Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

Less than half an hour after Xia Chunping left, I received a text from a friend in the United States who had just read the interview I did with him! The link even included the photos he had just taken of me! The speed at which the internet can spread news is really shocking; it is truly hard to believe. Almost everyone in my family is in engineering and the sciences, and that has heavily influenced me; I suppose that I too have become fairly well acquainted with technology; I gave up writing by hand and started using a computer back in 1990. But I still have trouble keeping up with all the latest technological advances and often find myself blown away by the newest capabilities out there. The news organization Headlines Today (Jinri Toutiao) featured me on its site and I uploaded an installment from my diary onto its “Micro Headlines” page; within one day it had been read by 20 million users, and a few days later it was up to 30 million views. For a writer like me who is used to a very small circle of readers, those numbers are terrifying. It just feels unnatural to me, so much so that I almost wanted to give up writing this diary. It was only after several old classmates encouraged me to continue that I decided to stick with it.

I’m quite familiar with how official government media organizations function in China. When they interview you, they ask a ton of questions, but usually only a small portion of your answers actually make it into print. But because I understand how they work, I usually still try to provide detailed responses to their questions as much as possible so that the editors will have plenty of material to choose from. The good thing is that when they add additional material without my permission, I always take a stand and they understandably agree to take that material out; they always do their best to respect my wishes. Overall, China News Agency has a relatively relaxed standard that they go by, while of course remaining fairly prudent when it comes to certain topics. They are certainly not as free and open as some of the social media and independent media platforms that I publish on. Comparatively speaking, Sina Weibo remains the platform with the most liberal policies for expression in China. I’m also quite fond of writing short posts in those little boxes; I pop out a post in a single breath, which always feels good. It is, however, a shame that they can’t stop those ultra-leftist groups from continually reporting my posts, which has resulted in my account being suspended. I left a message for them, saying: “I really love you guys at Weibo, but you have really let me down!”

First thing this morning my doctor friend sent me a note with his latest thoughts on the coronavirus outbreak. I also followed up with him in the afternoon to get a better sense of where things stand. I would summarize his thoughts as follows: According to statistics from the past three days, the overall trend is improving, but there has yet to be a fundamental change. The spread of the coronavirus has yet to be fully contained. The number of presumed cases is still quite high. The only good thing is that there is less pressure than before to provide additional hospital beds. There are two reasons why the shortage of beds is not as bad as before: The first is that many patients have now been discharged, and the second is that a lot of patients have died. Every day there are nearly 100 patients who die.

This news is all quite sad. While Wuhan’s ability to investigate cases of infection within the city is quite impressive, there are a lot of citizens who are not entirely happy with the way things are being handled. At the same time, it is still quite difficult to control the spread of the virus; perhaps it is precisely because of this that Wuhan is now constructing an additional 19 temporary hospitals. The plan is to increase the number of sickbeds to the point that there will always be open beds there waiting for new patients; that will help significantly cut down the number of mild cases that turn critical. My doctor friend reiterated what he told me before: There are still nearly 10,000 patients who were infected early on who are now still in serious or critical condition. That alone makes it hard to reduce the number of patients who are dying. Critical patients with breathing problems are put on oxygen or respirators to help alleviate their symptoms. That reminded me of a report I read yesterday by a Caixin Media reporter that was about how people’s lives were on the line, dependent on the availability of a single breathing tube. During my conversation with my doctor friend, he said: “We are now seeing a certain degree of effectiveness with the use of traditional Chinese medicine.” This reminded me of a question posted online about whether or not Chinese medicine was at all effective against the coronavirus. I passed this question on to my doctor friend, since he is trained in Western medicine. I really wanted to know how doctors who specialize in Western medicine look at the use of Chinese medicine for treating coronavirus patients.

According to my doctor friend: “Right now there are many hospitals in which the entire treatment ward is managed by doctors who practice Chinese medicine, and they have achieved very positive results. Of course, those traditional Chinese medicine doctors also employ some Western medicine and Western medical treatment practices. This mixture of Chinese and Western medicine has yielded very positive results and has also won a high level of approval with state-level medical agencies. At first a lot of doctors trained in Western medicine were extremely resistant to this approach and even mocked it. However, now that it has yielded positive results, most of those early critics have all quieted down. I suspect that once this outbreak has passed, the state will lend a good deal of support to further develop the field of traditional Chinese medicine. After all, over the course of this battle against the coronavirus, traditional Chinese medicine has really shined as an effective treatment method and everyone has taken notice; even practitioners of Western medicine have to admit that. Traditional Chinese medicine treatment is also much more affordable than Western medicine. I have never really understood the principles of Chinese medicine, but I also never looked down on it. After all, traditional Chinese medicine has been with us throughout 5,000 years of Chinese history, whereas Western medicine has only been in widespread use in China for a few decades. There are certainly ailments for which Chinese medicine is quite effective.” The previous passage was pasted together from several texts that my doctor friend sent me. I restructured it a bit, but the content is entirely taken from his comments.

I have a college classmate who now teaches at the Institute of Chinese Medicine (he was a graduate of the Chinese department; I wonder if he teaches students how to read classical Chinese medicinal texts? I never asked him that). Ever since the coronavirus outbreak began, he has been confident that traditional Chinese medicine would prove to be an extremely effective treatment. Moreover, he has stood by this belief and wholeheartedly promoted it over the past few months. He even got angry that Wuhan wasn’t utilizing even more traditional Chinese medicine in its treatment of coronavirus patients. I posted some of the things my doctor friend said in my college classmates chat group. One former classmate who works in the media said that, in some respects, you could even say that the coronavirus has saved traditional Chinese medicine. I find that comment somewhat frightening.

Then my classmate from the Institute of Chinese Medicine replied: “We should thank the coronavirus for allowing traditional Chinese medicine to finally show its face! The basic approach of Chinese medicine is completely different from that of Western medicine: ‘Chinese medicine always leaves the virus with a way out; it politely sees the virus to the door, but whether it lives or dies depends (usually the virus dies off).’ But Western medicine tries to completely eradicate the virus, but when it fails there are no incantations left to cast.” I found his viewpoint interesting, but a bit biased. His understanding of traditional Chinese medicine has a philosophical twist, yet his understanding of Western medicine seems just plain twisted.