48 The New York Review
widely trusted as upright and frugal. If
they collect money, people trust that it
will get to the needy. The result is that
people not only give but are excited to
do so: it makes them feel part of a na-
tional effort.
But aren’t groups like the nuns sup-
posed to turn into centers of opposition
to the state? In Communist Poland, the
Catholic Church helped shelter govern-
ment opponents, as did the Protestant
churches in East Germany and writers’
circles in Czechoslovakia.
Mattingly writes that this can hap-
pen in China, citing the much- reported
example of Wukan, a small town in
southern China where citizens in 2011
used the structures of local religious
life to replace corrupt Communist
Party control over the town. They
turned to lineage societies—people of
the same surname who worship their
common ancestors in a private tem-
ple. The heads of each lineage society
formed a council of elders that ran the
town during the period when the party
was essentially driven out.
Most of the time, however, civil so-
ciety groups help Chinese officials
implement government policy. In ana-
lyzing three major state objectives over
the past decades—expropriating rural
land, family planning, and limiting pro-
test—Mattingly shows how the state
can cultivate, co- opt, or infiltrate these
groups, using their standing in society
to achieve its goals without the usual
tools of repression.
Again the Taoist nuns are a good
example. For nearly three decades,
local officials have supported their ef-
forts to rebuild their temple, which was
destroyed by Japanese troops during
World War II. The nuns are apolitical
and support state priorities, such as in-
stalling a flagpole in front of the tem-
ple and holding a flag- raising ceremony
on national holidays. In exchange, the
state has helped the temple expand,
by, for instance, sending a retired ge-
ologist to analyze a nearby mountain
that the nuns want to adorn with a pa-
goda (the conclusion was that the soil is
very sandy and they should sink deep
pylons for support, something they
hadn’t considered). The state also sent
an academic to help the nuns write the
temple’s history, as well as a video team
to produce short films for social media,
which they used for fund- raising.
Across China, the state is engaged
in tens of thousands of similar efforts.
All are part of its highly capable bu-
reaucracy, the same one that drew up
the pandemic flyers and organized
their distribution through thousands
of apartment management compa-
nies. Not all of these projects are suc-
cessful, but overall they enhance state
capacity in ways that often surprise
outsiders. During the pandemic, out-
side reports on religious involvement
focused on two underground churches
that the state prevented from sending
aid to Wuhan—a hard- line policy that
undoubtedly alienated many hundreds
of worshipers—but missed the tens of
thousands of worshipers who were able
to donate through official religious
groups like the nuns, helping to build
shared pride in being part of an epic
national struggle.
This adept co- opting of civil soci-
ety highlights another insight in Mat-
tingly’s book: the state’s reliance on
interpersonal rather than high- tech
surveillance. While the latter gets ex-
tensive attention, it is only being imple-
mented slowly. Instead, what explains
the power of the Chinese state is its
well- organized bureaucracy:For the time being, China still
mostly relies on human, not digi-
tal, tactics of authoritarian repres-
sion and control. Even in an era of
heightened control under Xi Jin-
ping, infiltration and co- optation
remain key tools in the state’s
arsenal.Much more is at stake here than con-
trolling a pandemic. In the twenty- first
century nations will have to deal with
the consequences of the earth’s envi-
ronmental degradation—rising sea lev-
els, wildfires, and other ravages caused
by climate change, as well as pandem-
ics. These will require a competent
state that can also harness civil society.
China’s strengths may give it a deci-
sive advantage in responding to such
challenges. If dikes need to be built to
protect the coastline, a state that rolled
out a national high- speed rail network
in a decade can probably do it, aided
not only by engineers but also a pop-
ulation willing to make sacrifices. If
floods and fires ravage its hinterlands,
China will be able not only to mobilize
firefighters but also to resettle people
away from vulnerable areas, something
that Western countries have had a hard
time doing—think of how the US has
failed to discourage people from living
in fire- prone areas of California or on
coastlines susceptible to hurricanes.
And when a virus spreads, the Chinese
state can launch a public health blitz-
krieg, drawing not only on its own re-
sources but also on inspired citizens.
Competency, however, has a shelf
life. Once a project is completed, peo-
ple tend to take it for granted. That
raises the question of how to maintain
legitimacy over the long term. Like a
bicycle rider, does the Chinese state
have to keep moving forward to avoid
falling?On December 31 of last year, the
Wuhan writer Wang Fang—who goes
by the pen name Fang Fang—opened
her family chat group on the social
media app WeChat to find a message
from one of her brothers. He was for-
warding an essay called “Suspected
Case of Virus of Unknown Origin in
Wuhan (SARS).” Fang Fang’s brother
is a professor at a science and technol-
ogy university in the city and usually
well informed, so she paid attention.
He followed up a few hours later, say-
ing that specialists from the National
Health Commission had already ar-
rived to investigate. Soon after, other
friends began forwarding videos of
the Huanan Seafood Market, which
was rumored to be the center of the
outbreak. In a series of social media
posts, which have now been published
as Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a
Quarantined City, Fang Fang wrote
that as they were discussing this on Jan-
uary 1, her brother was unfazed:He didn’t think it would turn out
to be anything to be too concerned
about. He also didn’t think that the
government would block informa-
tion about what was happening;
that would be a true blow to the
people. My thoughts on the mat-
ter were pretty close to my broth-
er’s. I figured that there was noway the government would censor
news about something so import-
ant. How could they possibly stop
the public from learning the truth
about what was happening?The next three and a half weeks were
decisive for billions of people around
the world. In the end, the government
did exactly what Fang Fang and her
brother thought impossible: it blocked
official channels of information, al-
lowing rumors to cause panic among
residents of the central Chinese me-
tropolis. More importantly, the virus
jumped from Wuhan to cities around
the world. If officials had been more
forthright, it might never have spread
beyond Wuhan. Countless lives could
have been saved.
