'Sorry about the coronavirus'

I was thinking about the sense of guilt felt by some Chinese people – me included – in the 'China should apologise for coronavirus' affair. This isn't about the ridiculous conspiracy theory that the virus was manufactured in China, but the very misguided discourse around personal, collective and state responsibilities for the mishandling of a crisis. I do think the Chinese central government should apologise (more like kill themselves in shame if I'm to be very honest) first to the Chinese people and then to the world for what they did, but I doubt it will ever happen.

The idea that Chinese people should apologise for the misdeeds of the central and local government, on the other hand, is absurd. They (I mean we, but I'm among the more fortunate ones in relation to the epidemic) are at the forefront of the outbreak, many suffered and are still suffering immensely, oftentimes due to totally avoidable reasons, while others risk their lives getting things done under a system that treat them dispensably (c.f. Huoshenshan construction workers for a typical case). Chinese people did not take any of the political decisions including the suppressing of information – if anything, many tried pushing for transparency, accountability and humane treatments – but they respond with resilience and courage, as well as vulnerability and despair, most of all with public outrage haven't seen in years, at all the terrible shit happening to them, government action or otherwise. You can fuck off if you think Chinese people are guilty because we love eating bat soup. That's a gross mischaracterisation and terribly racist, and racism is wrong because it is wrong. End of the story.

Chinese government fucking sucks, so is your garbage Trump presidency. If all you want to do is to patronise Chinese people, you are better off minding your own business and get a functioning adult into the White House before it's too late – if it's not already lol. I mean, we welcome solidarity, and decoupling at the government level shouldn't mean cutting off civilian ties, but please please please do refrain from Orientalism racism and other stupid shit. Thanks.

This is exactly why I hate getting involved in these arguments, it's a mess and no one is paying me to stay woke. One second you try to fight against racism, and before you know it you sound like Hu Xijin playing Taichi. For the record though, I think whatever achievements the Chinese government may have – and that's something not for Beijing to evaluate – in regards to containing the virus, it does not and will not redeem the State from its grave errors, especially with the absence of tangible state accountability, and I think the COVID-19 will rightly go down the history along with Wenchuan and SARS. There are already rumours – omg is this 传谣? I'm so dead lmao – about Beijing verbally ordering lawyers around the country to not file cases of state compensation relating to the epidemic. Please don't quote me on this.

Having said all that, some Chinese including me still feel a tingling sense of guilt about this whole affair, often without an articulate reason. I initially refrained from expressing it on social media, seeing as anything a Chinese say to that effect during the heat of an opinion war, not fully explicated, would do more harm than good. In hindsight though, there are perhaps valid reasons for feeling – not accusing, mind you, these sentiments do not justify your racist accusations – individual guilt as Chinese.

The first is a bitter recognition that we are inescapably Chinese: geographically mainland (I don't know if it's quite the same for overseas Chinese so I'll just focus on the mainland experience which I have direct access of) and politically complicit (in a weak sense), and no matter how hard you try doing the conceptual work separating the party-state from the people, it's often of little avail. As much as there is a need to separate them as adequate moral subjects (thus you empathise with the latter but never the former), in practice reiteration is tiring and explanations futile – you are dealing with clueless people who don't nearly give as much fuck about 'opps just a word slip' as you, a 'woke and aware' weibo refugee on twitter, do. This whole 'China should apologise' affair is a testimony of that. To feel guilty in this sense is therefore not so much about particular deeds but sheer exasperation and confusion at the semantic entanglement and (as always) social media reality.

The second reason is more substantive. It is a feeling that we are indeed 'responsible' for China's current political reality, with the word 'responsible' variously defined. It ranges from merely recognising a causal relationship between individual action/inaction and the current state of affairs in China, which could very well be minimal, to the 'radical' claim that it is very much our fault that the CCP is still in power.

