Officials try to erase the memory of a massacre, again
A man killed 35 people in Guangdong province on Monday. Authorities' top priority is making sure no one talks about it.
Plainclothes workers remove flowers that had been left in honor of the victims (Photo by HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images).
Imagine the scene outside a school 48 hours after a mass shooting. There would be news cameras, bouquets of flowers, lit candles, shocked survivors.
Two days after a man drove a van through a crowd in Zhuhai, China, killing at least 35 and injuring 43, officials were busy removing such signs of mourning. Their goal was to eradicate evidence that the domestic terrorism attack ever took place, in a misguided attempt to force a forgetting onto the city’s two and a half million residents. The sports complex, where parents take their children and groups of elderly locals dance in coordination, likely currently bears little to no hint of the incident, which is not yet a week-old.
The top-down campaign to minimize, sanitize, and dissolve Monday’s attack is designed to speed up resolution of people’s unavoidable shock and distress. Officials are doing what they can to make this happen: scrubbing the internet of relevant posts, clearing out would-be mourners, throwing away fresh flowers. The initial police report didn’t even mention the deaths.
Most of the cliches about grief are centered on time. “It doesn’t get better but you get used to it.” Witnesses in Zhuhai are being instructed to expedite their route to acceptance and move on. Forget.
But collective, public grief tends to have a long shelf life. Tragedies that touch entire communities leave most people with single digit degrees of separation from victims. Close proximity spurs acknowledgement. As one bystander told the AFP, "What happened wasn't a small incident. We should remember those who passed away and not be so cold.”
According to The New York Times, a delivery driver agreed to spend the entire day bringing flowers to the sports complex, as he had heard other drivers weren’t willing to go there. Too risky. Reuters reported the perpetrator, surnamed Fan, was unhappy with the results of his divorce settlement. That’s obviously not the end of the story, but it might be the last we hear of it.
According to Xi Jinping’s official statement, a working group from the central government was deployed to Zhuhai, which is in southern Guangdong province, to “guide” the handling of the situation. Local authorities will be expected to defer to the central government’s preferred approach. “Prevention and control should be combined,” Xi said, to address risks and contradictions in order to “ensure social stability.”
As unlikely as facilitating mass memory loss seems, the Chinese Communist Party has pulled it off, however imperfectly, before. I’ve written about its tactics for “regulating history” and how they’ve been applied to bury mass events like the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre and a beauty influencer’s seemingly accidental reference to it.
But both self-imposed and state-mandated silencing can come in fits and starts. The attempted rapid erasure of the massacre in Zhuhai coincides with social media influencer Li Ziqi’s online reappearance. Li got famous for her paradisal videos of an unrealistically perfect life in the Sichuanese countryside. Her content was seen as soothing for urban workers navigating stressful life and labor conditions in China and elsewhere.
Her account also happened to fit Chinese authorities’ vision for “rural revitalization” and conveniently contributed to the “positive energy” internet regulators want to see permeating Chinese cyberspace. She stopped posting in 2021, around the time it became clear she was in a legal dispute with her marketing agency. In the years since, she has appeared at official events with provincial officials, who have named her “ambassador of Sichuan’s farming culture.” Now she is back, posting the same type of content that made her popular in the first place, but this time with the clear support of the government.
A still from Li’s video. (Photo credit: Li Ziqi.)
That support is an invaluable asset in an environment where one might accidentally cross a line – perhaps by remembering something she should have forgotten.
Both Li’s alignment with local officials keen to boost rural China’s image and the central government’s operation to quash a four-day-old memory of a deadly attack exist because of a set of conditions that characterize contemporary China. Its massive population is looking for tranquilizers to distract from social, economic, and even political stressors. People have to look for such content within an information ecosystem that is not only unfree, but sticky in its inconsistency and resolute in its punishments.
Li’s first video after her extended hiatus opens with her rushing awake, stuffing her feet in her flip-flops, and running outside to catch the sunrise. She then takes on the project of refurbishing her grandmother’s wardrobe, interspersed with images of scenic Sichuan and scenes where she shares respectful rapport with elders.
You can’t blame Li for protecting herself by cozying up with officials, primarily because her co-optation allows her to maintain a fan base of tens of millions of people. But she’s not just serving authorities; she’s also giving the viewers what they want to see and briefly inhabit — an impossibly simple life.
The genre precludes unpredictability. In its steadiness, it finds friends from both the censorious state and the general public. Her success is not necessarily a bad thing. But it’s safe to say that if “social instability” shows up in her hometown, violent or otherwise, Li — who runs one of the most prominent platforms in the country — will not be covering it.