When China hides disasters in a memory hole
ONLY A FEW fire-blackened branches and tree stumps, half hidden by young green ferns, betray the horrors that visited this valley in southern China a little over two years ago. No shrine or memorial stone marks the place where 132 people on a domestic flight from Kunming to Guangzhou lost their lives. They died in the early afternoon of March 21st 2022 when their China Eastern Boeing 737 hit the ground in a near-vertical nosedive, travelling at close to the speed of sound.
An unmarked dirt road leads to the crash site in the southern province of Guangxi, winding through citrus orchards and eucalyptus groves from the nearest village, Molang. For a while the steep-sided crater was sealed behind a wall of blue metal panels. Now farmers on motorcycles pass through openings to reach their fields. Controls remain in place, though. When Chaguan walked to the crater on a recent afternoon he was soon accosted by the deputy head of the village Communist Party committee, who like most locals bears the family name Mo. “We pay great attention to state security here,” Mr Mo explained, while filming your columnist with his phone. Villagers had told him about the arrival of a foreigner, heeding government instructions to report “people from elsewhere, spies and so on”. Locals would refuse to say anything about the plane crash, he added.
To this day Chinese authorities have proposed no cause for the disaster. Officials have confirmed that no problems were logged with the plane, its crew or the weather before take-off. Images of the doomed airliner, caught by a security camera near the crash site, show it hurtling earthwards in one piece. Though Boeing’s reputation as a manufacturer is taking a battering just now, no safety alerts have been issued by China Eastern or Boeing about the crash in 2022. These would have flagged things that other carriers need to know about. To aviation professionals, the only remaining explanation is “intentional pilot action”. The same professionals point to a telltale surge in Chinese efforts to monitor pilot mental health, including sessions on mental illness at an Asia-Pacific aviation-safety summit in August to be co-hosted in Beijing by the Civil Aviation Administration of China.
Pilot suicide has caused tragedies before, as when a co-pilot for Germanwings, a European airline, locked his captain out of the cockpit and flew into a mountain in 2015, killing 150 people. Yet from the start Chinese officials have scolded those asking whether China Eastern flight MU5735 crashed deliberately, calling such inquiries “rumours” which “seriously misled the public”. Alas, officials decline to discuss other causes. Instead, China has sought to bury the tragedy in a hole of forgetting. Immediately after the crash online nationalists denounced reporters who interviewed victims’ families. Since then, neither relatives nor their lawyers have waged public campaigns to hold state-owned China Eastern to account. Though international conventions require annual updates on air-crash investigations, China’s first- and second-anniversary bulletins were terse to the point of insult. The crash is “very complicated”, officials say, their work needs more time.
Chaguan did not travel to Guangxi to gawp at a disaster scene. His aim was to explore how officially mandated amnesia works on the ground. The question is worth asking because imposed forgetting is becoming more brazen in Xi Jinping’s China. Party bosses have always resorted to cover-ups when things go wrong. But in the first decades of the reform era, as China embraced capitalism and opened to the world, media, lawyers, civil-society groups and even some officials were more willing to press the government for explanations. After a high-speed train crash killed 40 near the city of Wenzhou in 2011, railway officials called off the search for survivors after eight hours and buried some train carriages in a pit. They reversed course amid an outcry, including on-air condemnations by state-television hosts. After 21 hours of searching, a two-year-old girl was found alive. The buried carriages were dug up.
Under Mr Xi, though, state media face far harsher political controls and censorship, and the party dares to consign even large catastrophes to a memory hole. After China’s tight pandemic restrictions were suddenly abandoned in late 2022, many doctors say they were banned from recording covid-19 as a cause of death. Later, to thwart independent researchers trying to estimate excess deaths from the pandemic’s exit wave, national authorities stopped reporting cremation statistics.
Autocracy, technology and cynicism at work
Still, the evidence from Molang is that controls are tight but not total. “In China it’s not like the West, you always insist on freedom, freedom, freedom,” grumbled Mr Mo, escorting his foreign visitor to the village. “Here we need to heed instructions from the security department.” Nearing a group of villagers playing cards, he added confidently: “When they see me, they won’t tell you anything.” He was only half right. Though many locals were silent, some were ready to talk. An older villager recalled rushing to help with the crash and watching bereaved relatives visiting Molang. With Mr Mo at his side, that villager agreed that the lack of a physical monument was odd, adding: “If that many people had died in a war, there would be a memorial.” Asked why one has not been built, he replied, “How should I put it? I’m just a simple farmer.”
Large disasters are not truly forgotten and leaders know it. They impose silence to signal that a subject is off-limits. Today more citizens have something to lose by disobeying. If they discuss banned topics online they risk being cut off from the all-in-one messaging, shopping and financial apps that are essential to life in China. After that, time is on the party’s side. Vegetation already covers the red-earth slopes of Molang’s crash site. Before long there will be nothing at all to see. ■
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