What is our collective memory of 2022? NetEase, China’s online entertainment giant, posed this question at the beginning of its summary of the year.
The six-minute clip included dozens of viral social media videos, often filmed by accidental witnesses to unfolding tragedies. A woman needing chemotherapy in a locked-down Shanghai begs for transport; a six-year-old boy pulls his grandmother on a wheelbarrow to take a compulsory Covid test; a truck driver, stranded by lockdowns and unable to reach his sick parents, kneels in the road, crying.
Other clips show economic hardships borne by migrant workers — a delivery driver’s insulated takeaway box opens to reveal a toddler sleeping inside. The first half of the video closes on the fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang in northwestern China, which sparked nationwide protests against the zero-Covid policy.
In a vast country with greatly varied experiences of the pandemic, the crowdsourced compilation felt a fitting way of covering a breadth of stories. Lockdowns were applied with varying degrees of discipline between different cities and within them. But across China, common emotions emerged: anxiety, helplessness, frustration — and uncertainty as to what might come next.
NetEase’s compilation was swiftly censored, as was Voices of April, a six-minute compilation of Shanghai residents’ audio recordings during the intense two-month lockdown that left some households running out of food and medication. Southern Weekly’s tribute to the year, more literary and less visceral, survived: “We saw the “two stripes” [of a positive Covid test] in our friends’ social media feeds, and we saw ibuprofen being passed among neighbours . . . ”
These accounts live on in various online archives, from platforms like the China Digital Times to citizen journalists who preserve censored material. Fang Kecheng, who studies China’s social media discourse at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, writes that “archiving . . . is the power of the powerless, the political action of the weak”.
How a tragedy is remembered is highly contested, because it brings up the question of who to hold to account, whose memories are prioritised, and whose are ignored.
It also takes a long time to settle. Almost six years on from the Grenfell Tower fire in London, an inquiry has yet to submit its final report; meanwhile, the inquiry into the UK government’s response to Covid is just getting started.
Journalism, art and literature are markers of a collective memory, and that is why they are so heavily controlled by authoritarian governments. Yet acts of remembrance, of holding the true range of human emotion up to the light, are necessary to build a future. Maintaining collective memory is a step towards collective processing, to satisfy the human need to create meaning and narrative.
The American psychologist Jack Saul, who had children in primary school near the Twin Towers during the September 11 2001 attacks in New York, writes about collective recovery from trauma.
“A collective trauma really needs a collective response and a collective voice, too,” Saul said in an interview after the attacks. “That process of collective storytelling in the community is a very important part of the recovery process itself.”
Communities are also strengthened when individuals can find resonance in one another’s experiences. The power of group-based therapy, said one Shanghai-based psychologist, is that individuals “situate their own emotions in the context of other people. I’m in pain, and so is she — I’m anxious, and so is he.”
In a 2007 paper, psychologist Stevan Hobfoll identified five principles for psychological and social responses to mass trauma that are still referred to in disaster response best practice guidelines: promoting a sense of safety, calming, a sense of self-efficacy and community efficacy, connectedness and, finally, hope.
Many Chinese communities that have weathered severe lockdowns together have emerged with much greater interconnectedness. “The lockdowns increased volunteering on campus, and made people more thankful for their community volunteers,” said one student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, whose campus went through rounds of lockdowns.
“We relied on our residential compound, we bought groceries together, shared rice. After the reopening, some people said they missed that feeling of sticking together,” said the Shanghai-based psychologist. Such bonds, she added, will lessen as people return to their normal lives, but traces remain — the grocery-distribution chat group, for example, is now used to share second-hand furniture.
The zero-Covid policy may be over, but the worst is not. As China heads into its deadliest Covid wave yet, and the rest of the world struggles through the long-lasting impact of the pandemic, let us keep our collective memory, with all of its shadows, alive.