Traumatized by COVID, but governed by a party that never apologizes

They posted photos of their positive COVID-19 results on social media.}

They described their symptoms as something to celebrate:

fever, cough, fatigue, body aches, loss of taste and smell.

They talked about how wonderful it was to stop fearing being sent to quarantine camps for infections and not having to worry about neighbors being locked away for weeks because of it.

“We will savor the moment when we can get sick‘ the owner of an independent bookstore in Beijing wrote on her WeChat account.

“Let’s protect this humble right.”

Since the government abruptly abandoned its tough “zero-COVID” restrictions last week in the face of unusual protests across the country, large parts of the Chinese public have embraced a new life.

They have been eager to get some of their basic rights back, even if it means the virus is spreading rapidly.

But under the relief is a deep collective trauma it won’t be easy to cure.

In grief, anxiety, and depression, people want a national reckoning about what went wrong.

Many now embark on an almost quixotic quest in the belief that the government must admit that its harsh policies have been a grave mistake and to apologize for the damages caused.

Li Gongming, an art historian and former member of a policy advisory group run by the Communist Party of China, posted an article on the social media platform wechatin which he urged the southern city government of Guangzhou to help heal the emotional and social wounds of the pandemic.

“The first step should probably start with acknowledging the mistake, offering condolences to the deceased, and apologizing to the public,” he wrote.

“It should be followed by holding people accountable and the government paying reparations.”

His article, published on Monday, was quickly deleted.

Another WeChat article, under the pseudonym “Banchizi”, urged the public to hold officials accountable for the high cost paid under the “zero COVID” policy, calling it a “silly farce”.

An apology would not be enough for some health officials who have lied and deceived the nation, the article said; they should be prosecuted.

The author urged the country to rank collateral deaths:

those produced by suicides, delayed or denied medical care and accidents related to pandemic restrictions.

China rarely releases the names and identities of victims of tragedies it believes are related to “zero-COVID”.

One of them was when 27 people died in a bus crash on the way to a quarantine center in the southwestern province of Guizhou.

Another was when 10 people died in an apartment fire in the western city of Urumqi, which sparked massive street protests last month.

collect their names and how they died is the “least respect we can pay to the deceased”, states Banchizi’s article.

It has also been removed.

Social media users have denounced some top health experts who have spoken out about the dangers of the omicron variant in support of the government’s “zero COVID” policy, only to then change their messages following the policy’s 180-degree shift.

People have been spreading screenshots of several headlines in the official people’s newspaper over the past few months, joking that the paper is always right on the day it is published, but contradicts itself when bound later together with other editions.

People I interviewed told me they wanted the government to apologize because it would offer them some comfort for what they’ve endured.

Zhang, an elderly university student from the eastern province of Jiangsu who requested to be identified by her last name only, had to undergo more than 100 tests COVID this year and has been on lockdown for a total of four months, including much of the fall semester.

You feel depressed, find it difficult to motivate yourself, and cry easily when reading news about COVID.

He believed government misinformation about the pandemic in the West, which is why he supported a lockdown in Shanghai in April, a stance he now regrets.

Now that he knows more, he wants the party to apologize to “all the innocents who died under the ‘zero COVID’ regime, the people who lost their income during the lockdowns and all the people who were recycled by the machine of propaganda the brain,” he said.

Like Zhang, most of the people I interviewed for this column want to be identified by only a name for the sake of safety.

In a normal society, for a major policy mistake like “zero-COVID,” the public would demand more than an apology, says Yan, a project manager at a Beijing Internet company.

“They would have liked a new party in government. But in the Chinese context it is something else.”

People I interviewed told me they wanted the government to apologize because it would give them something comfort for what they endured.

Everyone I’ve spoken to thinks the government should apologize, but no one expects it to.

The Communist Party can only be “great, glorious and proper,” they said, according to their own description in many official speeches.

Y Xi Jinpingthe top leader of the country, has silenced almost all dissent and criticism of his leadership.

“The apology is very brave, and I wish it too,” said Yan.

“But that’s very unlikely to happen.”

The Communist Party has never apologized to the Chinese people for any of the atrocities it suffered during its 73 years in power.

Not after more than 20 million people starved to death during the disastrous Big leap forwardNot when the Cultural Revolution plunged the country into a decade of economic chaos and destruction.

Nor for the one-child policy, which required many forced abortions and now helping to fuel a population crisis with one of the fastest aging populations in the world.

The party even killed off a literary genre called “scar literature”, which emerged after the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s and which portrayed the suffering people endured during that political campaign.

The party doesn’t want anyone to look too closely at their scars because they would inevitably wonder where they came from, says Xu Chenggang, a researcher at the Stanford Center on China’s Economic and Institutions who was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

Hu Xijin, one of the party’s top propagandists, sees dangers in all apology requests.

In a lengthy post on social media platform Weibo, where he has nearly 25 million followers, he wrote that people who have called China’s “zero COVID” policy “Man-made disaster” are too “radical”.

The post caused an outcry of anger and disappointment.

Many college students said they felt like prisoners on their campuses.

A Shanghai commentator said his son was locked up in a 600-square-meter apartment for three months. “

Isn’t that something we should think about? Shouldn’t we try to prevent this from happening again and keep the power in check?” the commentator asked.

The party stepped in to control the narrative.

On Thursday, in a comment on the front page, the People’s Daily, the party’s official newspaper, spoke of how the country is coming back to life.

He then spent more than 10,000 words praising how the party and Xi have led the country through the pandemic.

“Practice has fully proved that the Communist Party of China,” he said, “is the Chinese people’s most reliable backbone when storms strike.”

It is a clear sign that the government will deliver on its victorious message.

He wants the audience to accept his story, forget what happened to him, and move on.

Some have anticipated these moves and are determined to fight the collective amnesia the nation has suffered from for far too long.

It’s his way of overcoming trauma.

Yu, a programmer in his 30s, chokes whenever he talks about the Shanghai blockade in the spring of this year.

“I felt like the government had been knocking me down and hammering me for three months,” she explains.

“Then he told me he was doing it for my well-being.”

He continues to have two recurring nightmares.

In one, he found himself in a war zone filled with barbed wire and poisoned air.

In the other he heard a monotonous voice coming repeatedly from a loudspeaker:

“Go downstairs to get tested for COVID.”

Then her test results would come: negative, positive, negative, positive.

She thinks it’s important to record what happened in writing.

He spent the summer writing an e-book, collecting government announcements and credible information on the Internet about what happened to Shanghai’s 25 million residents between March and July.

He thinks it would be obvious to anyone how much the government has lied and how brutally it has treated the people.

“It was like an absurd nightmare,” he writes in the introduction.

“I can’t help but wonder why tragedies like this keep happening to the Chinese people.”

c.2022 The New York Times Company