Wuhan

"Poet and dissident Liao Yiwu has long been an outspoken critic of the Chinese government. Imprisoned and tortured for a poem on the Tiananmen Square massacre, Liao subsequently fled his homeland. His literary reputation in exile continues to grow with a documentary novel about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. Blending fact and fiction, Wuhan tells the story of Kcriss, a citizen reporter who travels to Wuhan when social media rumours of an unexplained outbreak of pneumonia begin to circulate. There, he finds a job in a funeral home, where he bears witness first-hand to the disparity between official figures and the reality on the ground. Wuhan is an episodic novel, weaving close examination with imaginative speculation. With compelling force, it links the unchecked spread of the deadly virus to an older plague: authoritarian propaganda. It’s compulsory reading for anyone who wants to understand the black comic absurdity of the initial response to COVID-19, the courage of Chinese citizens determined to speak for truth, and the tragic price they can pay for it."  -The Sydney Morning Herald (Cameron Woodhead and Fiona Capp)

"In Wuhan, Liao chronicles the beginnings of the pandemic in China, which he tracked from Germany. He obsessively downloaded scientific and medical materials, as well as the tide of Chinese social media posts and official and citizen journalism that swamped the internet and, for a few early weeks, seemed to outrun the capacity of Chinese censors to block it.

It is tempting to speculate that Wuhan was written as a documentary novel because the author could not go and report the events he describes. The novel was published in Germany in January 2022 and, as the author explains in an epilogue and several appendices to the English edition, it provoked discussion on the boundaries between fiction and documentary, with its mix of reportage, real and fictional characters.

Wuhan opens with an episode involving a Kcriss Li, a 25-year-old former CCTV news reporter turned citizen journalist. Kcriss Li exists, and the dramatic scene Liao describes was livestreamed and can still be found on YouTube. In it, Kcriss had parked near the Wuhan Institute of Virology, now famous for its research into bat viruses and for the gain-of-function experiments performed there. As he drove away, he was followed—and it quickly became a car chase. He recorded his return home and his terror as the police worked their way through the building looking for him. His online audience commented liberally throughout. Kcriss was eventually detained and forcibly quarantined, briefly reappearing two months later to post a single video which his fans judged to have been recorded under duress.

In Liao’s novel, Kcriss has been inspired by the example of the novelist Milan Kundera, one of the author’s heroes, to give up his safe job with China’s official media in favour of investigating the unfolding events in Wuhan and the origins of the virus, described in an appendix to the novel as the “ultimate taboo”. The main plot is carried by Ai Ding, a fictional historian who tries to return home to Wuhan from Germany to celebrate New Year. Wuhan is locked down and, through Ai’s communications with his wife, we follow the unfolding tragedy, the official lies and cover-up, the desperation and deaths of the citizens, all interspersed with journalistic and official reports. As Ai attempts to make his way across an unrecognisable landscape, a disaster on individual, national and international scales is relived through a dramatic, hybrid narrative."  -Prospect Magazine (Isabel Hilton)