My reading of February 23rd
I put pen to paper on February 18th and wrote ‘Memory and Reflection’, and after that I thought I’d throw in the towel, especially because I didn’t want to re-open the wounds of February 19th.
Four years ago on February 19th, when I circulated a piece on Weibo entitled “CCTV’s surname is the Party”, I added the remark “when all the media is surnamed ‘Party’, and when it no longer represents the people’s interests, the people are abandoned, they just become a forgotten corner”, and that note triggered ‘Ten days of Cultural Revolution’-style criticism of me on the web, and formal discipline by the Party, being placed on probation by the Party for a year. So, every year on February 19th, I firmly put down my pen, in order to protect the day.
But the explosion of China’s Wuhan coronavirus epidemic completely validated the reality of that phrase “when the media is surnamed ‘Party’…the people are abandoned”. When there is no media to represent the people and go report the real situation, we are only left with people losing their lives from the virus, and the collective harm from the seriously-ill political system as the results.
Several days afterwards, there haas been loads of media reporting and sharing online about the central government’s national ‘170,000 people meeting’ on February 23rd; it was supposedly the most-attended event in Party history. Way bigger than the Lushan meeting, which had 7,000 attendees, it was more significant too, and some called it a ‘Great Meeting’.