Of Commemoration and Anonymity

(Ironically, it was a post on the meme-like quality of a recent Liberty Mutual Commercial from a month ago which appears to have spread, meme-like, furthest from its original home. It was cited, among other places, in an on-line forum  for a modern dance site, and then, several weeks later, in a religion newsletter published by the Dallas Morning News. In the process, it ultimately attracted the interest of a couple of actuaries, who posted some interesting comments).

30 years ago, on July 28 1976, a major earthquake (perhaps as strong as 8.2 on the Richter scale) struck the city of Tangshan in Hebei province a little before 4:00 AM. The official death toll was nearly a quarter of a million lives (though some sources argue the true figure may have been much higher). Even by the government’s official figures, however, the earthquake was the deadliest of the twentieth century, and one of the three deadliest ever.   

The commemoration of the earthquake has become a major source of controversy. As several recent articles report (see, for instance, useful summaries and interesting discussions on ESWN, Danwei and Chinochano), there is as of yet no official, public memorial commemorating the victims of the catastrophe. Recently, however, the private Huaying Group has erected large granite slabs in a city park, on which they have inscribed the names of a small fraction of the victims—though many commentators have been apoplectic to learn that the company charges families a fairly stiff fee of 800-1000 Yuan (roughly $100-125) for the inclusion of each name. The Huangying Group general manager Li Li argues, however, that the fee is simply to cover the labor and supplies required to make the inscriptions. Furthermore, Li suggests, “If we were to simply inscribe all of the names of the deceased, would their relatives necessarily approve? This brings up a question of the rights of naming (姓名权问题).”

Although there would clearly be other ways to secure the families’ permission other than to require that they pay a substantial monetary sum, the point that Manager Li makes here about a politics of naming is not without interest. That is to say, due to the general chaos of the period together with the vast number of mortalities, it is certain that the identities of considerable numbers of victims will never be known (some estimate that these unidentified victims might number in the hundreds of thousands).

A recent blog by reporter and science fiction author Han Song [translated in Danwei], for instance, advances a detailed argument that the Tangshan earthquake may never has occurred at all. Han concludes by suggesting that the earthquake may have actually occurred in Beijing and killed Mao Zedong two months earlier than officially reported, and as a result the current city of Beijing “is a copy in silicon. Those of us who are still living are merely the memories of one corpse after another, extracted and stored in a computer, raving back and forth as electrons.”

While Han Song’s essay is clearly satire, it does nevertheless underscore the confusion and disorder which reigned during the period of the earthquake, together with the difficulty involved in obtaining reliable evidence concerning many aspects of the calamity. At the time, for instance, China controversially refused to accept any international disaster assistance, and there is considerable evidence that its own disaster relief troops were quite overwhelmed.

The question which arises, therefore, is whether it is fair or appropriate to have a memorial with specific names at all, if there it is virtually certain that any such list, no matter how comprehensive, will inevitably leave out countless thousands of unknown victims? Would it not be more appropriate to have a symbolic memorial commemorating all of the diseased, both known and unknown?

Han Song’s tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the earthquake may actually have killed off Chairman Mao, meanwhile, underscores another dimension of this problem of commemorating the Tangshan dead. As is well-known, the Tangshan earthquake was popularly regarded as having presaged the death of Chairman Mao less than two months later (on Sept. 9th), which in turn officially brought to a close the 10-year long Cultural Revolution. Even if it were possible, therefore, to accurately record the names of all of the hundreds of thousands of the Tangshan dead, such a commemoration would still inevitably stand in the shadow of the millions of casualties from the Cultural Revolution itself (of which the earthquake was a crucial bookend), the identities of many of whom will never be reliably established and will certainly never be publicly commemorated.

Regardless of the practical limits on knowing the identities of all of the dead,  public memorials remain, however, very important, in that they both allow communities to commemorate collective tragedies, while also giving individuals an opportunity to publicly mourn their friends and relatives. How might one reconcile these twin needs for public commemoration and private mourning with the fact that any attempt to record the actual names of the dead will inevitably leave out countless deceased?

In his satiric suggestion that contemporary Beijing may be merely a digital replica of the actual city, Han Song points to a possible solution to this dilemma. More specifically, the collectively-composed on-line encyclopedia Wikipedia provides one possible model for resolving these competing demands for personal mourning and public commemoration. A project which seems almost like something out of a story by Borges, Wikipedia is by far the most comprehensive encyclopedia mankind has ever conceived. As discussed, for instance, in a lengthy article by Stacy Schiff in this week’s New Yorker, Wikipedia currently contains more than a million individual articles on a dizzying array of topics (both obvious and esoteric), each of which is collectively composed by as many as thousands of on-line contributors.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Wikipedia project, however, is the way in which it combines the necessity for both collective anonymity and individual recognition. That is to say, to casual readers each of the Wikipedia articles are effectively anonymous—a web of countless individual contributions woven together into a seamless whole. In this sway, for better or for worse, the articles are perceived as reflecting the aspirations and ideals of the project itself, rather than the expertise, ignorance, or prejudices of any individual author. At the same time, however, if the project were indeed completely anonymous then there would be little incentive for individual contributors to devote their time to writing and updating the encyclopedia (Schiff, for instance, mentions one user who at one point spent 14 hours a day working on the site). As a result, beneath the official anonymity of the contributions, the site contains a second level where the contributions are all carefully credited (albeit to screen-names, rather than to actual names). As a result, Schiff notes,

Perhaps Wikipedia’s greatest achievement—one that [Wikipedia founder Jimmy] Wales did not fully anticipate—was the creation of a community. Wikipedians are officially anonymous, contributing to unsigned entries under screen names.

The dynamism and appeal of the project as a whole, therefore, lies in no small part in the symbiotic interaction of these two levels.

Extrapolating from the Wikipedia model, therefore, I would suggest that one approach might be to construct public monuments (as for the Tangshan earthquake and other catastrophic disasters featuring potentially large numbers of unknown fatalities) would be to have a symbolic monument commemorating all of the dead, combined with some process whereby (known) names of the deceased are inscribed in the monument in some way not visible to the general public (symbolically buried in rubble, perhaps). In this way, families can use the monument to commemorate specific individuals, while side-stepping the problem of having a public monument with a necessarily incomplete (and potentially exclusionary) list of names.

Comments

[Anon]

Sir, I must correct you. 800-1200 Yuan is 100-150 USD.

[crojas]

yes, of course. in my haste, i dropped a decimal point--should be 800-1000 RMB/ 100-125 USD. many thanks.