People hear about terrible things that happen and try to learn about and remember and commemorate the victims. Then the Chinese Communist Party and its legions of just-doing-my-job censors act to wipe out memory—or at least all signs and records of the memory (“China clears memorials, censors reports after car ramming in Zhuhai kills 35,” France 24, November 13, 2024).
Officials in southern China ramped up security on Wednesday at the site of one of the country’s deadliest mass-casualty events in years, snuffing out makeshift memorials to the 35 people killed when a man drove a car into a crowd at a sports complex.
On Monday, the 62-year-old man surnamed Fan ploughed a small SUV through a gate to the complex in the city of Zhuhai and into crowds of people as they exercised on the roads inside, according to police.
An initial police statement said people had been injured but did not mention any deaths, and videos of the attack later appeared to be removed by China’s internet censors….
Since Tuesday night, journalists had observed people placing candles and flowers near the site of the attack to commemorate the victims.
But cleaning staff removed the memorials in the early hours of Wednesday, with some telling AFP they were acting on an “order from the top”.
Why try to limit awareness of what many already know, that the man who plowed his SUV into the crowd killed a lot of people?
The totalitarian state’s endless game of pretend has been going on for decades. As in other lands, the rulers of China seem to believe that the people must be made to believe that only good things, or what the Party calls good, happen in the communist utopia. Even if the ideal of perfect universal ignorance of truth and perfect universal acceptance of official claims can never be reached, the rulers feel that it is better for society and safer for themselves if this ideal is approached as closely as possible.
In struggling to hide any facts that don’t fit its fictions, the Party does manage to delude many people. But not as many people as it would like or as thoroughly as it would like.