I think this one holds more truths than many are willing to accept. You don’t need to go as far as the 'radical' stance (I actually don't think it's that radical, hence the inverted commas). Simply imagine a possible world where the CCP is in power but the political landscape, in particular the dynamics between the state and the (non-)civil society, are even more strained than it currently is. Both resistance and oppression take place with much greater intensities, the former persistent and subversive, the latter brutal and deadly. So basically imagine [insert appropriate historical parallel here since I suck at history and can't do it myself].

This is very much not a possible world for the moderate reformists, but I mean if you still take that as a possibility you are delusional to say the least. Since this possible world is much more brutal and dystopic than our current one (which just as a reminder is also brutal and quite dystopic unless you are blind), you cannot light-heartedly wish for it to come true. But fear for the state to double down is never a reason to not act; it only calls for sound pragmatism, something that takes considerable courage and political wisdom to actualise without retreating to cynicism and defeatism. I, for one, keep falling for the latter. But there is absolutely no reason to think that sound pragmatism cannot manifest in something much more radical than what we are used to. It is political imagination that we are lacking, not the (platonic) forking paths themselves.

When a Chinese say 'I'm sorry about this whole coronavirus thing…' she might – note the modality – be saying that 'I regret that my life hasn't been political enough for things to turn out differently.'

Do I really think that the Chinese people who apologise for the coronavirus actually mean this? Of course no. I think basic human decency & good-will is more than enough to justify this perhaps not-so-rational sentiment (mine included), and I don't think you should go after people for expressing this sentiment privately. Moreover, though you may have qualms expressing it in public – nuance is, alas, but a cognitive impossibility during times like this – I still think it is ok to do so, preferably with extra caution.

However, this sentiment does not aggregate into attributable collective guilt, and should never be the excuse for racism, Orientalism, or other braindead shit white people pulls out when they try to use the 'China should apologise' narrative as a convenient handle for their dogshit agenda. Trump can go suck his own dick. What I've said so far about political guilt also has nothing to do with Chinese Americans with internalised colonialism telling their kids to feel sorry about what China (which inevitably translate into being Chinese or even just Asian) has done, and to tell their white classmates about their 'guilt'. Kids, you have absolutely nothing to be sorry about, other than perhaps for your clueless parents.

To go back to the point about guilt-from-being-politically-docile, it is most importantly a feeling of guilt in face of actual activism – Marxist student activists, feminists, human right lawyers, among others – who paid a hefty price very much in our stead. And as shallow an act of virtue-signalling as it is, this IS a starting point for many of us: say you haven't been doing enough, say you are guilty. This may sound ominously 极左 but try thinking about it – who is really defining the 'radical'?

If you take, say, what 岳昕 did in PKU out of the political context, is there anything even slightly 'illegal' or 'nonprocedural'? I know full well that you cannot take away the Chinese context, but what do we even mean by 'cannot'? 'It's called analysis, duh.' But if analysis is paralysing action, internalising fear of mental transgression and encouraging conceptual self-cencorsing, perhaps there needs to be a better, action-inducing framework for better analysis.

This is not to discredit the formidable courage of the activists, but quite the opposite: it's questioning what we take to be their legacy (they're not all dead, it's just a metaphor). I would hope it's more than just commemorating them in coded language on social media every now and then.

The real question is, of course, the substance of those 'radical' (but not really) actions – what works better? Lead a resistance, go on protests, quitting WeChat, posting in Low Mewnian font, do drugs, abolish marriage and opt for open relationships, I dunno. I think quitting WeChat is definitely one of them. The strongest argument is not individual privacy – as much as I wish it mattered – but a political obligation (not the ones derived from a 'contract') to your fellow citizens in a 'Leninist digital surveillance' state, in particular to those targeted and harmed by it – the activists. Yes, I think you should quit WeChat for people like Wei Zhili. This isn't nearly a stretch as it sounds.

Anyways, I just wish to answer some questions about the sense of guilt, and hopefully didn't get everything wrong.