Documents on Democracy

China

As part of the government's "zero-covid" approach to the pandemic, Shanghai's roughly 26 million residents were subjected to a two-month lockdown so severe that it led to food and medicine shortages, and included the forcible separation of children from their parents. Across the country, draconian covid-19 restrictions have been imposed in at least 27 cities, affecting more than 180 million. In a now-censored WeChat post, journalist Lian Qingchuan reflected on the May 31 relaxation of restrictions in Shanghai, while alluding to the June 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. A translation from the Chinese, provided by China Digital Times, is excerpted below:

June is not a time for forgetting….

The end of the lockdown is as muted as the announcement itself: no fervid neighborhood committee announcement, no big show of celebration from the news media, no fanfare declaring victory.

So we wander inexplicably out of our cage, just as we'd wandered inexplicably in.

What did we defeat, in the end? What were we fighting, in the end? What were we resisting, in the end?

No one even bothered to give us an explanation.

So all the blood, tears, sacrifice, and sorrow of the 25 million of us, of Shanghai, over those 60 or 70 or 80 days … what does it amount to, in the end?

Who is it—whose great authority, whose will—that in this modern 21st-century world holds such power over an enormous city and all its people, the fearless power to give or take, to spare or kill?

As our WeChat Moments circulated, the term "end of lockdown" never arose—naturally, it was the same with "city lockdown." So for these past two months and more, the whole of Shanghai was like a clump of roadside weeds, something to be expediently discarded, and now, when it suits, expediently picked up again….

We might be able to believe that the disaster is now past, and limp into the future with our newly restored spirits, but if we choose to forget, there will always be another disaster lying in wait for us.

Am I wrong? Haven't we seen enough disaster already?

In his 1989 film "Crimes and Misdemeanors," Woody Allen said that forgetting is a kind of healing mechanism that humans have come up with. When suffering becomes too great, people deliberately forget their pain in order to survive, to keep on living.

It's just that I'm skeptical. Can forgetting really make us happier?

Shouldn't June be a time for asking questions? If the city was never locked down, then what were these last two months? Who's responsible for losing them? Who shut the hospitals, leaving innocent people to die in their doorways? Who sealed people into compounds and let them go hungry? Who threw away the food donations that the rest of the country sent to help us, and let them rot in the trash? Who took spoiled food and sold it to officials to use as government aid? Who closed the streets, cutting us off from our loved ones, some of whom we'd never see again? Who left people fleeing and stranded, trudging for miles, and sleeping in the open at train stations?

Such lawlessness, imbecility, corruption … we should just forget it?

Shouldn't June be a time for healing? There were so many people who lost work in the lockdown, so many without access to food or clothing, so many businesses fallen into trouble, so many efforts gone to waste, so many things that had been advancing and growing, all crumbled to dust during this thing we can't even call a lockdown.

And now we're just supposed to forget it all?

Forgive me for not being able to put on a happy face right now. Perhaps my heaviness is untimely. After suffering, talk of happiness is laden with guilt. But if that suffering was itself manufactured, then forgetting is shameful.

Having the courage to question, the capacity to remember, and the tenacity to challenge—perhaps these are the mementos we should hold fast to in June. However, I am painfully aware of how very powerless...