Wang, who is sixty-five, couldn’t focus on the novel she was working on, and, on the third night of lockdown, she typed up a four-paragraph blog entry and posted it on Weibo, a Twitter-like platform, where she has about 4.8 million followers. “I really should start writing about what is happening. It would be a way for people to understand what is really going on here on the ground,” she wrote. Her posts became a daily ritual; they grew longer, her tone more forceful. Almost immediately, the essays drew a large following—some readers professed that they would stay up until a post was published, unable to sleep until they’d read that day’s entry—and also attracted censorship and vicious criticism. In May, HarperCollins published “Wuhan Diary,” an English translation of her collection of lockdown essays.

attached to: Fang Fang's Diary