Fang Fang - Wuhan Diary - Dispatches from a Quarantined City

Bai Hua (1930–2019) was a novelist, poet, and playwright. He is generally best known for his play Unrequited Love ( Ku lian ).

“The Three Old Essays” (“Lao san pian”) normally refers to three iconic essays by Mao Zedong, which were widely read in China during the 1960s and 1970s. These essays included “Serve the People,” “In Memory of Dr. Norman Bethune,” and “The Foolish Old Man Who Tried to Move a Mountain.” Here, Fang Fang is making a playful reference by using the same title for her group’s nickname.

Zhang Yiwu (b. 1962) is a literary critic and cultural studies scholar at Peking University. He is the author or editor of more than 18 volumes of essays and academic studies. He also serves on numerous governmental committees.

Zhou Xiaoping (b. 1981) is a popular essayist and blogger who is known for nationalistic essays like “Don’t Let This Era Down” (“Qing buyao gufu zhege shidai”), “Your China, Your Party” (“Ni de Zhongguo, ni de dang”), and “Nine Tricks of the United States Cultural Cold War Against China” (“Meiguo dui hua wenhua lengzhan de jiuda juezhao”). During October 2014, Zhang Yiwu published an essay entitled “The Meaning of Zhou Xiaoping” (“Zhou Xiaoping de yiyi”) in which he praised Zhou for giving the Chinese youth something to dream about and strive for.

Zhang Wenhong (b. 1969) is a physician and director and secretary of the Party Branch of the Department of Infectious Disease at Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, which is affiliated with Fudan University. During the COVID-19 outbreak, Dr. Zhang was the leader of the Shanghai Medical Treatment Expert Group. In February 2020 he made media comments relating to the origin of the virus that generated controversy online. Then in April, he was the center of more criticism when he suggested Chinese children should have milk and eggs for breakfast instead of porridge, which was interpreted as “worshipping the West.”

This slogan refers to a 2016 online political incident. The “Emperor” is the online nickname for Li Yi, a Chinese sociologist who was educated in America and has a strong online presence in China on the platform Baidu. In 2016 members of the “Emperor’s Bar” launched a propaganda campaign on international social media platforms like Facebook to promote Chinese unification with Taiwan and to criticize the Taiwan independence movement.

A line of poetry from an iconic poem by Bai Juyi, dating from the Tang Dynasty.

“Big V” is a Chinese internet slang term; “V” is short for “Verified,” and “Big V” refers to verified users on the social network app/site Weibo who are extremely active and have over 500,000 followers. Most “Big V” users are famous celebrities.

Helen Davidson, “Chinese writer faces online backlash over Wuhan lockdown diary” in The Guardian . April 10, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/10/chinese-writer-fang-fang-faces-online-backlash-wuhan-lockdown-diary?CMP=share_btn_link.