 Warm welcome to everyone to SOAS China Institute Monday seminar. My name is Dr. Xiaoning Lu. I'm a reader in modern Chinese culture and the language at SOAS. It's my great pleasure to introduce to you our guest speaker today, Professor Guo Bin Yang. Dr. Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, United States. At the University of Pennsylvania, he also directs the Center on Digital Culture and Society and serves as Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. Professor Guo Bin Yang studies social movements, digital culture, global communication, and contemporary China. He has published numerous scholarly articles and books. Here I just want to mention three books that came out with the Columbia University Press. The first one is the award-winning book, The Power of the Internet in China, Citizen Activism Online, which was published in 2009. The second, The Red Guard Generation and the Political Activism in China, which was published in 2012. The last is Professor Yang's latest book, The Wuhan Lockdown, which just came out this year. As we hold this event, there is a new nationwide search in COVID cases in China. Swift lockdowns, travel restrictions, and mass testing are being enforced in various districts in the city of Jilin, Shenzhen, and Shanghai. So Professor Yang's talk today echoes of the past during the Wuhan lockdown, is particularly timely. I'm sure that you'd like to ask many questions following Professor Yang's talk. I'd like to invite you to type your questions in the Q&A box. Please feel free to introduce yourself so that we understand where the questions are coming from. If you prefer to remain anonymous, please let us know and we will respect your wishes. Without further ado, I'd like to give the floor to Professor Yang. Thank you, Professor Lu, for your very kind introduction. And thank you for inviting me to talk about my book. It's really a great pleasure. And I also want to thank everybody for attending. I know it's evening time in London. It's about time to be off work. So I really appreciate this opportunity and the conversations I had. So what I'm going to do is briefly introduce the book and then focus on one particular theme, underlying theme, I would say, echoes of history. So I've been giving a good number of talks about the book. It has a variety of themes. And I found that I really couldn't cover everything in one talk. So I've come up with a strategy of giving some broad introduction to the book and then focusing on one particular theme at one particular occasion. So today is the echoes of history. I thought one way of introducing the book is to share the result of a test I took not long ago. And the test is called Page 99 Test. It's one of the websites. Page 99 Test is a website associated with a campaign for the American reader, which is a campaign to promote the culture of book reading. And it has been around for a long time. It introduces new books. And the editor invites authors to basically apply this Page 99 test to their book. And the idea of the test is borrowed from a sentence, a statement attributed to the British novelist, Ford Maddox Ford. And the statement is this. Open the book to Page 99 and read. And the quality of the hope will be revealed to you. So when the editor of the website asked me to apply the test to my book, I accepted the invitation at the risk of failing it. But I do think that Page 99 of the Wuhan lockdown shows quite well a few features of the book. So what I'm going to do is to read my response to the test, basically my exam paper in response to the test. And this is published on the website, Page 99 test. It's only a few paragraphs. Page 99 of the Wuhan lockdown is in the middle of telling the story of Anye, a 26-year-old professional who worked in Beijing. She had traveled back to her hometown, Wuhan, to spend a lunar new year with her family. Back home, she caught COVID and was hospitalized in a temporary shelter hospital. Her 89-year-old grandmother, who also had COVID, was in another hospital for patients with severe symptoms only. When her grandma was put in ICU care, Anye requested to be relocated to her grandma's hospital so she could look after her. Her request was granted, and she joined her grandma. Anye posted diary entries on social media every day in which she provided updates about her grandma's condition as well as descriptions of life in the hospital. Sadly, her grandma died on March 6, 2020. Anye had promised her mother that she would go home together with grandma. Now, she wrote, I did not finish my job. Page 99 captures several key features of the book. The Wuhan lockdown is not a conventional academic book. It experiments with a new approach of storytelling, one that focuses on the presentation of things and characters. Very much a book of characters tells the stories of a galaxy of individuals in Wuhan in their daily struggle to cope with the COVID pandemic. Some stories take up several pages. Others are as brief as just one sentence. The story of Anye is one of the longer character portraits and probably one of the most memorable. Although the character portraits in the book cover both men and women, there are more stories of women than men. Women played a prominent role in the lockdown as health care workers, caregivers, volunteers, and activists. Other notable women