MARCH 19, 2014

ANGER ON WEIBO OVER FLIGHT 370

POSTED BY JIAYANG FAN

Tragedy, when its cause and the fate of its victims are still unknown, is supposed to occasion solidarity. So far, on Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, the confounding mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370’s disappearance has done anything but. As satellites, planes, and warships look for the plane, in a search area that stretches from Kazakhstan to Australia, Weibo has been filled with conspiracy theories. Some of them are simply far-fetched—could it have been a U.F.O.?—while others reveal domestic anxieties that are preoccupying citizens of the internally riven state. None seems to have solved this puzzle, eleven days after Flight 370 left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing, carrying two hundred and thirty-nine passengers, a hundred and fifty-three of them Chinese.

“I have a gut feeling this has something to do with the killings in Yunnan province,” a popularBeijing blogger wrote. “It’s got to be those Uighurs. My guess is: the plane will be found in Central Asia.” The Uighurs are an ethnic minority concentrated in western China, some with separatist aspirations; it was widely noted on Weibo that one possible trajectory for the plane would have crossed that region. Never mind the complete absence of corroboratory evidence for such speculation; the theory gained traction. The post was reblogged hundreds of times before being taken down—in part because of the fear inspired by two recent mass stabbings attributed to Uighurs (twenty-nine dead in Kunming, six dead in Changsha). The Chinese government often talks about a Uighur terrorist threat. On Tuesday, though, the Chinese ambassador to Malaysia, Huang Huikang, discouraged this line of thinking and said that his government had cleared the one Uighur passenger on the flight. He also claimed that China had “ruled out the possibility of Chinese passengers engaging in destruction or a terrorist attack.”

Like those of their Twitter counterparts, Weibo users’ conjectures about the plane’s fate have run rife and have ventured toward the outlandish (“had they traversed a space-time portal??”). For a while, the likelihood of a secret landing was hotly debated, inspiring hope that the passengers might still be alive but also fear that the plane might be held hostage in territories politically hostile to China. “Do we really know all of China’s enemies?” a microblogger wrote.

Still, being held in captivity was better than the other option. “This is my only son,” a man named Li told reporters at a Beijing hotel, where press conferences have been held daily for family members. “If the worst happens, I will have no meaning in my life.”

The Chinese censors keeping tabs on Weibo deleted other posts, too: ones that compared the behavior of Malaysian officials to that of Chinese politicians. (“Look: Malaysian bureaucrats—they are just like ours!”) This is not a compliment. Xinhua, China’s state-run media organization, has issued a strongly worded op-ed condemning Malaysia for its “intolerable” mishandling of the investigation. On Weibo, there is disdain for the Malaysian authorities’ “foot-dragging” and distrust of almost everything they say. A widely circulated mock mantra has been, “Malaysia—affirm, deny, feebly search.” It does not help that the Malaysian government has been startlingly unapologetic about its multiple instances of misinformation. One Shanghai-based blogger, after noting the lead pilot’s support for his country’s opposition leader, wrote, “If the Malaysian government discovered that the plane was brought down by an anti-government captain, they would die rather than admit the fact. The legitimacy of the country and its national image would never recover!”

The recriminations from the relatives of the missing Chinese nationals have been particularly clamorous. “Why don’t you tell us the truth,” tearful relatives holed up in the Beijing hotel conference room reserved for family members demanded of airline officials. “What else are you hiding?” On Weibo, this has at times translated into accusatory stereotypes: “As suspected, Malaysians are irresponsible and unreliable in every regard!”

Some have wondered if the collective fury and frustration, stemming from other dissatisfactions with the government, might resolve itself in a mass movement: “Will this domino into another 1989??” (That was the year of Tiananmen Square.)

The Chinese government has pointed to its deployment of the largest rescue fleet ever assembled: four warships, four coast-guard vessels, eight aircraft, and ten satellites. But it can hardly assuage the agony of the friends and families of the missing, or the nagging feeling that, if only the search were being conducted differently, by another party, things would miraculously be better. “What if those 153 Chinese nationals had been Americans?” a user named Chinese Talmud asked. “I sincerely believe that the American government would mobilize the entire country, turn the world upside down and scour every corner of the earth until that plane is found.”