In 2016, when the Chinese writer Wang Fang (who publishes as Fang Fang) released her novel Ruanmai (软埋), she could not have known that within five years her books would begin to disappear from public life in China. Reprints of her backlist—nearly a hundred books, including novels, novellas, and collections of stories and essays—would be halted, and her new work would be effectively banned from publication in the country. Her very name, once respected—she had served as chair of the Hubei Writers Association and had been awarded the Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s highest literary honors—would become reviled, inseparably joined to the seventy-six-day lockdown, from January 23 to April 8, 2020, that affected tens of millions in Hubei province and its capital city, Wuhan.

For sixty of those days Fang Fang kept a public lockdown diary, fengcheng riji. Each post appeared on her Weibo (microblog) account late at night or in the early hours of the morning. An entry might record the names of the dead, encourage readers to follow the latest government directives, note the flowers outside her window, or describe the news reports and essays she couldn’t get out of her head. She amplified the calls of fellow Wuhan residents desperate for help, and the words of doctors sounding warnings; she wrote that “how you treat the weakest and most vulnerable members of your society” is the “one true test” of a country’s civility. On January 27 Fang Fang wrote:

When the world of officialdom skips over the natural process of competition, it leads to disaster; empty talk about political correctness without seeking truth from facts also leads to disaster; prohibiting people from speaking the truth and the media from reporting the truth leads to disaster; and now we are tasting the fruits of these disasters, one by one.

The diary became a cultural phenomenon. Individual entries—forwarded, published on websites and news portals, compiled into PDFs, read aloud on streaming sites—reached an estimated 50 million people in China. According to The Guardian, by early April the diary had 380 million views on Weibo alone.

What happened to Fang Fang and to her Wuhan Diary, as it is known in English, is a devastating example of cyber disinformation, and the speed at which conspiracy theories and persecution campaigns gain traction. By January 2020, as Fang Fang’s posts gained popularity, Weibo had begun erasing individual entries; within weeks, online attacks spreading false information about her posts and reporting her for rule violations were flooding the Chinese Internet. Extremist nationalists accused Fang Fang of fabricating stories.

Critics mocked her for not leaving her apartment to report on the situation (she spoke regularly to health care workers and administrators by phone and included their observations in her diary) while she, like most Wuhan residents, was under lockdown orders. They said that her calls for government accountability were being used by Western governments, and particularly by Donald Trump, to demand reparations from China. When Weibo temporarily suspended her account, she turned to WeChat. On March 3 a neighbor texted her, “The begonias on your front porch are in bloom, but your WeChat seems to have been shut down.” Friends posted on her behalf.

In April word circulated online that Fang Fang’s lockdown diary was already being translated and would be published internationally. She was denounced for selling out her country. On Chinese social and traditional media, a startling consensus began to emerge: Fang Fang, in allowing her diary to be translated and distributed around the world, had taken an internal conversation and offered it up to those who dehumanized her fellow citizens.1

Initiated by agitprop news sites and outright trolls, the disinformation campaign moved like wildfire through a broad cross section of society, amplified by state media, lifestyle and popular magazines, cultural influencers, political commentators, government officials, professors at leading academic institutions, retired members of the military, and ordinary people whose lives had been upended by the pandemic. Prominent figures called her a threat to national security and wondered why no criminal charges had been brought against her; the most extreme voices called for her death.

How a popular sixty-five-year-old writer could become, for so many, the embodiment of disloyalty, deception, and venality—at a time when policymakers were under scrutiny for their handling of a virus that, in April 2020, had officially claimed around five thousand lives in China and, unofficially since then, somewhere between 80,000 and 1.5 million—is both a confounding and familiar story. The mistakes of those in positions of authority eventually evaporated, replaced by a narrative of triumph over a deadly virus, but Fang Fang’s name in China will likely never be entirely freed from stigma.

For most of her time as a published writer, Fang Fang was celebrated for the intimacy and skill with which she wrote about everyday lives, particularly the lives of those whose labor was crucial to the new economy. Her fiction and that of Chi Li, who is also from Wuhan, as well as Liu Zhenyun, from Henan province, helped define the “new realism” movement that emerged in China in the 1980s. They tried to resist false consolations and moral judgments; they rejected the sublime and the transcendent; they explored a spiritual emptiness that seemed to infect even those desperate to remake their lives.

In contrast to painterly, ambiguous novels like Ge Fei’s Flock of Brown Birds (1988), or the bold narrative unreliability in Can Xue’s Huangni Street (1987), works of new realism used informal language to communicate the texture of ordinary existence. Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, they found a wide and receptive readership. Fang Fang’s lockdown diary had initially been read as a product of that tradition, an empathetic and frank chronicle of a shared experience. On February 2, 2020, she recalled a phrase she had written nearly a decade before: “One speck of dust from an entire era may not seem like much, but when it falls on your head it’s like a mountain crashing on you.” Weeks later, when asked by a reporter if these words had been prophetic, Fang Fang replied, “That sentence isn’t prophetic, it is reality—a reality that is with us during every era.”

