling her respectfully “little elder sister.” The policewoman seems a bit embarrassed and softly says, “This is a notice from the higher ups, you can’t stay here.” He says, “Little elder sister, I’ve only just arrived, you can see it’s dark everywhere, where would you have me go?” The policewoman says: “It’s not that I won’t let you stay.” He says: “So what should I do?” and turns to look piteously at the manager’s sister-in-law, who says, “I just look after the keys, so I’m no use to you.” After a while, another police officer comes, whom Kcriss similarly calls “little elder brother.” In a flash, the eyes of the younger elder brother and the younger elder sister meet, and they agree he can stay for one night but must leave the next day.
Kcriss gets a little emotional after he goes upstairs to continue the live broadcast. He says Chen Qiushi had lived in Wuhan for more than a week until he went missing, but he can only stay one night. Then he presses the button on his smartphone, and all the audience hears the manager’s sister-in-law say: “Brother, there is really no way. I’ve phoned around for you, and sent a WeChat message, but no one dares take you in. Now, the government’s authority is delegated from the city to the districts, and from the districts to the residential areas, divided up into small pieces. Everything is closed and sealed off, only one person in each household is allowed to go out with a ‘pass’ to buy daily necessities just once every three days. I’ve heard that in some neighborhoods, people are not allowed even to enter or leave the main gate. The neighborhood property managers register what’s to be purchased and set the prices, so you eat what you eat, as if everyone’s in a jail together … So, where’s an outsider like you to go?” Then the police officer says, “If you don’t move out tomorrow, they’ll go through each room searching for you. I can’t possibly hide you …”
As the folk saying goes: when the legendary Eight Immortals crossed the sea, each displayed their supernatural abilities. Kcriss dared to resign from CCTV and come here, and in the final analysis, he has magical powers too. With the help of an unnamed friend, first, he moves into a residential area under the ruse of being a volunteer, and a few days later he moves again. He also gets hold of a Volkswagen off-road vehicle, and this, in addition to his pure Beijing accent, regulation protective clothing, and look of a pampered son of a family of influence, leads the police who check his ID to be more courteous than they might otherwise be.
To Kcriss, having just arrived in the city, the sunshine, air, and quiet streets and alleys feel both beautiful and deceptive. At first, he contacts those he wants to interview through information he found on microblogging services like WeChat and Weibo, and many agree to talk, but later change their tune when he can’t enter any local people’s homes. He visits the location of the “Ten Thousand Family Banquet,” which had occurred before Spring Festival on February 15 in the Baibu Pavilion area of Jianghan District. It has been the most notable source of infection after the South China Seafood Wholesale Market. A girl breaks the news that many people who attended contracted the virus, and due to a shortage of nucleic acid testing they hadn’t been able to get diagnosed. Moreover, she said the local government concealed the number of deaths, out of fear of reporting them to the higher authorities.
So Kcriss hurries to see for himself. It’s a huge residential area of over two hundred apartment buildings and home to more than a hundred thousand residents. The surrounding shops are all closed, but he discovers an official media reporter from elsewhere in China wandering outside the #2 Building Gate. The two begin a loud conversation and are intercepted by the guards. Then they go around to another gate, trying to hide each other, but just as they’re about to slip in, the security guards of several gates come rushing over to them. Kcriss has some experience with this and shouts repeatedly: “Don’t come near me! Keep your distance! It’s dangerous, understand? I’m not going with you, alright?” The security guards are somewhat subdued by this, but tenants on the upper floors hear the commotion and immediately open their windows and voice their support: “Why do you have to drive away reporters? We’ve been in here for nearly two months and there’s been no sanitation or disinfection …” Kcriss turns to ask if this is true, and a minor bureaucrat type says it’s nonsense, we’ve records of cleaning and disinfection.
Suddenly, several women come rushing downstairs to confront the guards. One woman scolds him, saying, “Your cleaning and disinfection is just to put a checkmark in the logbook outside the corridor door every day. In fact, absolutely nothing’s ever done, there’s no smell of disinfectant, and the elevator buttons are all covered by spiderwebs. In the past, we’d go to the supermarket at the main gate every three days to buy necessities. Later, after somebody fell dead there, we haven’t dared go.” Kcriss asks her if she knows of any fever patients in the neighborhood. The women say they don’t know as they can only communicate with each other through WeChat to find out which buildings post a “fever building” notice. As to which household in the “fever building” is suspected of infection, diagnosed, dead, or taken away or not, whether sent to an isolation shelter, a hospital, or a crematorium, nobody can be sure. The government never announces such things – but the number of security guards is always increasing.
