Introduction — a diary, a city, and the pressure cooker of early 2020
In late January 2020, as the world was slowly learning the name of a new coronavirus, a bestselling writer in central China began to publish short, blunt dispatches from inside a city under lockdown. Those daily entries — later collected as Wuhan Diary — were intimate, plainspoken and occasionally furious. They kept a record of a particular time and place: hospital corridors turned into triage zones, exhausted healthcare workers, relatives denied visits, the weird economy of rumor and rumor-control that clustered around emergency management. The author, known by the pen name Fang Fang, was not alone in speaking about Wuhan in those weeks. But her diary did something unusual: it turned private grief into public witness at a moment when the country and the planet were trying to make sense of a new catastrophe.
A parallel story — less literary but no less consequential — played out inside Wuhan’s hospitals. Frontline staff faced infections, shortages of protective gear, bureaucratic bottlenecks and an unrelenting patient flow. Under those pressures, talk of leaving the profession, of resignations and of moral rupture rippled through wards and staff WeChat groups. Physicians and nurses fell ill and some died. Health-system strain and staff attrition became both a humanitarian crisis and a political fault line.
This longform piece examines how Fang Fang’s diary and the turmoil inside Wuhan’s hospitals together helped define a turning point in the early pandemic: a contest over narrative, care, blame and accountability. It is a story about the ethical responsibilities of witness, the human limits of health systems, and the way public memory is negotiated when tragedy and politics collide.
1. Who is Fang Fang — the writer as chronicler
Fang Fang is the pen name of Wang Fang (born 1955), a well-known Chinese novelist and essayist who had long written about Wuhan and central China. By the time the 2020 lockdown began, she had an established voice in contemporary Chinese letters — a voice that mixed literary observation with civic concern. When Wuhan closed its borders and public life contracted, Fang Fang started posting short daily entries on social media. Those entries—at once reportage and personal reflection—tracked the practical and moral dislocations of quarantine: a hospital refusing a new patient for lack of beds, the neighboring shopkeeper who kept his shutter down out of fear, the odd courage and small kindnesses people found for one another.
The diary was not a blow-by-blow epidemiological brief; it was a human record. It named caregivers and relatives, described the bureaucratic logjams that left families in limbo, and called out what the author saw as missteps in local official responses. That mixture of on-the-ground detail and moral commentary is what made the diary compelling to readers inside China and, later, abroad. Medical journalists and scholars would later cite it as one of the many contemporaneous narratives that documented how ordinary people experienced the first shock of COVID-19 in a major city. PMC
2. The diary goes public — translation, acclaim and backlash
As the months passed, Fang Fang’s daily posts accumulated into a substantial chronicle. Overseas translators and publishers took notice; English-language editions and translations in other languages followed. International audiences read Wuhan Diary as a rare, immediate perspective on the moment the virus shut down the city. Many Western readers saw in those pages a humane account of suffering and resilience, and the book was praised for preserving testimony from a place and time that would otherwise risk being flattened into statist summaries.
Back in China, the reception was complicated and increasingly fraught. Some readers embraced Fang Fang as a conscience-keeper; others accused her of providing grist for hostile foreign narratives about China’s pandemic response. Anger intensified after translation rights were sold abroad: critics accused the author of profiting from national shame, of helping feed an international discourse that, to some domestic ears, felt punitive or exploitative. The online backlash included sustained campaigns on social platforms that accused the writer of betraying the nation’s image; state and social commentators debated whether her tone was unduly negative or necessary witness. The debate over the diary illustrated a central tension of the early pandemic: whose story gets told, in what voice, and for whose benefit. The GuardianWorld Literature Today
3. Pressure inside hospitals — contagion, shortages, and human cost
Parallel to the literary controversy was an unmistakable medical crisis. Wuhan’s hospitals — especially in late January and February 2020 — faced an enormous influx of patients with a novel respiratory illness. Early reports and later scholarly studies documented high levels of stress, anxiety and physical illness among frontline staff: long shifts, inadequate protective equipment in some places, and the psychological cost of witnessing relentless death. Healthcare workers reported insomnia, depression, and morally wrenching choices about triage and resources. Clinical studies from the period show elevated rates of anxiety and depressive symptoms among nurses and doctors who worked in designated COVID-19 hospitals. JAMA NetworkPMC
Moreover, infection among health workers was itself a major driver of system fragility. Early data indicated significant numbers of medical staff infected; by spring 2020, international press and official Chinese reports recorded the deaths of multiple clinicians, including notable hospital directors. Each death was not merely a tragic individual story; it was a public signal of vulnerability within the very institutions tasked with protecting the population. The mortality and morbidity of healthcare workers fed a broader social fear: if caregivers could fall ill en masse, who could the public turn to? CIDRAPCBS News
4. Resignations, intentions to leave, and the rhetoric of “quitting”
In media accounts from early 2020 and in later retrospective interviews, a recurring theme emerges: the phrase “many doctors are now thinking of resigning.” That language appears in contemporaneous reports and in posts by medical personnel who shared, often anonymously or through limited channels, the emotional calculus facing frontline staff. For many clinicians these were not abstract musings; they were reflections born of exhaustion, fear for family members, lack of protective gear in the earliest days, bureaucratic friction, and the moral distress of watching patients die without traditional rituals or family support.
