Many innocent lives have been lost in the tragic events in China this past month. So far we have not learned a single name of any of them from the Chinese government or its official media. We also never saw news interviews of family members talking about their loved ones.
Those victims included a coach and 10 members of a middle-school girls volleyball team killed in late July when the roof collapsed on a gymnasium near the Siberian border. Despite the public outpouring of grief and anger across the country, the government never released their names. Social media posts sharing their names and tributes to their lives have been censored.
Then there are the people – perhaps dozens, possibly hundreds – who have died in severe flooding in northern and northeastern China in recent weeks. This is the worst flooding in the country in decades. Posts about the casualties, and the hardships people suffered, were censored.
In 2015, 442 people died when a cruise ship sank in the Yangtze River, and last year, 132 died in a plane crash in southwest China. And of course the many, many people who have died from Covid and have yet to be identified.
For the past decade or so, the Chinese government has tightly controlled how the tragedy is reported by the news media and presented on social media. Official media rarely reveal the names of victims. Family members get in trouble with the authorities if they mourn the dead publicly or loudly. This kind of emotional repression on a large scale reflects the party’s expectations of the Chinese people: to play only one role, the obedient and grateful subject, no matter what happens to them.
“After each tragedy, we always hope to find the names of all the victims so that we can read them silently in our hearts and spread them to the public,” wrote an online commentator about the death of the volleyball team. “Unfortunately, this humble request is often difficult for us to fulfill.” The article was censored on a news portal subject to Beijing’s rules.
There is a reason for the enforced removal and silence. In the view of the Chinese Communist Party, its leadership should be celebrated regardless of the circumstances. The victims of public tragedies are inconvenient truths that show that not everything under the watch of the party is glorious. Their deaths are testimony to its failure.
The government’s determination to silence discussion of public tragedies dates back to Mao Zedong. Xi Jinping, China’s current paramount leader, continued the practice.
“He wants to eliminate history by eliminating collective memory,” said Song Yongyi, a Los Angeles historian who specializes in the study of the Cultural Revolution.
The Communist Party has never been honest about the truth of its rule. It does not reveal how many people died during the Great Famine from 1959 to 1961; historians have found evidence that the number ranged from millions to tens of millions. It is not known how many were killed in the bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989, although estimates of the death toll range from hundreds to several thousand.
Members of an organization of relatives of Tiananmen victims, called “the Tiananmen Mothers,” was harassed, monitored and imprisoned. At the top of their demands was “the right to mourn peacefully in public.”
The party relaxed its control somewhat in the 1990s and 2000s, and people like investigative journalist Zhang Wenmin, known by his pen name, Jiang Xue, did their best to humanize their coverage. in disaster.
After the earthquake in Sichuan on May 12, 2008, in which more than 69,000 people died, Ms. Zhang and many other journalists, artists and activists recorded the names and life stories of the dead. They produced some of the best journalism and artistic works in recent memory despite occasional censorship.
“The Chinese public used to be referred to as the nameless ‘masses’ in the party’s media outlets,” said Ms. Zhang. “Now they are back to the ‘masses’ with no name or face in the media.”
But even the limited freedom of expression granted at the time has been removed under Mr. Xi, who has tightened state control over information and how the past is remembered.
“Xi Jinping has made control of history one of his signature policies — because he sees counter-history as an existential threat,” wrote Ian Johnson, an author who has covered China for decades. , in his new book“Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future.”
Mr. Xi has tightened the screws since the Covid pandemic. In April 2020, relatives of Wuhan residents who died were followed by administrators as they collected the ashes of their loved ones.
The government ignored a citizen’s request to make February 6 a day of national mourning to mark the death of Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower who warned the public about the coronavirus.
“We have always known that our speech is not free, our voice is not free. However, we have not realized until now that even sadness and mourning do not belong to us,” wrote Ms. Zhang, the independent journalist, in an article that was widely circulated on WeChat and other social media platforms before it was censored.
A recent one video of the bereaved father of a volleyball player killed in the collapse of a gymnasium in Qiqihar highlighted the harsh reality family members face in public tragedies: Their grief, in the eyes of the government, becomes potential threats to stability of society.
In the six-minute video, the father remains preternaturally composed as he tries to reason with police, doctors and government officials at a hospital. She and other family members want to be allowed to identify their daughters’ bodies.
The father said he understood why the police were at the hospital. “We didn’t cause any trouble,” he said. He said he understood why no official bothered to talk to them. “It’s good,” he said.
Many people said online and in interviews that they cried watching the video because they recognized her “cardiac arrest” and he knew why he behaved like that.
“What would happen if he didn’t control his anger?” asked one author in an article posted on social media. “As a father who has suffered great pain, why does he have to reason with restraint and humility?”
As usual, the censorship machine went into high gear. Social media posts that contained the names of the victims and celebrated their lives and friendships were deleted. So were the photos and videos showing the entrance of their school, where the public sent many bouquets of flowers, yogurt, milk tea and canned peaches, a comfort food for children in northeastern China.
The most recent example of how the government is trying to hide the widespread suffering of the Chinese people is the flooding in northern China.
Areas in Hebei Province near Beijing were hardest hit as authorities opened spillways to partially protect Xiong’an, a city being expanded to serve as an alternative national capital. This is one of the pet projects of Mr. Xi. The The Hebei government said on Thursday that 29 people died and 16 are missing in the flooding. On the social media platform Weibo, some commentators said the government was lying about the casualties; on some posts, the comment function is disabled.
Some social media posts and first-person accounts of the flooding have been censored. Among the blocked posts were complaints by people who said government officials were nowhere to be found when they needed help, and only showed up after the flooding.
In home page of the central government of China, the highest article is a story from the official Xinhua News Agency.
The headline read: “Under the strong and steadfast leadership of Comrade Xi Jinping, the Party Central Committee directs and manages flood control, disaster relief and emergency response efforts in Hebei Province.”
Nearly 4,990 words long, the article lists many things the government has done, including the number of text alerts it has sent. It did not mention how many people died or were missing or displaced. They are the nameless “masses” who, of course, are grateful for the government’s rescue.