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An award-winning Chinese author who kept an online diary about her lockdown life in Wuhan is facing death threats after agreeing to publish her journal in foreign languages. ...

She wrote about her fears, but also about politically sensitive topics such as overcrowded hospitals turning away patients, mask shortages and relatives’ deaths.

“A doctor friend said to me: in fact, we doctors have all known for a while that there is a human-to-human transmission of the disease, we reported this to our superiors, but yet nobody warned people”, she wrote in one entry.

“We have reached the latest understanding that the risk of sustained human-to-human transmission is low”, Li Qun, the head of the China CDC’s emergency center, told Chinese state television on January 15.

The United States government angered China when it said it was exploring the possibility that the virus was accidentally released from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, after it was revealed that the wet market, which China quickly blamed for the spread of the virus, did not sell bats.

A Nobel Prize-winning virologist this week said that China’s claim that the virus originated in the wet market in China is “a beautiful legend”, and that it was obvious that the virus was developed in the Wuhan city laboratory, which has specialised in the coronaviruses since the early 2000s.

Fang Fang’s diary of a Wuhan in lockdown have led multiple of her posts to be deleted. Her account on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent to Twitter, was blocked temporarily, she said.

After she decided to release her diary in the West, she revealed that she received death threats on social media, and is now worrying about her and her family’s safety. One person publicly urged her to kill herself or risk being attacked. Fang Fang added that publishers in China who were interested in her diary, now hesitate to publish her book.

China on March 25 imposed restrictions on the publication of academic research on the origins of Covid-19. Under the new directive, scientific research papers about tracing the origin of the virus must first be approved by the Chinese education ministry before they are published in international journals.