It is important to be precise: broad, publicly recorded mass resignations of Wuhan hospital staffs were not the dominant historical record in the sense of entire departments walking out. But the idea of resignation — whether as an expressed intention, a temporary leave, or a morale collapse — circulated widely among medical teams. Research on healthcare worker intentions to leave their jobs during the pandemic later showed that perceived risk, burnout and insufficient institutional support were consistent predictors of attrition. In short, a credible and consequential conversation about leaving the profession took place inside many hospitals, and that conversation itself became a sign of crisis. ChinaTalkResearchGate
5. The whistleblowers, the punished, and the mayor who offered to resign
Into this mix came other seismic moments: early whistleblowers who raised alarms, local officials who came under public pressure for perceived lapses, and the cascading politicization of both critique and policy. One of the most poignant symbols of that fraught moment was Dr. Li Wenliang, the ophthalmologist who attempted to warn colleagues about a SARS-like cluster in December 2019, was reprimanded by local authorities for “spreading rumors,” and later died of COVID-19. Li’s death sparked public mourning and anger, fueled debates about transparency and the cost of silencing medical voices. His case crystallized questions about accountability and the rights of professionals to speak out about public health threats. Wikipedia
Simultaneously, political pressure mounted. Local leaders in Wuhan faced intense scrutiny for their early handling of the outbreak. At one point, media reports documented that Wuhan’s mayor offered to resign after admitting failures in the early response. A mayoral resignation, or even the offer of one, is a dramatic political event in any city; in Wuhan’s case, it signaled the public salience of pandemic governance and the potential consequences of mismanaged emergency response. These ruptures — whistleblowing, deaths among clinicians, and political concessions — together helped transform what had begun as a localized health crisis into a national reckoning about preparedness, transparency and the costs borne by front-line communities. TelegraphSouth China Morning Post
6. How Fang Fang’s diary intersected with the hospital story
Why consider a writer’s diary alongside hospital resignations? The connection is not purely symbolic. Fang Fang’s diary did two practical things: it made visible certain human experiences of the lockdown, and it helped shape the public conversation about how the state and institutions handled the crisis. When a writer of public standing records, day by day, the strains inside the city — when she notes hospitals full of fevered bodies, or relatives being turned away, or the exhausted way a nurse explains a death — those details become part of the shared archive that future historians and policymakers will consult.
For medical staff, the diary was sometimes a mirror. It echoed their exhaustion; it named their grievances. For officials and defenders of official policy, the diary was sometimes a provocation: a public airing of failings that could be read abroad and used to construct critical narratives about governance. The diary thus amplified the moral stakes: healthcare workers who were thinking of leaving saw their suffering represented; the polity that had to respond saw its reputation at stake. In that sense, the two narratives — the one inside hospital wards and the one in the pages of a diary — were mutually constitutive. One documented the human cost; the other shaped how that cost was interpreted and remembered.
7. What “resignation” meant in context — literal departures and social withdrawal
To avoid confusion, it helps to parse the different registers of “resignation” that were present in Wuhan’s hospitals:
- Literal resignation: staff formally leaving their employment. While individual departures certainly occurred, the mass exodus of entire units is not the dominant documented outcome. Many hospitals stayed functional because of emergency mobilization of staff from other provinces and rapid expansion of bed capacity (including the construction of modular hospitals). PMC
- Temporary withdrawal or leave: some staff took sick leave, quarantine leave, or temporary administrative leave when infected or exhausted. That pattern affected staffing levels in the early weeks. ScienceDirect
- Psychological resignation / intention to leave: clinicians voicing a desire to quit later, or expressing disenchantment with the health system and public management; these expressed intentions were an important barometer of morale and predict future retention risk. Research on burnout and intent to leave in healthcare repeatedly showed that such intentions spike during crises and foreshadow downstream staffing shortages. PMC+1
- Social or civic resignation: in the broader citizenry, a sense of resignation about the ability of institutions to protect people — a type of civic demoralization that shapes public willingness to comply with future directives.
Understanding these shades matters because policy responses differ: you address a wave of formal resignations with hiring and deployment; you address the psychology of morale with counseling, better protection and systemic reforms.
