Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary

“Translation, Disinformation and Wuhan Diary is a powerful account of Professor Michael Berry’s unlikely encounter with COVID-19 when it first broke out in China in 2020. This book is far more than a personal story of a transcultural adventure and its frustrating outcome. It touches on a wide range of political and ethical issues from journalistic communication to linguistic rendition—and their political stakes—that concern all of us during a time of plague.” 

— David Der-wei Wang, Edward C. Henderson Professor of Chinese Literature, Harvard University, USA and author of Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China



During the early days of the COVID-19 health crisis, Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary provided an important portal for people around the world to understand the outbreak, local response, and how the novel coronavirus was impacting everyday people. But when news of the international publication of Wuhan Diary appeared online in early April of 2020, Fang Fang’s writings became the target of a series of online attacks by “Chinese ultra-nationalists.” Over time, these attacks morphed into one of the most sophisticated and protracted hate Campaigns against a Chinese writer in decades. Meanwhile, as controversy around Wuhan Diary swelled in China, the author was transformed into a global icon, honored by the BBC as one of the most influential women of 2020 and featured in stories by dozens of international news outlets.


This book, by the translator of Wuhan Diary into English, alternates between a first-hand account of the translation process and more critical observations on how a diary became a lightning rod for fierce political debate and the target of a sweeping online campaign that many described as a “cyber Cultural Revolution.” Eventually, even Berry would be pulled into the attacks and targeted by thousands of online trolls.


This book answers the questions: why would an online lockdown diary elicit such a strong reaction among Chinese netizens? How did the controversy unfold and evolve? Who was behind it? And what can we learn from the “Fang Fang Incident” about contemporary Chinese politics and society? The book will be of interest to students and scholars of translation, as well as anyone with special interest in translation, US-Chinese relations, or internet culture more broadly.

Michael Berry is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA, USA. He is the author of Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008), Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), Boiling the Sea: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Memories of Shadows and Light (2014), and Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2022); the editor of The Musha Incident: A Reader on the Indigenous Uprising in Colonial Taiwan (2022) and co-editor of Divided Lenses (2016) and Modernism Revisited (2016).