July 20 this year marks the first anniversary of the flood victims in Zhengzhou. The urge to commemorate is widely distributed on the Internet, whether it is on the death subway or in the tunnel that took lives, and to this day echoes that video of the last desperate struggle, which makes some commemorative people. People feel anxious and squeak.
Judging from Zhengzhou’s feedback on social media, this commemorative move has been curbed. The owner of the flower shop and the courier said that they had received the above order and could no longer deliver flowers to the subway entrance and tunnel entrance. Some chrysanthemums that have been successfully delivered near the subway entrance will also be confiscated and cleaned up, so some people ask: Why are they afraid of flowers?
July 20, 2022, is the first anniversary of the 720 flood disaster in Zhengzhou. pic.twitter.com/ALkFSeFGoI
— China Digital Times (@CDTChinese) July 21, 2022
After the Shishou incident, removing sensitive sources was standard practice for stability maintenance. It may seem to some people in Zhengzhou that putting flowers to commemorate the disaster anniversary and turning the general mourning online into an offline mourning scene will inevitably convey the meaning of accountability and condemnation. Such a situation will be considered uncontrollable, and flowers as emotional connections are naturally taboo.
The idea of people offering flowers and the ban on flowers are actually not difficult to understand, but it once again reflects the difference between the strong and the weak. When the desire of society collides with the logic of maintaining stability, the latter has the means and determination to intervene, while the former can only intervene. Accept the setbacks that come with it. This is the remembrance and memorial around the real object, and the intuitive impression of why it failed.
But in another sense, a memorial without flowers is still a memorial, and a memorial is still completed; while the besieged and feared memorials are demarcated as a restricted area on the spot, but in a different form, they are used by people continued its process in spite of the grievances. The obsession of the commemorators to the offline, and the inability of the blockers to the online, are like two sides of the same body.
These remembrances, those who commemorate the victims, are important and should be acknowledged in the ceremony, which is a person-to-person remembrance. In fact, this kind of commemoration is also very important to Zhengzhou. It at least shows that in this provincial capital city where public opinion frequently occurs, no matter how many people are “doing things”, there are still some people who have erected a human image. The image of being thrown over and over again.
Since the spring of this year, a series of major events have occurred in Zhengzhou. Several village banks suffered thunderstorms, and 400,000 depositors regarded Zhengzhou as the birthplace of the disaster; the red code incident was not only a by-product of the village bank thunderstorms, but also the main product of Zhengzhou’s stability maintenance; The method provokes the three circles of banking, enterprise and government, and the rumors spread from Zhengzhou to the whole country, and the impact is incalculable.
In so many incidents, there are fears of ordinary people, the crimes of gluttonous predators, and the selfishness and cruelty that some people in Zhengzhou can feel. In the process of dealing with these matters, whether it is the strong party or the weak group, they have fully tasted the full fear. This is not a confrontation between chaos and stability, but a confrontation between fear and fear.
The crux of the problem is that, after the impact of floods, thunderstorms, rights protection, commemoration and other events, this place known as the heart of the Central Plains, the question of “who will build the image of people” has not been answered. Practical decisiveness makes even the most common question seem radical. The Central Plains is a province with a large population, and the provincial capital is in the tens of millions, but the image of the people is sluggish.
This downturn in the “image of man” is circulated in sad stories. For example, a single mother, as a betrayed saver, had to terminate her mother’s treatment; a father, who was saddled with the loss of his daughter, rode his bicycle as close as he could to the last haunt of the dead daughter, and then stooped away. They symbolize more people, and the image of the person who can’t be publicized, so it’s not good.
It is human nature for a white-haired person to send a black-haired person to their parents. Innocent people, etc., have been involved in a financial trap that has lasted for more than ten years. When bad news comes, and there is no owner, the victims report to the group to warm up. This is a logical move. It is inevitable that the unfinished buildings will harm the sufferers, destroy their life prospects, and form a loose supply-cutting movement to prevent themselves from going mad.
On the other hand, the suffering of these people as human beings and the reasonable demands derived from them have not been treated sincerely and fairly. Suppressed emotions, with the help of empathic people, promote waves of public opinion momentum, and the impact is obvious. Zhengzhou’s honest image and even Henan’s social evaluation have been declining all the way, and the public sentiment has fallen into the public opinion field.
What I have seen and heard in the public opinion venues: During the duration of the epidemic in Shanghai, various events, big and small, broke off the exquisite self-proclaimed elegance of the magic capital; compared with all kinds of strange phenomena in Shanghai, the Zhengzhou series of events were hard bridges and horses, and the texture was abnormally rough. However, it reflects the twists and turns of being a human being with pixel-level granularity, and vigorously illustrates how lacklustre the innermost city of the Central Plains can be.