characters in the book include a gong-beating woman, a swearing auntie, several feminist activists. Dr. Ai-feng, who was colleague of Dr. Lee Wenliang who died of COVID, found the artist and so forth. And I'm very pleased to have a women's story on page 99. Finally, Anye's story highlights another notable feature of the Wuhan lockdown, the use of online pandemic diaries to construct my account. Anye wrote two diaries during the pandemic. One posted on social media, the other published in print. I made use of both. Indeed, although I used many different types of materials in writing the book, online diaries are the main primary sources. I cited at least 46 diaries in the book and read and consulted numerous others. Diaries are the ideal documents for understanding the visceral feelings, thoughts, and activities of residents caught in their daily struggle. I'm very glad that page 99 contains several direct diary quotations which convey the voice of one of the characters in the book. So that's a few paragraphs I wrote in response to that test, page 99. I thought the test shows three things. That the book is about storytelling. It is about the stories of ordinary men and women in Wuhan. And it is primarily based on lockdown diaries. So in that sense, page 99 sort of showcases some of the main features of the book quite well. Let me explain a little bit why I chose to focus on storytelling. Instead of, let's say, develop a theory or some concepts to explain what was happening in Wuhan. I think one main motivation for me was to document a major historical event from a botanical perspective. And I started working on this project almost as soon as the lockdown started. Because when it started, I wanted to understand what this might mean not only for Wuhan, but for people in China. And I have families. My wife and I, we both have families in China. And I wanted to read about SARS-2003, which was quite a while ago, but also a major crisis at that time, there were hospitals in Beijing which were locked down in 2003. But I didn't find a lot of material. There were some, but not as much as I wanted. So as soon as this crisis started, I thought what I could do is try to collect all these very rich material, personal writing of all varieties, which was appearing in large quantities every day. And that was one different from 2003. 2003, the internet social media, not as developed was important, of course, at that time. But this time, the amount of personal writing was just unbelievably rich. So I collected these documents. I read them. I followed them closely. And it was also a way for me to follow what was happening in other parts of China, because we were worried about our relatives in Beijing or in other cities. And we have friends in Wuhan. But most importantly, as a sociologist who really I have been very much sort of really interested in studying these kind of personal documents, Professor Lu mentioned my earlier books, in both books, the internet book and the Red Guard book. I made use of personal writing of various kinds of personal writing diaries from the Cultural Revolution letters as well. So these kind of, as soon as they appeared on social media after Wuhan, I realized this was just a wealth of material and it's very precious for social science, for scholar research. So that's one motivation. I wanted to document a major historical event and trying to provide but not perspective in a sense that I was going to make use of a manly diaries and other kind of personal writings, photographs, poems and so on. There are of course, even from the very beginning, official narratives. And those are useful. I follow the news, the press reports, news releases in Wuhan very closely as well. But mostly I wanted to provide a button up story about what was happening in Wuhan. The other reason, well, I should say the second reason was, you know, here in the US, I suppose in Europe as well, media began to cover the Wuhan lockdown also very quickly. And there were some wonderful stories. I remember here, reports filed from international press journalists who were based in China who travel to Wuhan. So some wonderful stories mostly though, I felt that the mainstream discourse about Wuhan in China, especially after March, after we in Philadelphia, we began our own lockdown in mid-March. After that period of time, there was a period when there was a sort of rise of anti-Asian, anti-Chinese discourse partly fanned by some political leaders. And all this language about China virus, kung fu and so on and so forth. And in that process, I felt that the voices of ordinary people from Wuhan are missing from these mainstream stories. And I felt that it's necessary to highlight these voices, to give visibility to stories of these ordinary people. So that's another motivation. I suppose it was an effort to contribute to public discourse about what was happening in Wuhan and in China. And a third reason, I guess, why I focused on storytelling instead of the sort of more analytical or theoretical academic approach was because the event was still unfolding when I started writing. It was still very uncertain. The prospect was uncertain. Nobody knew when even the Wuhan lockdown was going to be lifted. So I felt that as an ethical approach to an unfolding story, I should take a humbler approach, trying to avoid, I