Portraits of Wuhan | The Paper

A man with salt-and-pepper hair in a three-piece suit, a woman in a full-body protective suit wearing a cross-body purse and a big shopping bag on her shoulder, a barber donned with a DIY back-facing breathing tube for work. These are people photographed by Zhong Ruijun in the streets of Wuhan in early April, around the time the city reopened. Zhong has extensive experience photographing celebrities, but he thinks people who are not trained to pose for photos reveal more of themselves in front of his camera.

Coming Home to China During the Pandemic | iFeng

International travel amid the pandemic is stressful and expensive. And yet since mid-March, hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens living abroad have returned to China, braving a dwindling number of international flights, expensive flight tickets, and tighter travel and transit restrictions across the globe. Depth of Field’s Yan Cong made one such journey, flying from New York to her home in Beijing in late March.

A Grandmother Fortifies Herself against COVID-19 | iFeng

Photographer Pang Hai went to visit his grandmother in Beijing before Chinese New Year on January 23 and decided to stay with her for the initial period of the coronavirus outbreak. He witnessed and documented an unusual Chinese New Year; his grandmother had asked the rest of the family to stay away. Visual coverage of COVID-19 has mostly focused on medics and empty streets, but this photo story—its moody images saturated with warm color—shows us what it’s like to take on a personal battle against the virus as an 81-year-old.

The Sixth Floor: Wuhan Critical Care Unit | Esquire China

This 33-minute documentary by Chen Weixi for Esquire China presents the perspective of a team of medical workers from Nanjing, a government dispatch to the Guanggu branch of Wuhan’s Tongji Hospital on February 9 to treat COVID-19 patients. 17 medical teams from six provinces set up wards at Guanggu, adding 850 beds to the hospital’s capacity. Nearly as soon as the Nanjing team arrived, desperate patients were pounding on the door of their new ward, begging to be admitted.

Wuhan Diary 2020 | Weibo/YouTube

During the two months of lockdown in Wuhan, the outside world had limited reliable information about conditions on the ground there, as reporters, especially those from international media, struggled to gain access to the city. Many locally-based videographers and vloggers filled the void with personal video diaries. Among them is the whimsically-named vlogger “Spider Monkey Bread” (“蜘蛛猴面包”), who now has almost 5 million followers on Weibo and 23,000 followers on YouTube.

Wuhan: January 23-February 23 | The Paper

This gallery offers a glimpse of the transformation of Wuhan, hinting at the city’s irrepressible vitality even under lockdown. The two photographers, Wu Wei and Ke Hao, capture both the changed activities and the moods of a wide swath of the city’s populace: deliverymen unloading boxes of cabbage, masked women exercising outdoors, exhausted medical workers, and even patients in various stages of their encounter with the virus. In the photo above, an elderly woman rests on a stool near Jiqing Street, which bustled with food stalls selling local specialities before the pandemic hit.

Mask Hunter | Tencent Video

In April, the documentary “Mask Hunter” captivated Chinese netizens, attracting millions of views. From March 5 to 18, the filmmaker, Wu Dong (who goes by Hua Zong in the video), followed Lin Dong, a 30-year-old Chinese businessman from Guangdong province, as he went to Turkey to try to procure the raw materials necessary for the production of medical-grade face masks, and commission factories to produce the masks. Wu details Lin’s ostentatious and risky business endeavors.

East Asia Forum

Publication Logo Header: 

East Asia Forum is a platform for analysis and research on politics, economics, business, law, security, international relations, and society relevant to public policy, centered on the Asia-Pacific region. It consists of an online publication and a quarterly magazine, East Asia Forum Quarterly, which aim to provide clear and original analysis from the leading minds in the region and beyond.

Based out of the Crawford School of Public Policy within the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, the Forum is a joint initiative of two academic research networks: the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research (EABER) and the South Asian Bureau of Economic Research (SABER).

East Asia Forum is edited by Shiro Armstrong and Peter Drysdale. The views expressed in this forum are those of the individual authors and do not represent the views of the ANU, EABER, SABER, or the institutions to which the authors are attached.

East Asia Forum publishes twice daily. A weekly lead article is published every Sunday evening, and a Digest is sent to subscribers every Monday morning. EAF content is peer-reviewed and articles are checked for factual accuracy and edited to conform to style conventions. East Asia Forum is cataloged and archived by the National Library of Australia.