8. The short-term fixes — mobilizing medical teams and building hospitals
Faced with staff infection and the immediate threat of capacity collapse, Chinese authorities mounted rapid mitigation measures. Two of the most visible were the mobilization of health workers from other provinces into Hubei, and the construction of makeshift hospitals (the familiar images of fast-built modular facilities that accepted thousands of patients). These interventions — national triage by personnel and a material expansion of beds — were decisive in averting longer collapses of care. They also changed the staffing calculus: while some local staff were sick or exhausted, new teams rotated in to relieve pressure. The influx of external medical teams was a national demonstration of surge capacity, and it showed how central coordination can reshape the staffing landscape quickly in a crisis. PMC
Yet these fixes had limits. The arrival of outside teams did not erase psychological wounds for local workers. It did, however, buy time for protective measures, training in infection control, and the steadying of supply chains for PPE and medical equipment—improvements that reduced the rate of infection among staff as the months progressed.
9. Moral distress, ethics and the frontline calculus
One concept that recurs in accounts from Wuhan’s hospitals is moral distress: the anguish clinicians feel when they know the morally appropriate action but are constrained from taking it due to institutional or resource limitations. Early in the outbreak, clinicians reported agonizing choices: rationing care, limiting family access, or seeing standard practices—like offering end-of-life family visits—suspended for infection control. Those situations produced ethical pain. Moral distress is a known predictor of staff turnover and burnout. In that regard, the talk of resignation is not simply about fear of infection; it is often about the erosion of the professional conditions that make clinical work meaningful. Addressing resignations therefore requires ethical as well as material responses—clear triage guidelines, psychosocial support, and channels for staff to voice concerns without retaliation. JAMA NetworkResearchGate
10. The public debate — narrative control and the politics of testimony
Fang Fang’s diary and the conversations about hospital resignations fed into a larger public debate: who gets to tell the story of Wuhan, and with what moral authority? For citizens inside and outside China, the diary appeared to some as a brave act of bearing witness; to others it appeared as an airing of national wounds in ways that could be weaponized in international discourse. The hospital stories—about infections, deaths and potential resignations—raised similar tensions about the politics of testimony. When medical staff speak candidly, they risk official censure; when writers amplify those tales to global readers, they risk domestic backlash.
This debate is not unique to China. Across the world, the pandemic exposed a common dilemma: the need for transparent reporting about institutional failings versus the temptation to manage narratives in ways that prioritize stability or national image. The Wuhan moment was an early, vivid example of how those tensions could become intense and sometimes personal.
11. Aftershock: policy reforms, staff supports, and the longer term
In the months and years after the initial wave, health systems everywhere confronted the same problem: how to translate emergency fixes into durable improvements. Wuhan’s experience generated several lines of policy response that are worth noting:
- Improved infection-control training and PPE supply chains to reduce staff infection risks. The early PPE shortages were a primary driver of moral panic among health workers; fixing supply logistics was therefore central to re-establishing trust. CIDRAP
- Psychological supports and counseling for frontline staff. Recognizing that moral injury and burnout require more than rest, some hospitals expanded mental-health services and offered longer leaves and rehabilitation. PMC
- Legal and institutional protections for whistleblowers and medical voices. The case of early whistleblowers—most famously Li Wenliang—generated public debate about how authorities respond to professional warnings in a moment of emerging crisis. Reforms and public statements about the treatment of such warnings were part of the aftershock politics. Wikipedia
- Surge staffing mechanisms. The rapid redeployment of personnel from other provinces became a model for emergency surge capacity in future planning.
These responses, while imperfect, are the policy equivalent of trying to heal the hospital system’s emotional and structural wounds. They are aimed at reducing the conditions that lead to intent-to-leave and frank resignation.
12. Memory and meaning — how societies remember medical trouble
If we step back, the interplay between Fang Fang’s diary and the hospital story reveals how societies shape collective memory. There are many possible public memories of Wuhan’s early pandemic: valorizing frontline workers, celebrating national mobilization, naming and mourning individual losses, or pointing to governance failures that should not be repeated. Each memory comes with its own politics.
Fang Fang’s diary helped make a particular type of memory more durable: not merely a record of statistics but a catalogue of ordinary grief, administrative friction, and human vulnerability. The hospital resignations story—whether consisting of departures, leaves, or intentions—provided a second strand: it emphasized that institutional failure is often simultaneous with personal sacrifice.
Together, these sources resist simplistic accounts of heroism or collapse alone. They suggest that the pandemic’s moral complexity will continue to be contested in public culture and policy debates.