In a 2021 interview Eric Liu, the editor of China Digital Times, described how strict control of public discourse “necessitated hatred targets.” As Wuhan weathered the hardship of the lockdown, a sense of betrayal began to build across society and concentrate upon a scapegoat. Surely few could have anticipated the target: not an investigative report but a public diary written in real time; not a societal structure but a sole individual; not a political leader or government official but a novelist.

Fang Fang’s novel Ruanmai, translated with great sensitivity as Soft Burial by the scholar Michael Berry, is, on its surface, about the disappearance of three families, encompassing dozens if not hundreds of people across multiple generations; only four survivors remain. But it also chronicles a collective experience, the way that wealth was transferred in the late 1940s and early 1950s from a land-owning, educated, privileged class to the tenant farmers and laborers who worked the land. This redistribution remains a defining act of the Chinese Communist Party, and the speed with which it was carried out, the violence that the architects of the Land Reform Campaign deemed necessary, and the subsequent amnesia that both victims and perpetrators needed in order to persevere in its aftermath left no life untouched.

The story recounted in Soft Burial begins in 1952, when a young woman is pulled from a turbulent river. Falling unconscious, covered in horrifying bruises, she is pronounced dead. But before the undertaker arrives, a doctor sees the faintest tremor in one hand and insists the patient be kept under observation. When, more than two weeks later, the young woman wakes, she does not know her name, where she is from, or how she was swept into the river.

The doctor, Wu Jiaming, tells her that she cried out a name before losing consciousness: Ding Zi. To preserve this trace of her identity, the doctor registers her name as Ding Zitao—adding a reference to the season in which she was saved, when peach trees, tao, begin to bloom. The young woman attempts to start over. She is hired as a nanny in the household of a political commissar and stays with the family for ten years. Then one day, Wu Jiaming is transferred to the city where she lives. The two reconnect and she marries him.

For a time, Ding Zitao tries to remember the years before the river, but each attempt brings on overwhelming terror. It is now the 1960s, and the first persecution campaigns of the Cultural Revolution, which took the lives of as many as two million people, shut down nearly every university, and displaced millions to rural and remote areas, will soon begin. Wu Jiaming tells her that forgetting is not always betrayal; in some cases it might be the only way to survive.

About four years into their marriage, a tragic accident takes Wu Jiaming’s life. Ding Zitao works tirelessly as a caregiver to earn money for their son Qinglin’s education, and he eventually studies architectural design. After years of struggle, he is promoted and fulfills a childhood promise, building a home for his mother so that she can live in comfort, surrounded by her family.

By now, sometime in the early 2000s, Ding Zitao is nearing retirement. The memories that she cannot consciously access exist as a root system beneath her life, linked to other buried histories. Concealed from Ding Zitao’s sight, these roots becomes visible through the fleeting encounters that permeate Qinglin’s job and daily existence. Characters emerge and vanish within a handful of pages: former soldiers, Communist cadres, tenant farmers, and the children of perpetrators and victims (often both at once) criss-cross eastern Sichuan for work, pleasure, tourism. The landscape itself seems to slide long-separated individuals into proximity, but not quite near enough for them to fully recognize one another. Two old men, for instance, meet by chance in a shop selling Shanxi noodles, never fully realizing that each holds a key to the other’s past. Glossing over the Land Reform Campaign, one says, “We shouldn’t talk about it, but it’s really one of those things that is just too difficult to mention.”

Recognition, however, is tantalizingly near. A former commander asks after a young cadre he remembers, only to learn of the young man’s shocking murder. A professor researching remote estates wins the trust of an old man who tenaciously guards a mass grave, containing the corpses of the influential family who once employed him, all of whom died in a single night. A former member of the Communist resistance, already in his nineties, fights to be absolved of political crimes so that he might clear his name before he dies. Wu Jiaming’s diaries, which span 1948 to 1968 and illuminate the lives of myriad characters, are delivered into his son’s possession but remain unread for two critical years, when a man who might have answered his questions is still alive. And Ding Zitao, now living in her son’s lovingly built home, experiences an emotional collapse. She falls into a catatonic state.

Her illness eludes diagnosis, and Qinglin is desperate to find a remedy. He has an odd feeling that she is “existing in a kind of secret state.” At last his friend Zhongyong offers a clue, confiding that when his father was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, he’d said that he was “in a process of leaving this world and heading to another place.” The father, sitting with them as they talk, seems lost. But he interrupts when the two men bring up Ding Zitao. Without lifting his gaze from the floor, he says, “Her spirit is no longer of this world.”