tried to avoid developing sort of any overarching theories or concepts or even giving too many explanations or joining two big sweeping conclusions. I think stories out there let the stories speak for themselves. I did try to offer some interpretations and trying to provide a lot of context to these stories. But mostly, I tried to avoid theorizing and focused instead on telling the stories. I did use a few concepts. I mentioned scenes and characters and context. I talked a little bit about why I wanted to focus, I tried to present scenes from Wuhan. The concept of seeing is borrowed from drama, obviously, but it's also used by sociologists, social scientists. A scene is just a very brief event that crystallizes many things. We may argue that behind scenes, we can trace institutional or other structural factors, but mostly, I think, scholars who have analyzed scenes, like music scenes, urban scenes, scenes in social movements have been attracted to this concept because it provides room for contingency. Scenes are dynamic, but they, in many ways, are also unpredictable. So in this sense, this provides somewhat of a non-reductionist theoretical orientation to the presentation of the stories from Wuhan. I think an example is probably necessary at this point. Let me give one example just to illustrate what a scene is like, that I present scenes and characters and why this concept seems to be, to me, a useful way of constructing the stories. So every chapter really consists of a lot of scenes and characters. And let me just choose one example from chapter 3, which is called People's Wall. And I'll come back to chapter 3, People's Wall, because when I come to talk about echoes of history. So many, many dramatic stories in this chapter, and one of which is called Fake, Fake. That's the title of that short section. And the story was really pretty brief, Sun Chun-Lan, Vice Premier, who recently is in use again because of the resurgence of COVID in China. But she was the number one person on the ground basically directing the so-called The People's Wall on COVID. So on March the 5th, 2020, she was leading a group of Wuhan Hubei local cadres on the tour of a residential community. So early March and late February was a particularly stressful period for a lot of the residents in Wuhan. Because at that time, the lockdown, I didn't get to talk about exactly what Wuhan lockdown was like. It was nothing like the kind of lockdown we had here in Philadelphia, right? We could go out any time we wanted to here, of course. But in Wuhan, it was a complete ceiling of the residential communities, which, of course, meant that daily life would become very difficult for the residents. And one of the critical things was grocery shopping. Grocery shopping was challenging for a period of time because you couldn't go out. Every family could have one member going out, checking out of their community every three days. So the community volunteers were supposed to be responsible for delivering groceries. And residents were organizing themselves using WeChat to do group shopping. And that's how they managed most people. But there were occasional issues. And some residents were angry. So this incident on March 5 happened when Premier Sun Chun Lan was touring the residential community. And while she and other cadres were walking in the community, residents from the buildings high up, windows began to shout fake and fake, jade, jade. And what they were talking about was that the residential community, knowing that leaders, these party leaders were coming to inspect today, they pre-arranged for free groceries to be delivered to the residents. So it was really for sure to impress the leaders. But at this point, the voices just came out of the windows from these buildings to people were really angry. And this very, very brief period, really, were recorded. And people posted on social media and became viral. So it became one of the better known, I suppose, one of the best known instance or scenes of the lockdown period. So it was a very brief period. And what happened next was that Vice Premier Sun immediately convened the meeting of these cadres and very seriously told everybody that we got to hear, got to listen to the complaints of the residents. This is a serious matter. We've got to solve their problems. So they moved very quickly to try to resolve the issue. So that was the story of fake and fake incident. So it was a scene in the sense that this was very brief. And but also in the sense when I say that this is a non-reductionist kind of, what does this thing tell us about COVID politics in the Wuhan lockdown period? Or maybe even about Chinese politics more generally. I think we can certainly invoke theories of institutions, party structures, state-society relations, all these familiar concepts and theories in China studies to understand this thing and this will be very useful. But I will also argue that this particular scene of fake and fake could only happen at that moment in that particular place. Was it going to be repeated? We don't know. There was a lot of contingency. People were really angry at that very moment. There were several similar incidents at that time. So I think my approach in presenting this story was really trying to tell the story, describe the story, and try not to offer any theory or