Deadly Quiet City
Stories from Wuhan, COVID Ground Zero
by Murong Xuecun
2022
Deadly Quiet City is a journalistic account of the 76-day lockdown of Wuhan in early 2020. This was a hard one for me to read, because my father died of covid, but it felt important too.
Murong traveled from his home in Beijing to Wuhan shortly after the lockdown ended in early April. He conducted interviews allowing him to report 8 people's stories. He was shadowed by the police. Another citizen journalist is arrested and disappeared, as is one of Murong's interviewees. He fled Wuhan to write in secret, handed his manuscript off to a trusted friend to smuggle out of the country, then he left the country as well. As far as Murong knows, he can't return to China without being arrested.
Each of Murong's accounts includes certain shared markers of time - the start of the lockdown on January 23rd, the Chinese New Year on the 25th, the death of whistleblower Li Wenliang on February 7th, and the Chinese Communist Party's subsequent efforts to transform him a popular hero who defied the government into a loyal Party hero, the cherry blossom season in late March, the lifting of the most severe travel restrictions on April 8th.
The first account in the book is based on an interview with a doctor at Wuhan Central Hospital, who knows by late December that there are an unusual number of pneumonia patients, with a new disease, that can spread from patient to caregiver, and that the CCP is censoring any mention of this information, both on social media, and even in any official hospital documents. The doctor himself gets sick, is forced to work while sick, fears he is infecting patients, and eventually barely survives his own infection.
Most of the people Murong talks to are cornavirus survivors, or people who lost a family member to the virus, or both. A wife loses her husband, a young man his elderly father, a mother her adult daughter. In each case, their condition or the condition of their loved one is made worse by the CCP's efforts to prevent the spread, not of the virus, but of information. In each case you can see how they became radicalized enough by what they experience to risk talking to Murong.
In many cases, it seems that the government official with the most proximate authority is perfectly content to let someone die without treatment, their biggest concerns are that the death be quiet, that it not be counted as covid, and that the surviving family members don't talk about it afterward. After the hospitals are overfull, hundreds are sent to "isolation centers," warehouses where they are provided only food, water, and a cot, but no medical care. When these centers get too much attention, the CCP empties them by sending in wave after wave of bureaucrats to each send home the healthiest remaining patients, until none are left.
Murong also talks to a man who drives an illegal motorcycle taxi, who provided invaluable service transporting people around Wuhan during the lockdown, when public transit was shut down, and taxis and private cars were forbidden except to the police and Party members.
And he talks to a woman much like himself, who smuggled herself into the city during the lockdown to try to conduct interviews, share information, and provide aid. At one point before Murong spoke to her, she was arrested and spent over a week in solitary confinement, in the dark, with her hands and feet shackled to the floor, eating and drinking from bowls, and lying in her own excrement. It was her second arrest that prompted Murong to flee the city.
I don't know if a more open or honest government could've prevented the global spread of Covid-19, but it's clear that China didn't even try to. (The WHO, the CDC, and the Trump administration bare similar guilt for similar reasons in my view, though by the time they got involved, it was already too late.) At every possible decision point, the CCP, from Xi Jinping down to the neighborhood committees, chose to hide and suppress and censor information, and to harass and arrest and persecute anyone who tried to speak up or tell the truth.
Hospital staff were forbidden to wear PPE because that would create the appearance of a cause for concern. At one point covid test results were classified as state secrets, with doctors not authorized to see them. Causes of death are falsified to keep the numbers down. Over a month of inaction, in the lead up to New Years, when people traveled to and from Wuhan, when the only thing government did was to keep the disease a secret. People who had their social media posts deleted, their accounts canceled, who were visited and followed by the police, for saying what happened to them.
Even with my small online footprint, with my insignificant readership, I presume I would receive the same treatment if I lived there, under those rules.
If I read another book about covid in China, it will probably be Wuhan Diary by Fang Fang, a first-person account interspersed with interviews, originally published on social media. Fang's translator has been harassed and targeted online by some mix of sincere patriots and paid trolls, which is presumably why Murong's translator remains anonymous.
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