On WeChat last weekend, "Fatty Zhao, scholar of Song Dynasty history" reflected on a recent fire at a Shandong university. The students’ escape route was blocked by facial recognition turnstiles through which they scanned one by one, even as the smoke made that more difficult. Despairing of the students’ compliance in the face of danger, Zhao cites a pair of historical episodes by way of explanation:
Recently, I’ve been busy working on a book manuscript, and haven’t had time to post on WeChat or check the news. Only after finishing the first draft yesterday did I have a chance to start catching up. So it wasn’t until last night that I saw this piece of what you might call “old news.”
I say that because it happened almost a week ago, on November 10, and in this age of new hot topics erupting every day, that’s really dead and buried.
But after I’d read it, I felt unsettled for quite some time.
There was a fire at a female college students’ dorm. I saw some photos online: the fire had broken out on the ground floor, and one of the dorm rooms was completely engulfed, with flames and black smoke rising toward the upper stories. As the students fled, they were blocked by the facial recognition gate at the dorm’s entrance. Fortunately, the fire was extinguished soon after without any serious injury.
There were two things about the report that surprised me.
First, even with the fire at their backs, not one of the students tried to escape the emergency by climbing over or breaking through the turnstile as they fled—instead, they obediently lined up behind the gate, scanning out one by one.
Second, school officials interviewed by reporters calmly said, "Of course they had to scan out, how else could we guarantee that they were safe?"
Returning to the question in our title: What does the future hold for college students who would line up at a checkpoint as if everything were normal while fleeing from a dorm fire?
Or, to put it more directly, what kind of person is this school producing?
I can’t say for sure. But as you all know, I’m a historian of the Song Dynasty by profession, and I was reminded of two short episodes from that period that seem relevant here.
The first is from Wang Gong‘s “Chronicle of Recent Events.”
In the Yuanfeng Era [1078-1085 CE], there was a great fire in the departmental halls. Seeing the blaze in the imperial palace, the Emperor Shenzong turned to a eunuch beside him and said, "Hurry, ask the captain of the horse guards to dispatch two commands to fight the fire!"
A command was a unit of 400-500 men in the Song army, so two commands was about a thousand men.
Minister Feng Jing was present, and said: "According to custom, dispatching troops requires an imperial decree from the Privy Council. Having a eunuch do this would set an impossible precedent."
Emperor Shenzong concurred at once, and asked Feng Jing to write the command then and there at the foot of the throne, then give it to the eunuch to go and dispatch troops to fight the fire.
The second is from "Shao’s Records of Hearsay."
During the reign of Emperor Taizu, there was a fire in the imperial palace. The palace guard then was under the command of Taizu’s old friend Wang Shenqi. As soon as he saw the danger to Emperor Taizu, Wang and his men rushed into the palace to put out the fire and save the Emperor, without waiting for orders.
Afterwards, Wang was impeached by the imperial censors and forced to retire to his hometown in Shouzhou (now Shou county in Anhui province). This, of course, was Emperor Taizu’s wish.
As Wang was leaving, Emperor Taizu said to him, "It was loyal of you to lead your men to my rescue without orders, but I cannot ignore the censors’ judgment."
By way of compensation, Emperor Taizu agreed to marry his daughter to Wang Shenqi’s son, Wang Chengyan. Because Wang Chengyan was already married to a woman named Le, Emperor Taizu ordered them to divorce, and provided the Le clan with a generous dowry to remarry her to someone else. Then he adopted Wang Chengyan as his own son-in-law.
After the splendid wedding, Emperor Taizu said to Wang Chengyan: "Now your father can feel at peace."
What’s the moral of these two stories?
In the eyes of both Emperor Taizu and Emperor Shenzong, the important thing wasn’t whether there was a fire, but whether their underlings adhered to the rules.
The more compliant their underlings, the more secure they felt. [Chinese]
The dorm fire also has more recent historical resonance with the Urumqi fire on November 24, 2022, whose death toll was likely exacerbated by pandemic control measures. The resulting public outrage was widely credited with bringing about the end of China’s draconian zero-COVID regime.
