Book Review: The Wuhan lockdown

It was in 1919, more than 100 years ago, that the Irish poet W.B. Yeats wrote ‘The second coming’, of which the most quoted lines are probably Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. Today, a century later, somehow, these words seem to resonate uncomfortably well the times we are living in. War, climate change, geopolitical tensions, a pandemic: life has become saturated with uncertainty and instability. How to make sense of our current times? What task is left for us, academics? In my reading of Guobin Yang’s new book on the Wuhan lockdown, the answer is that we need now – maybe more urgently than before – detailed, empirical, site-specific studies to grasp what is going on. Or, at least, to try our utmost to grasp the current conjuncture. Such works steer away from easy generalisations; instead, they present us with ambivalences, contradictions, if not paradoxes, and as such refuse to give convenient answers. Yang’s study is a well-researched analysis of the Wuhan lockdown, drawing on an elaborate online ethnography that includes diaries, WeChat groups, WeChat moments, news reports, poems, interviews, Sina Weibo postings, policy documents, press conferences, and so on. While circumstances forced such an approach – the author could not enter China for obvious reasons – the result is both an exemplary study of the possibilities of online research methodologies as well as an empirically and theoretically rich account of the starting months of the pandemic. Building on his previous work, Yang convincingly draws on ample case studies to guide us through the start of the pandemic, roughly from December 2019 to April 2020, zooming in on one city, Wuhan. Allow me a very brief, and therefore incomplete, overview of its nine chapters, with some more reflection on the conclusion of the book. The first chapter focuses on the month before the lockdown, showing how formalism (xingshi zhuyi 形式主义) perpetuates official culture in China. This results in an obsession with appearance, an image management that in the end led to a delayed response to the outbreak. Chapter 2 looks back onto internet culture in China over the past decade, in conjunction with the change in leadership. It shows how platformisation in China has a distinct logic in which ‘[t]he dialectics of party-line domination and bottom-up practices are intricate’, (p. 38) dampening the contentious landscape of the Chinese internet. Chapter 3 zooms in on the mobilization of resources by the state to implement its policies, including the use of loudspeakers, reminiscent of older times, but also blunt force and the pivotal role played by community