WUHAN — The luxurious K11 Art Mall complex in Wuhan is a fashionable place to eat and spend time. Opened in 2021, this all-gold mall is the creation of Hong Kong billionaire Adrian Cheng, who owns several similar shopping malls across China where he displays his personal art collection.
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On the ground floor, on this mild January morning, Wuhanese are sipping bubble tea, seated on Chandigarh-style chairs, the famous model by Swiss designer Pierre Jeanneret — all the rage on China’s Instagram. On the upper floors, there’s an “international cinema city” and even a chocolate museum.
Five years after COVID-19 appeared, life has resumed its course in Wuhan, the epicenter of the pandemic. New metro lines, high-rise buildings and hospitals are being built. Retirees are again playing games of mahjong or cards. Orange sellers are back in town with their vans overflowing with fruit, while grandmothers are seen drying bacon, sausages and fish on the sidewalks. Chinese tourists, meanwhile, are always looking for the best angle to take a photo of the Huanghelou, a golden pagoda that is one of Wuhan’s symbols and overlooks the city.
A 76-day lockdown
On Jan. 23 2020, this industrial metropolis of 14 million people became the first in the world to go into total lockdown. A few weeks earlier, several people at the Huanan food market in the city center had fallen ill, victims of a curious virus causing flu-like symptoms. In Wuhan, like elsewhere, no one imagined that the world would experience a pandemic that would claim more than 7 million lives worldwide.
Five years later, Wuhanese have not forgotten the 76-day long lockdown. The day it started and the day it ended will forever be engraved in their minds. “We had to get tested every 48 hours. And if we were positive, authorities would would seal off your apartment, then the entrance, and eventually the whole building,” explains one resident.
“Fortunately, as Chinese New Year was approaching, families had stocked up,” remembers a cab driver who got through the rough period thanks to an 18,000 yuan (around 2,400 dollars) subsidy distributed by the government. The man was only able to return to work after “liberation” on April 8, 2020 — the word locals use to describe the lifting of the lockdowns.
Erasing this period
Today, certain habits have remained, such as wearing a mask, which is widely used at a time when China is facing an outbreak of metapneumovirus (MPVh), a winter cold. But locals, caught up in the difficulties of everyday life, seem to have moved on.
“We don’t talk about it anymore,” the cab driver says, speeding along one of the 11 bridges spanning the Yangtze River. From now on, Wuhanese are more preoccupied with the economic slump, youth unemployment and the real estate crisis affecting the country. In 2023, Wuhan’s GDP grew by just 6%, compared with an average of 8% before the pandemic, according to official figures.
All are now hoping for better days in the coming Year of the Snake, with Beijing having promised new economic stimulus measures in the meantime. At the Gudesi, an incredible 19th-century temple with the resemblance of an Andalusian palace, many come to make their wishes. They hang red cloth strips on the patio’s grapefruit and orange trees, which at this time of year are bursting with fruit.
As a result, not a single media outlet has reported on COVID-19’s five-year anniversary.
If the Wuhanese have buried this period, it’s also because China doesn’t allow the slightest memory work on the subject. For Beijing, the COVID period is a null and void episode. “They haven’t turned the page, they’ve erased it,” says a foreign source based in Wuhan.
As a result, not a single media outlet has reported on COVID-19’s five-year anniversary. The police intimidate and dissuade any citizens who dare broach the subject with the foreign press. Fang Fang, a writer who kept a diary on the internet about the Wuhan confinement (later published in the West), can no longer publish articles or books, she told Les Echos in 2023.
In the city, only a pedestrian bridge next to the K11 center recalls the moment when Beijing announced a national mobilization, when the rest of China was shouting “Wuhan, jiayou,” encouraging the city to “keep fighting.” The number of doctors sent by each Chinese province to help Wuhan has been engraved on both sides of the bridge.
Rebuilding Wuhan
Elsewhere, all other places linked to COVID-19 have been closed and are gradually being abandoned. In the city center, a stone’s throw from the train station, the Huanan food market has moved to the suburbs. High blue palisades have been installed all around the original building. On the second floor, only the wholesale eyewear market has been allowed to remain, with its merchants selling frames, cases, lenses and ophthalmic equipment.
An hour’s metro ride away, the Leishenshan hospital, one of the two prefabricated hospitals that China had built in a matter of days to cope with the influx of patients, is a gloomy sight. Placed on concrete blocks, the electricity generators are still there, as are the countless remote surveillance cameras.
Rural and industrial, Wuhan, the capital of the Hubei province, is a city of contrasts.
But the weeds have grown and the white buildings, all numbered, are falling in ruins. On the corner of the street, farmers sell their vegetables on the ground. At noon, a client leaves on a motorbike and strapped behind her, a live chicken in a cage.
Rural and industrial, Wuhan, the capital of the Hubei province, is a city of contrasts. Clean and trendy in the former 19th-century European concessions; dirty and dilapidated in the old alleys of the city center; underground in its punk bars; spectacular and immense as you approach the banks of the Yangtze River, which bisects the city and has become a promenade.
Every year, a swimming competition is held at the same spot where in July 1966, according to propaganda, an ageing and endangered Mao Zedong swam 15 kilometers. A “publicity stunt” designed to reassure the population of his health and reassert his power at the very start of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).
A brighter future
Like Mao at the time, Wuhan is now looking for a second wind. It’s not just a question of erasing COVID-19 but also of erasing the image of a grey, industrial city that clings to it. The megalopolis, a historic automotive stronghold with Dongfeng, the former local partner of Renault and Peugeot-Citroën in China, is looking to catch up in electric vehicles.
The Chinese group has been overtaken by more innovative start-ups from Shanghai and Shenzhen. Renault and Peugeot-Citroën have terminated their joint venture with Dongfeng, and the French community in Wuhan — who used to work for automotive suppliers Valeo or the former Faurecia — now counts only around 300 people. The three direct weekly Paris-Wuhan flights launched by Air France in 2012 no longer exist.
The city is expanding into lasers and fiber optics with its Optics Valley.
To make a change, Wuhan has followed Chinese President Xi Jinping‘s motto and is pivoting fully toward new technologies and new industries. The city is expanding into lasers and fiber optics with its Optics Valley, chips with Yangtze Memory Technologies Corp (YMTC), electric vehicles with XPeng and mobile payments with SaoBei, China’s second-largest company in the sector.
The city can also count on Xiaomi, whose founding CEO Lei Jun is from the region. The manufacturer of smartphones and now electric cars has just invested almost 10 billion yuan (around .37 billion) in a new factory for connected gadgets, due to open in Wuhan in 2026. Five years on, the memory of COVID-19 remains painful. But Wuhan is looking to the future.