Time, for Ding Zitao, is not whole. The elderly woman who exists in the early 2000s and the young woman who exists in 1952 are severed from each other. Chinese beliefs that draw from Buddhism, Taoism, and traditional mythologies describe how a soul, preparing for reincarnation, embarks on a journey through the underworld. This realm, a combination of purgatory and hell, is sometimes imagined as having eighteen levels. In its worst manifestations, the body is grotesquely tortured but cannot die. This conception of an afterlife—which is also a preparatory interval, a continuity that joins death and rebirth—holds that no past action, or crime, is erased. Punishment avoided in life is exacted here without mercy.

Soft Burial is structured like a double helix. In one strand, the world is temporal. Qinglin ensures that his mother is kept comfortable and without pain, and continues his work. He and Zhongyong lead a group of architecture students into remote areas of eastern Sichuan to study abandoned family compounds now eroding into nature. Behind dilapidated walls, they find exquisite living spaces separated by as many as twenty inner courtyards; design elements from multiple dynasties remain visible. These sites evoke intense emotion in Qinglin. Meeting elderly men, he hears disturbing stories of which he’d been entirely ignorant.

In the other strand of the novel, the world is eternal. Ding Zitao’s memories return in reverse order: she is “back on the road from where she once came…. Everything now seemed to be so clear.” Early on in this journey, she recalls learning that a person is born with a soul “rich and full”; over time, it disintegrates. If the person is fortunate, they will turn themselves around, “retrieving those lost bits of his soul, one piece at a time.”

Ding Zitao’s descent into hell, which she experiences first as a fall in which she feels “all of the bones in her body cracking,” and then as an ascent up “row after row of lines,” is harrowing. On one level, her in-laws learn that soon they will be paraded in a denunciation session that will end, in all likelihood, in executions. Observing the eerie calm of the family meeting, Ding Zitao recalls that she had

witnessed a scene like this before. When you are standing there on that platform facing the villagers’ insults and attacks, the only thing you hope for is death. It is difficult to imagine the degree to which you need to harden your heart in order to get to a place where you still want to go on living.

This strand of the novel constitutes both a journey into the interior of China’s twentieth century and a very personal reckoning with a severed self—a consciousness that has, for the better part of a lifetime, survived by forgetting. The elder Ding Zitao found peace with a loving husband and a beloved son; she knew poverty, hard work, and deep loneliness. The younger Ding Zitao is destroyed by the agony of remembrance. Her mother tells her that death brings an end to suffering. “But,” her mother continues, “there is another way. If you can erase your memory, you’ll never know that you were once in pain.”

The question at the epicenter of Soft Burial is simply: What happened? What happened to Ding Zitao, her family, village, and country? The characters often turn to words like “fate” and “chance” to explain the horrors they face, but do these words offer consolation because they camouflage deeds carried out by their neighbors and fellow citizens?

Qinglin and Zhongyong were children during the Cultural Revolution. Like many of their generation, when the political campaigns ended, they left their home provinces in search of better lives. Qinglin, now a manager for a real estate developer, is fascinated by the coexistence of the environment and human life, and the boundary between outer and inner worlds. He reflects on how individuals

maintain their privacy and independence, achieve freedom and feel at home in their own skin…. What kind of overall environment could allow people to experience beauty, what else people might seek in life besides a comfortable home.

In the mansions they visit, Qinglin and Zhongyong see remnants of the private wealth that was once carefully concealed in remote areas. Organized violence emptied these homes, some of which were several hundred years old, but their exteriors, designed to blend into, and be shrouded by, the environment, are preserved like the skeletal remains of ancient creatures. Zhongyong believes that only dwellings that become “one with nature can stand a chance of being preserved over time.” He seems to be referring not just to buildings but to political structures and systems of belief; he and his students discuss how after the Land Reform Campaign, private wealth, accrued over generations, didn’t simply vanish; it became the foundation of state wealth.

The campaign destroyed local power centers. Tenant farmers and laborers who had lived at the mercy of their often brutal overseers suddenly found themselves in an upside-down world. The shock released decades, and in many cases generations, of pent-up misery. Landowning families were subjected to struggle sessions and collective punishments. They were beaten, starved, tortured, and executed. Some of the wealthy were guilty of unspeakable crimes; some were killed in petty feuds; some were tortured and murdered for no reason at all.