But is this assessment realistic? Crit-
ics say yes, pointing to whistleblow-
ers such as the doctors Ai Feng and
Li Wenliang, whom local officials si-
lenced. But a counterargument is that
these concerns were initially vague.
Taking concrete action required reli-
able knowledge about a new virus. It
took experts time to figure out that it
could be transmitted from person to
person and did not simply spread from
animals sold at the seafood market. If
Chinese officials dithered, they were
no different from elected leaders in
Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US, who
had weeks of advance notice and still
did next to nothing. Holding China to
an idealized standard of action is ap-
pealing but unfair.
These conflicting lines of thought
run through Fang Fang’s diary. At
sixty- five, she is a writer who has found
a way to coexist with the regime. She
recently wrote a brutal novel called Soft
Burial, banned in China, that explores
the aftereffects of the Communist Par-
ty’s violent land reform movement of
the 1940s and 1950s. She is not a party
member but joined the government-
run writers’ union. Although some of
her work is censored, she enjoys the
perks of being inside the system—she
writes in her diary of people bringing
her New Year’s gifts and of television
stations coming to her for acceptable
quotes about the lockdown. Her criti-
cisms are not strident; she reflects none
of the panic in January, when doctors
in Wuhan were screaming on social
media for equipment. Like a typically
pampered Chinese intellectual, she
doesn’t sully herself with fieldwork—
there are no dispatches from hospitals,
morgues, or even a walk through the
ghostly city center.
Yet this moderate tone makes Wuhan
Diary an honest take on the pandemic
in China. Foreign editors and publish-
ers often want “authentic” Chinese
voices but end up preferring foreign-
based Chinese writers because they
conform to expectations, writing, for
example, much more explicitly about
Communist Party control. Fang Fang’s
diary is nuanced, careful, and soft. It
is the work of someone not trying to
challenge the system but simply trying
to express in real time what she felt.
Translated by the veteran sinologist
Michael Berry in a matter of weeks,
it is too long, not quite sharp enough,
and lacking in the deeper analysis that
comes with distance. But because of all
that it is a genuine voice from the whirl-
wind, a book that will be referred to in
the future when people want to under-
stand how many Chinese felt about the
pandemic.At first celebrated on social media
when she began to publish online on
January 25, Fang Fang ended up being
denounced there as inadequately pa-
triotic. That arc says much about how
authorities manipulate public opinion.
Many of her critics were probably gov-
ernment trolls, but the feeling I got in
China was that after initial panic most
people accepted the government’s ef-
forts, especially as reports of the pan-
demic came in from abroad, where the
bungling was many times worse. By
March, Fang Fang’s critique of govern-
ment censorship seemed passé.
That opinion turned on Fang Fang
shows the artificial nature of China’s
consensus. Not all public opinion is
manipulated, but it’s often warped in
a way that makes the culture wars of
the United States appear mild. In open
societies, conflicts come up like pus in
a wound, whereas in China they fester
below the surface. Over the past few
weeks my social media feed has been
filled with completely delusional views
of how the pandemic has progressed in
the West, with many (I would say most)
Chinese believing that it has been an
unadulterated debacle in rich coun-
tries, while the Chinese state has kept
its people safe. Differing opinions are
pilloried, and obtaining basic facts is
hard. Not for the first time, I’ve felt that
my Chinese friends are living in a par-
allel universe where certain basic as-
sumptions about the world are turned
on their head.
This is mirrored in so many facets of
daily life that it is hard to list them all.
Talk to most Chinese about minority
areas in the country, such as Tibet and
Xinjiang, and they will have almost no
understanding of international con-
cepts such as self- determination. Bring
up Hong Kong and most people will
angrily denounce pro- democracy pro-
testers there as dupes and traitors. The
disconnect is sometimes so strong that
it’s easy to lose heart. Many people in
the West have done so, leading to a
sense that engagement with China has
been a failure, and that confrontation is
now the only alternative.
But people like Fang Fang still exist
and show that China isn’t a monolith.
I would argue that collectively they
present a real challenge to the govern-
ment—not in the classic civil society
sense of people who are likely to orga-
nize opposition; the party, as Mattingly
argues, is too savvy to allow such op-
position to form, and officials are much
better at stifling dissent than they were
a couple of decades ago. Instead, Fang
Fang represents a significant group of
people in China who see clearly the
flawed nature of their state and who are
willing to express these reservations in
the most direct way they know.
Consider her analysis of how local
officials hid the pandemic early on.
While the party- led media blamed a
few local officials for not responding
quickly enough to the virus, Fang Fang
saw Wuhan’s problems as systemic.
Without competition that might result
from elections or some sort of partici-
patory political system, China’s systemleads to disaster; empty talk about
political correctness without seek-
ing truth from facts also leads to
disaster; prohibiting people from
speaking the truth and the media
from reporting the truth leads to
disaster; and now we are tasting the
fruits of these disasters, one by one.