try to draw a big conclusion just based on this one scene. So that's one example. And like I said, the book, every chapter has many such scenes. And each chapter, I would say, of course, there are a number of key themes and conclusions can be drawn. But by the end of the book, even though the book has a conclusion, I deliberately try to avoid drawing a big conclusion about what's the meaning of the Wuhan lockdown. I think all these stories add up to really create a very rich picture of the experiences of Wuhan lockdown. But how can we summarize this in one sentence or one theory, one proposition? Maybe, but I try not to. And my hope was that the readers will draw their own conclusions. So I think that's what I'm going to say about why I focused on storytelling and what I tried to do in this book as an introduction to the general sort of structure, design, and content of the book. I'll be happy to go into any particular chapter to share more of the stories in various chapters later on during the Q&A. But let me move to the theme I wanted to focus on today at this point, because I'm seeing the time, not much time left. So echoes of history. I don't have a chapter that is called echoes of history in the book. But this is a theme that runs through many chapters, but at least three chapters where we can see a very clear underlying theme of these echoes of history. And I will share stories from those three chapters later on. But before that, let me briefly explain what I mean by echoes of history. Very broadly, I think of three main types of echoes, historical echoes or historical references and memories. The first type is we can think of them as vocabularies and idioms with very strong historical cultural resonances. If we look at the not just personal stories from the time, diaries and so on, but certainly from official discourse as well, there are a lot of familiar vocabularies. People's War is an obvious example. From made famous by Lin Biao in his long treatise in memory of the 20th anniversary of the victory of the China's war of resistance against Japan. Long live people's war, long live the victory of the people's war. And of course, during the Cultural Revolution, the Red God factions fighting against one another, they were all invoking this concept of people's war. And many other similar concepts, Baowei Zhan, right? Tuzheng, Baowei the Battle of Defense. Xuanzhi also taking Tuzheng, right? Going on the expedition setting off because again, remember that especially in the early period of lockdown, medical teams were being dispatched from various parts of the country to Wuhan. And all of them, before they set off on their journey, either flying or by taking a train, it was common for them to have an old-taking ceremony. It was old-taking ceremony and it was moving, a lot of moving scenes of that kind. Familiar language, Song Wenshen by Mao, Mao's poems farewell to the God of Plague was often invoked in a lot of the online stories. So that's one category of this kind of echoes of history. There is a whole network of vocabularies and idioms which invoke the idea of war, battle, and militancy. And that's an important part of that cultural or social discourse at the time. The second category, roughly, I think of them as contemporary practices during the Wuhan lockdown period which were reminiscent of past experiences or past histories. Some of these examples I gave already fall under this category because old-taking is not new thing during the Wuhan lockdown. I think China over the past several decades has developed a whole repertoire of language and forms of action for crisis management during emergencies and crisis. For instance, the Sichuan earthquakes 2008. Actually, certainly from the SARS period, we can go back to the SARS periods during the SARS period, there was a song called Zhong Zhi Cheng Cheng. A group of celebrities singing a song of Zhong Zhi Cheng Cheng united with something like that, right? Which almost became an anthem of crisis and invoked again and again. That was being that particular song and similar other examples were being repeated again during the Wuhan lockdown. There was the revival of loudspeakers. Loudspeakers, we all know, was a ubiquitous presence during the Mao period in urban and rural areas. And they disappeared for a long time after the reform started because there were new radios and televisions and so on. But in the past decade, actually, the propaganda department in China has quite consciously been reviving this culture of loudspeakers as a form of propaganda, as a media propaganda. And it was revived very quickly during the Wuhan lockdown and used both in the cities and in rural areas. And some of the theorists wrote about their impressions of this. And people would mention, well, this sounds like cultural revolution period. So present practice is reminiscent of the past. That will be one example. Community control as well. The community control that we're seeing in China today from the Wuhan lockdown, but up to now, it's very well organized. It's volunteers, but also consisting of residential community committees, party-led committees, as well as property management committees for these residents. There is a whole network of community governance. That has been sort of taking on some new form, but certainly also reminiscent of the kind