Around two million people were murdered, though some estimates run higher. Cruelty in the name of justice appeared to wipe the slate clean, but turned out to be just the prologue to ever-widening purges. In Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958–1962 (2012), Yang Jisheng observes that even as land redistribution significantly decreased the numbers of the poor, subsequent campaigns divided “middle peasants” into further subclasses, ensuring that a class of people remained readily available to serve as scapegoats or political enemies.2

In the life of a nation, perpetrators and victims coexist. They are bound together, if peace holds, in a shared geography and social structure. Soft Burial’s force arises from its insistently interconnected threads. Lives that form a unity never fully glimpse the ways they have been knotted together. The novel makes no claim to conveying ultimate truths; there is no moralizing, only a continuous dialogue. For Zhongyong, attention—to others but also to architecture, landscape, vanished histories—becomes a way of belonging; without it, people are alienated from their environments and become disturbed. But Qinglin accepts this disturbance as a small price to pay for stability, which seems to require looking away; his parents, he knows, wanted him to have a “carefree and relaxed life.” The murdered and lost, he argues, “should be allowed to become one with the earth.” Qinglin voices what many will feel about the horrors of the past: “I don’t want to know anymore.”

The phrase “soft burial” mourns those who could not receive a proper burial, whose remains were treated merely as waste. Some believe that such a burial, a body pushed hastily into the ground, without a coffin or even a shroud—the physical counterpart of inadequate remembering—prevents the soul from finding peace; reincarnation will be impossible. The novel makes clear that for Ding Zitao, forgetting was survival. Qinglin, thinking of his friend Zhongyong, adds another layer to this divide: “I’ve chosen to forget, while you have chosen to leave a record. But once you record what happened, how will I ever be able to forget?” Meanwhile the novel itself acts as a site, however small, however incomplete, for remembrance.

Soft Burial, like The Running Flame, another of Fang Fang’s novels newly translated into English by Berry, is notable for how it documents the lives of women who, as Fang Fang writes in the novel’s afterword, “shouldered the heaviest burden and the deepest pain, and yet, in the end, their lives seemed so inconsequential, as if they had never even existed in this world.”3 The Running Flame is a concise and lacerating depiction of a young woman who, after years of brutal beatings by her husband, runs away to remake her life. She finds hope in pragmatism: “Since she couldn’t have any of the things she really wanted, why couldn’t she at least have money?” But in defending this tenuous freedom, she commits a brutal act of vengeance.

The subject of both novels is the individual self molded, remolded, surviving, or being consumed by cataclysmic change. Fang Fang marks these shifts as they occur in the consciousness and subconsciousness of different characters, and she is attentive to how these shifts create their intersecting realities. Taken together, they construct the fabric of society. Her awareness of this entanglement also resonates throughout her lockdown diary: “Let all of us in Wuhan leave behind a collective memory of what happened.”

Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary is Michael Berry’s chilling account of the campaign that destroyed Fang Fang’s name in China and threatened her life. It is a rigorous examination of a stunningly efficient disinformation campaign, untangling how millions of voices seemed to unify, almost overnight, against a single target. The book, as Berry writes, is also a “gesture of preservation.” While translating Wuhan Diary, he was “continually haunted by the shadow of disappearance.” Not only were Fang Fang’s diary entries scrubbed from the Internet in China, but “hundreds of articles and posts about the diary were also erased without a trace.”

This disappearance grew to encompass not only words in support of Fang Fang, but also, months later, some of the posts and publications attacking her. Berry felt a responsibility to record the infrastructure of this disinformation campaign—constructed as it was from millions of posts, stories, essays, messages, and comments—given the ease with which our present technologies, often in the hands of governments or corporations, can erase such evidence.

Among the most striking aspects of Fang Fang’s voice are her sympathy and sheer stubbornness. In her lockdown diary she is like an older sister who, without wanting to alarm you, is urging you to take precautions. She challenges officials and others in positions of authority, but she is asking for something basic: that those who put politics and career ahead of human life should pay a price. The entries read primarily as a place to process, in real time, sixty days that were completely without precedent. When many were searching for information and hope, millions found solace in the persistence of her voice.

As the tide turned against Fang Fang, the celebrated novelist Yan Lianke permitted one of his lectures to be published. On February 21, 2020, he told his students at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology:

Imagine this: the author Fang Fang did not exist in today’s Wuhan. She did not keep records or pen down her personal memories and feelings. Neither were there tens of thousands of people who were like Fang Fang and who would send out loud cries for help via their mobile phones. What would we have heard? What would we have seen?4

Fang Fang, to the surprise of many, has not recanted or broken down. She has said that she will not leave her country. She has demonstrated a courage that, frankly, is astonishing to witness. The hope Fang Fang seems to articulate is both simple and powerful: a refusal of discontinuity. On February 17, 2020, in her lockdown diary, she wrote:

Yesterday’s post on WeChat was deleted again. Besides helplessness there is only helplessness. Where can I share this record of my life in this besieged city?… To observe, to reflect, to experience, and, ultimately, to set my pen down to paper and write. Don’t tell me this is a mistake?

A question, an assertion, and, finally, an intimate address to the reader, for whom the words might already be disappearing from the screen.