China Daily Global Edition (USA)
FOREIGNER SENDS RUMORS PACKING IN WUHAN
Lebanese student paints true picture of life in lockdown
At midnight on Jan 22 last year, Adham Sayed, a Lebanese student studying at a university in Wuhan, Hubei province, received an email informing him of the lockdown due to be imposed in the city the next day.
Ten minutes later, he got an email from his elder sister, asking him to return home to Lebanon.
“Come home. We will pay for your trip. You can go back when the crisis is over,” his sister’s message stated.
Sayed, who is studying for a doctorate in quantitative economics at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, did not comply with the request.
In the hours that followed, instead of trying to book a flight, he busied himself viewing material about the novel coronavirus outbreak.
In a later interview he said: “I had no inclination to go home. I just naturally stayed.”
On Jan 23, like most people in Wuhan, the Hubei provincial capital, he remained at home to begin life in isolation.
Working from his four-room apartment, Sayed discovered that rumors directed at Wuhan were being spread on social media platforms overseas. Some of these messages even contained false video footage, blaming Wuhan residents for eating bats that caused the outbreak.
Sayed, who was shocked by the rumors, said, “I have lived in Wuhan for five years and I have never seen a single restaurant that cooks bats, or any market that sells them.”
On Jan 28, he decided to hit back at the rumors by posting news about the situation in Wuhan on his Facebook account. The information was released in Arabic.
“Wuhan is facing a terrible situation, but the country is still full of confidence. We have ample food and no pricing monopoly. The big supermarkets are operating smoothly to ensure daily food supplies. I am a foreign student, but I feel as if I am a citizen of the nation. My university has taken good care of me,” Sayed posted.
“Life has changed, but everything is going smoothly. The government is doing its job and the whole nation is supporting Wuhan. I am honored to fight together with those who neither discriminate against us, nor forget us. Victory belongs to us.”
Successful efforts
When he posted his remarks, Sayed never expected them to attract such a big response.
He received more than 1,000 comments, over 5,000 “likes”, more than 1,000 new followers, and the remarks were forwarded some 1,500 times.
“I spent a whole day replying to the comments. I was glad to see that so many people in the world cared about Wuhan. I think they really cared about lives in the city. The problem was that there was little reliable information and people were easily misled by certain Western media outlets,” Sayed said.
His rumor-breaking efforts proved a success, as the false video footage about Wuhan were later confirmed to have been shot in Indonesia and the Pacific island nation of Palau.
Inspired by his efforts, and to address doubts voiced in the comments he received, Sayed aired a livestream broadcast.
Using a face mask and headphones, he took to the streets of Wuhan to interview people in what is believed to have been the first such broadcast transmitted in Arabic during the lockdown.
For the session, Sayed bought four 5-liter bottles of water from a shop for his interviewees. “The shop owner charged 10 yuan ($1.60) for each bottle, the same price as before the pandemic emerged. It was amazing,” he said.
The broadcast, which refuted rumors of price hikes in Wuhan, was widely reported and quoted by Arabic- and English-language media outlets. It painted a true picture of the situation in the city — that there were ample food supplies, stable prices and good supervision from the local authorities.
As a result of the broadcast, Sayed became a celebrity on social media platforms.
He compared the combined efforts made in Wuhan during those dark days to a warrior fighting a battle.
In the book he wrote later, he states: “Since the outbreak emerged, quite a few voices have been hostile to China, especially some media outlets in the United States and some of its allies, which used the epidemic to badmouth China. It was like a war against both the epidemic and rumors, and I could be a source of real news.
“Some of my ammunition came from enemy hands. I saw the rumors online, gathered the truth from reliable sources to break them, and told it to the whole world in this way.”
At times, the enemy “ammunition” was so strange that it was not worth refuting.
Some US websites claimed that the novel coronavirus only infected Asians, while others referred to a “biological war launched by the US”, or said that the outbreak resulted from a possible leak at a laboratory.
Sayed carefully selected rumors that had been spread the most, refuting them one by one. “Some of these reports were more like Hollywood fiction. We have seen enough of them and they are nothing new to us,” he said.
Zhang Yanqiu, professor of communication and deputy dean of the Institute for a Community with a Shared Future at Communication University of China, said Sayed had chosen a smart way to fight rumors, because most of the biased reports in Western media outlets were contradictory.
She said that people in the West, long drained by such reports, might gain a stereotyped impression of China. By telling his own stories, Sayed had helped greatly in correcting the situation, as well as pointing out the shortcomings of some Western media outlets.
Sayed hit the headlines in his home country. On Feb 3 last year, he accepted an online interview with OTV, a television station based in Lebanon, in which he said his compatriots “felt good in Wuhan”.
On Feb 21 last year, when the first COVID-19 infection was reported in Lebanon, he updated his Facebook account, detailing the most effective ways to fight the pandemic.
He adopted an open attitude toward global media outlets, aiming to give them the truth about the situation in Wuhan, and to relay this information to a wider audience.
In the first two months of last year, Sayed gave more than 100 interviews to global media outlets. Since then, the number has exceeded 500, and is continuing to rise.
In his Facebook updates and interviews with media outlets, he shared a wide range of local information with the world.
He told how the Huoshenshan and Leishenshan emergency hospitals were built in Wuhan within days, how local stadiums served as cabin hospitals for patients with slight infections, and how medical workers from across China worked with local colleagues to fight the pandemic.
On April 8, the lockdown ended in Wuhan. Two days later, Sayed gathered the items he posted on Facebook during this period and decided to write a book based on them.
“I faithfully recorded what happened in Wuhan during the lockdown. I hoped to let the whole world know the truth here, and tell what we had done to fight the pandemic,” he said.
“I wanted to let the world know about China’s efforts and the contribution it made.”
In June, his book, Firmness: A Foreigner’s Wuhan Diary, was published in Arabic in Lebanon. In December, it was published in Chinese by Contemporary World Press in China.
Wei Yinping, editor of the Chinese version, said she “felt a responsibility to publish it.”
“It is more than just a record of a person’s life. It is a record of how Wuhan people fought in the most difficult days and how foreigners with a sense of justice stood with us,” Wei said.
Dong Guanpeng, a member of the national group of COVID-19 experts, spoke highly of Sayed’s diary and the book based on it. “This helps us observe and look back on the global reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic in a more rational way,” Dong said.
Zhang admired the fact that foreigners living in China were writing books about the country.
“It will be easier for people in the Arab world to accept this book, because it is written by a compatriot in their language. It is a good trend for foreigners in China to share their experiences, and we hope they do this well,” she said.
During Spring Festival, Sayed stayed in Wuhan to work on the dissertation for his doctoral studies in the new semester.
He continues to update his Facebook account.
“We will fight on to clear all the rumors”, he said. “There should be no place for them.”