Can’t tell you." Because the doctor’s hospital has to focus on coronavirus cases, its revenue from charges for other kinds of treatment dries up. Bizarrely, security guards at the entrance may see the results, but when he asks them about a particular person’s test, the answer is: “That’s secret. Dispatched to a busy isolation station, where people with suspected covid are sent, he finds that the results of virus tests are treated as classified. The doctor finds himself in a baffling new world. It is a harrowing collection of stories, grippingly narrated. Each of his chapters focuses on one of eight protagonists, ranging from a doctor at a small community hospital to the unlicensed driver of a motorcycle taxi and another citizen journalist, Zhang Zhan, whose daring efforts earned a four-year jail sentence. Mr Murong’s book takes a different approach. Ms Fang’s journal was written from home, drawing on information provided by her extensive network of contacts in Wuhan. She hints that the trolls may have government backing. She describes how “ultra-leftists", enraged by her criticisms, bombard her with online tirades. Like Mr Murong’s, it is scathing about the government’s response, including the initial attempts to suppress news of the disease’s spread. Published in 2020, it is a translation of her posts to Chinese social media in that period. Mr Murong’s book follows another by a prominent Chinese writer about Wuhan’s shutdown: “Wuhan Diary" by Fang Fang (whose real name is Wang Fang and whose home town is Wuhan). In the preface he says that recalling his efforts, undertaken while dodging the Chinese police, still gives him a “heart-sinking, bitter taste of terror" even though he is now “out of their reach". Before its publication-last year in Australia and now elsewhere-he fled abroad. Yet one author, Murong Xuecun (the pen name of Hao Qun), managed in 2020 to interview people about their experiences of Wuhan’s 76-day lockdown at the start of the pandemic and to write a book, “Deadly Quiet City". Several citizen journalists have suffered the consequences of reporting independently: imprisonment, police intimidation to keep them silent, or simply being “disappeared". It has taken much bravery to produce them. This enhances the value of the few independent accounts that Chinese people have written of how the pandemic unfolded in their country. Victory will be the only permissible verdict. There will be no open investigation into where the virus came from, or whether better safety precautions-say in a lab or a wet market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan-might have prevented a global disaster. There will be no public inquiry in China into how officials handled the outbreak or the harsh and protracted lockdowns in city after city. The story of how covid emerged late in 2019, and of how the Chinese government responded, is another that will be clouded in Chinese minds by disinformation and lies. Some sympathise with the party’s decision to crush what were in fact peaceful demonstrations, believing the official narrative that large riots had broken out. Likewise, many who have grown up since the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 are confused about what happened. Without a free flow of information to help them identify the real culprit, most Chinese bought the party line. But poor harvests were officially blamed on natural disasters. Millions died in the famine triggered by Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. The party is a master at controlling and confusing memories.
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