A spate of “revenge against society” attacks that have left dozens dead and more injured over the last week-and-a-half have left many in China grasping for an explanation: what is driving these “Xianzhong” rampages?
The short answer is, nobody knows. A longer answer may prove elusive, as censors have diligently scrubbed any serious discussion of the provenance of the attacks from the Chinese internet. Some, in their search for understanding, have turned to China’s rich corpus of literature.
On Weibo, people share passages from Lu Xun’s 1933 essay on Zhang Xianzhong, the peasant rebel who slaughtered a path through Sichuan as the Ming were replaced by the Qing. Lu Xun wrote: “In a way reminiscent of ‘art for art’s sake,’ he seemed to ‘kill for killing’s sake,’ though in fact he had ulterior motives. At first he had no desire to kill, nor did he want to become emperor. It was only after learning that Li Zicheng had taken Beijing and that the Manchus had “breached the Shanghaiguan Pass” that he was forced against a wall and so began to kill, kill … He felt keenly that there was nothing left for him on this earth except to destroy what remained for others.”
Others have reached further back. In the short essay below, originally posted to Weibo, the author asked whether the mass slaughter of innocents has its roots in two of China’s greatest literary works: “The Injustice to Dou E” and “Journey to the West.” Even though the post made no explicit references to the Zhuhai, Yixing, or Changde attacks, censors scrubbed it from Weibo. CDT has translated the post in full:
A colleague said an interesting thing: these recent incidents of the underclass venting its rage on itself have antecedents in literary tradition.
Take, for example, Dou E after she was framed for a crime she didn’t commit and sentenced to death by ignorant officials. In the final moments before her execution, she made three vows: that her blood would stain the white banners flying overhead, that snow would fall in June, and that there would be three years of drought. None of the vows were particularly logical, nor were they targeted at the ones who caused injustice to befall her. A three-year drought would place responsibility [for her injustice] on all the innocent people of the land to bear.
In the Phoenix-Immortal chapter of “Journey to the West,” the Jade Emperor became enraged with the Phoenix-Immortal after the latter and his wife knocked over a table of offerings while arguing, and decided to punish his lands with a drought. The Jade Emperor decreed that there would be no rain until a chicken had pecked through a mountain of rice, [a dog had lapped up a mountain of noodles,] and a flame had burned through a golden lock. The Jade Emperor’s revenge makes even less sense than Dou E’s, but that’s the extraordinary pleasure of exercising arbitrary power. By the time Tripitaka arrived at the Phoenix-Immortal’s home, the couple was doing fine but the people of his realm were stricken and destitute.
Fuck, I’m afraid I’ve already said too much. In both these stories, the thinking of those in power and commoners is remarkably similar: neither address the issue at hand nor align responsibility with power. Instead, when they feel wronged they demand that the whole world pay a price. Whether a three-year drought will litter the land with dry bones is beside the point—they must vent their rage.
Society, our so-called public commons, is just a toilet in which to dump rage. [Society] has never been given its proper place or care. As for those who make up this society? Those in power don’t care, and the same goes for the amnesiac masses. [Chinese]