13. Global lessons — staffing and testimony in pandemic preparedness
The Wuhan episode offers practical lessons for planners in other countries:
- Protect the protectors. Ensuring PPE, reasonable shift lengths, and infection control training reduces the primary drivers of fear and resignation. CIDRAP
- Support mental health proactively. Burnout prevention is as important as physical protection. Early psychological intervention reduces downstream attrition. PMC
- Create channels for transparent reporting. Whistleblowing mechanisms and protected channels for frontline observations can surface risks early and reduce the political cost of truth-telling. The Li Wenliang case is a painful reminder of what happens when early warnings are suppressed. Wikipedia
- Plan surge staffing in peacetime. Training and interprovincial (or interstate) agreements for rapid deployment reduce the need for ad hoc, risky solutions. PMC
- Respect narrative plurality. Encourage multiple forms of testimony—clinical reports, patient stories, and cultural accounts—so that policy can be informed by both technical and human evidence.
These lessons are not uniquely Chinese; they echo through pandemic commissions and health-system reviews globally.
14. Reappraising Fang Fang in later years
As the acute phase receded and the virus became a historical subject, cultural and academic reassessments of Fang Fang’s diary emerged. Some literary critics argued that the diary performed an essential civic service: preserving the texture of ordinary life under extreme constraint. Others remained skeptical, worried about how transnational publication might be interpreted politically.
Whatever one’s view, the diary is now part of the archival record of the pandemic’s opening chapter. It offers future researchers qualitative data about fear, governance, and daily life—complementary to epidemiological curves and policy timetables. That archive function is crucial: official records and statistical summaries cannot fully capture what it felt like to be in a hospital hallway at midnight or to watch a neighbor’s funeral procession pass without the usual rites. The diary fills that gap.
15. Hospitals as political sites — the stakes of resignations
Hospitals are not just clinical spaces; they are political institutions. When staff talk of resignation, the story resonates with citizens in a way that purely technical metrics do not. A resignation signals moral reckoning: it says that the conditions under which clinicians can do their work have eroded. That is why talk of leaving is politically potent. It forces policymakers to confront the human cost of system failure and the need for institutional reforms that extend beyond temporary triage.
In Wuhan and elsewhere, medical resignations or the intent to resign became a mechanism for public accountability. They demanded, in their way, that authorities not only count beds and ventilators but also count the people whose labor sustains those resources.
16. Epilogue — what was the turning point?
Was Fang Fang’s diary itself a turning point? Was the talk of hospital resignations the decisive event that changed national policy? The historical record is more complex. The turning point is better understood as an intertwining of signals: the visible human stories (diary entries and staff testimonies), the empirical signs of stress (staff infection and deaths), and the political responses (surge deployments, construction of temporary hospitals, and public discussions about accountability). Together they forced a shift in public conversation.
The diary and the hospital stories functioned as complementary pressure points. One shaped public understanding and memory; the other exposed immediate operational vulnerabilities. Their collision made the crisis both morally urgent and administratively unavoidable. That collision pushed the pandemic from a localized emergency into a subject of national scrutiny, debate and, eventually, reform.
Final reflections — testimony, systems and the human work of repair
The arc from the first diary entries to the months of hospital turbulence is a lesson in how pandemics are lived: as a mix of intimate suffering and institutional strain, of literary witness and epidemiological urgency. Fang Fang’s diary offered a human lens on a city in lockstep with an overwhelmed health system where staff contemplated leaving under unimaginable pressure. Neither element alone explains the pandemic’s trajectory; together they illuminate why truth-telling, worker protection and institutional responsiveness are all essential to both public health and public memory.
If we take one lesson away from this intertwined story, it is this: societies cannot have healthy health systems without caring for the people who keep them running, and they cannot honor sacrifice without preserving testimony about what was suffered. The diaries and the resignations are part of that mutual testimony—evidence that, when systems fail or bend under stress, ordinary human actors carry the moral burden. Remembering their stories is both an ethical obligation and a path toward building more resilient systems for the future.
Note on sources and caution: This piece synthesizes contemporaneous reporting, peer-reviewed studies of healthcare worker experiences, and widely reported cultural commentary on Fang Fang’s diary and the Wuhan response. Key public accounts of Fang Fang’s diary and its reception were reported in major outlets and reviewed in academic commentaries; studies have documented elevated anxiety, depression and infection risks among frontline staff; and widely reported incidents (such as the death of Dr. Li Wenliang and expressions of political pressure on Wuhan officials) were central to public debate. The narrative above avoids asserting mass, city-wide staff walkouts (which are not supported by mainstream documentation) and instead focuses on documented intentions, leaves, local departures and the moral force of “resignation” as a concept. For those interested in the contemporaneous reporting and clinical studies that informed this narrative, I used public news reporting and peer-reviewed research published in 2020–2021 as primary background. PMCThe GuardianWikipediaJAMA NetworkSouth China Morning Post
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