The lockdown of Wuhan in 2020 was an extraordinary historical event in modern world history. One of its remarkable features was that residents in Wuhan documented their everyday experiences in diaries and shared their stories on social media. Guobin Yang’s book The Wuhan Lockdown recounts the drama of the lockdown by drawing on these diaries. Prioritizing the voices of ordinary people, The Wuhan Lockdown presents a galaxy of scenes and characters against broader social and historical contexts. To narrate a pandemic that was still unfolding poses multiple challenges. To have theory in a pandemic, or not to? How to have theory, or how not to? This talk introduces the book, discusses its narrative strategies, and reflects on the meaning of social science representation in times of a public health crisis and global geopolitical conflicts.

Guobin Yang is the Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication and the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he directs the Center on Digital Culture and Society and serves as deputy director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary China. He is the author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online (2009), The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China (2016), and The Wuhan Lockdown (2022). His 2-volume Dragon-Carving and the Literary Mind (2003) is an annotated English translation of the 6th-century Chinese classic of rhetoric and literary theory Wenxin Diaolong. He has edited or co-edited seven books, the most recent being Pandemic Crossings: Digital Technology, Everyday Experience, and Governance in the COVID-19 Crisis (2024, with Bingchun Meng and Elaine Yuan).