of community control from the cultural revolution period. I'll read one story later on when I come to the stories. So this will be the second kind of echoes of history, present practices that are reminiscent of the past, that are legacies of the past, or have continuity with the past. The third category, I will call them historical references, memories very broadly, but there are three kinds, three varieties here. One is memories of pride. Memories of proud moments of the past, historical events. And we mentioned that the concept of the people's war, is part of that language of victory of war, resistance against Japan. But because this was Wuhan lockdown, the battle of Wuhan in 1938 was also involved quite often. It was memories of pride, except that of course the battle of Wuhan in 1938 was the main character, Nationalist army was rarely mentioned, but it was still mentioned at the moment of glory, that it was a major battle that thought it was Japan's invasion with a turning point in the sense in a war. So those were earlier moments of pride, historical events. More recent ones, I mentioned SARS, I also mentioned the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. These are also mentioned quite often. The song, we're going to turn from SARS from 2003, was, you know, you search it just everywhere. And it's kind of a moment of pride again, memories of pride when we overcame SARS, we managed to recover very quickly after the Sichuan earthquake. Let's do the same. So these memories of pride, the second type here, I call the memories of shame, and they go further back, to the Boxer's Rebellion, the crushing of the Boxer's Rebellion, the burning of the summer palace in 1900, and then the Eighth Nation Alliance, and these are historical moments of shame for the Chinese nationals, and these came up often too, and I talked about this in the chapter on COVID nationalism, and I'll read a few paragraphs from them. The third and last category of these kind of historical references and memories are sort of the past as lesson, or as negative example, and in this case, it's the most frequently mentioned example is really the Cultural Revolution, as a negative example of behavior in a number of situations. Again, I think I'm going to mention this, come back to the Cultural Revolution example later on. So that's what I mean by the, from the beginning to the end of the lockdown, all the way to the present, really this people's war on COVID that has been going on for more than 10 years, is really suffused with this vocabulary, this language of war, but a lot of them really are echoes of history, familiar vocabulary, and they have, I think, very powerful effects in mobilizing the public, mobilizing the residents in their daily struggle against the COVID. But at the same time, in some cases, there were negative examples, they also attracted critical responses and our residents, citizens, critical responses to certain forms of mobilization. For instance, the kind of community control, the very tight community control and surveillance that to some, to some extent, they were reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution period. So I really don't, I think I don't have a lot of time left because I plan to have a talk for about 40 or 45 minutes. Let me give a couple of examples from the book, just so we have a sense. This is from chapter three again. Chapter three, again, people's war. Really, I began the chapter by describing the kind of war scenes, war-like scenes after the city was locked down, and I'm not going to read that, but let me read one couple of paragraphs, two paragraphs, and one of which is excerpt from a diary to give you a sense of echoes of history in Wuhan. Page 48. February 2020 was the month when the war on COVID-19 was at its most austere stage. The strict regimen of community isolation was full of hailing and yelling. On February 8th, Xiao Yin recorded an episode brought back to him memories of the couch revolution. He wrote that the community where he lived had been sealed off and the entrance was guarded strictly by three people in full protective gear. Just as he was going to walk out of the entrance, one of the three guards held him loudly to stop and have his temperature taken. This reminded Xiao Yin of his childhood experiences. This is a quote from his diary. When I was small, a kind of cooperative defense and management system was common. We all lived in apartments assigned by work units. There was not enough police force to patrol the community. So a method of people swap was invented. Every household would take turns to take on the responsibility and every day there would have to be a guard at each building. At the same time, the neighborhood committee organized a group of retired grannies and grandpas to patrol the alleys and streets wearing red armbands and carrying a radio. As soon as they spotted anyone idling, they would shout a loud shout, stop, and the person would instantly stop, whether it was a class enemy, an enemy agent, or a petty thief. I think I'm Professor Lu. Shall I stop here? I think my time is up. I'll be happy to share more stories in our Q&A period, but I don't want to take up too much time. Okay. Thank you, Professor Yang, for sharing those fascinating stories and also for performing storytelling for our audience members.