There's a touching article here [in Chinese] on the reading out of the names of the dead after the Beijing rainstorm. "The departed are also citizens, and their names are joined with the city." I've written about this before, but the shift from mourning en masse to commemoration of individuals is important. The dead are much easier to dismiss in large numbers.
This is part of what's made the Wenzhou high speed rail crash, and these Beijing storms, far more potent than the 2008 earthquake was in terms of criticism of the government. The number of dead is small enough to be comprehensible and to give individual stories bite, so the "in the face of great suffering, great compassion" government line doesn't get any hold. They've also been far closer to places that matter, whereas Wenchuan pretty much just devastated a backwater stretch of countryside. And, of course, Weibo was not a thing in 2008, whereas now it has, according to a report I just read but can't find, 88 percent penetration among 20-somethings.
Comments