"I haven't been to Malaysia but I will not travel there for the rest of my life," wrote Meng Fei, a TV host known for his matchmaking show If You Are the One, on his Weibo account, winning more than 190,000 thumb-up from netizens.
As the investigation of MH370's mysterious crash continues with little result, it's not only family members of passengers on the doomed flight who are growing impatient, but also the general public in China.
The Chinese public has seen conflicted announcements and endless denials as the hallmark of the Malaysian authorities since day one, which stirred huge confusion that later turned to anger.
Netizens even created a rhyme to mock the ineffectiveness of the Malaysians: "The Vietnamese are always searching while the Malaysians are always denying."
Malaysia's official announcement of the crash almost two weeks after the initial disappearance did nothing to ease these complaints, but instead further aggravated their distrust toward Malaysians.
In the meantime, conspiracy theories have been invented to fill the vacuum of hard evidence.
Many are accusing the Malaysia government of hiding critical information, even arguing that the Malaysians had been secretly dealing with the planes' supposed hijackers, claimed to be supporters of the opposition party.
Malaysia has poured huge effort in solving the MH370 puzzle, but this has done little to convince either the Chinese public or the families of the victims.
Worse, since the public knows little about plane crash investigations, and the Chinese media hasn't been helping, they are being manipulated by Internet rumors, seeing themselves as victim of Malaysian's "evil" scheme.
Pushed by populism and nationalism, some of them are even demanding the Chinese government "punish" Malaysia for its supposed misdeeds.
One widely cited post on Weibo reads "If there were 154 Americans on the plane, the Malaysian would already be facing an international trial. If there were 154 Russians on that plant, Malaysia would have been wiped out by nuclear bombs."
It is indeed a concern, yet people who are aware of this dangerous sentiment are powerless to change it. Some tried to warn the public, but were quickly labeled as "traitors."
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Here's a very heartbreaking article from the Guardian. I totally agree that grief is a very private affair.
Joanna Moorhead of the Guardian wrote:
The Chinese authorities failed to shield from the media those families who are stricken by grief.
They were dazed and crazed in their grief: one woman ran headlong into the corridor, confused and wailing; another – who, we were told, had lost her only son, her daughter-in-law and her only grandson – could barely walk and was being half-carried by friends. The reporter's voiceover was accompanied by the howling and wailing of other relatives who had lost their loved ones on Flight MH370.
As the 10 O'Clock News beamed all this into my sitting room last night, there was only one thought in my mind: we shouldn't be seeing this. No reporter, no camera, no prying eyes, no public should have been allowed into the room through which the grieving relatives, who had just been told the Malaysian plane has definitely been lost with no survivors, had to walk. At the top of the piece, presenter Huw Edwards warned viewers that the report contained "some flash photography"; it would have been more appropriate for him to have warned that it contained some scenes that should never have been broadcast.
Grief is a private matter. If we choose to air it, it is one of the most powerful and moving emotions we have to share. So today, many of those same relatives we saw on the news last night have chosen to use their grief, some carrying banners that read "Mum, Dad, without you what will I do?", to march on the Malaysian embassy in Beijing; they are claiming that the Malaysian authorities have been distorting the facts of the airliner's disappearance.
But that is very different from the raw scenes of grief we saw paraded on the television last night. I don't blame the journalists – I'm a journalist myself, and I know what journalists are. We're takers: we take what we're given in the way of information and pictures and stories. But we're used to being managed in situations like the one that's unfolded in Beijing; we clamour for all the information we can get, but we know that some things aren't possible, that some individuals need protecting, that there is a time and a place for people in extreme situations to be kept away from us, and a moment when they can come forward and pass on, through us, the emotion they want others to witness and be aware of.
Those scenes last night, in a hotel corridor in Beijing, were not those moments. They were intensely, deeply private moments; the sort that, even in a 360 degree-connected, fully-wired, mobile camera-dominated world, are not made for any kind of sharing. They are not moments to record, or encroach on, or in any way savour (and putting them on the TV news is surely savouring of some kind). They are moments none of us would wish on anyone; and for those faced with them, they simply have to be endured, and survived, and worked through – in private.
The people who can most help in moments of extreme grief are relatives and friends. Their instinct, as well as to comfort, is to protect; another of the images last night was of a man hitting out at a TV camera with his bag; he looked very much like a relative trying to protect a grieving loved one. But beyond that group of supporters, people in extreme grief often have to rely on the humanity of a wider circle; and in Beijing yesterday, that wider circle most certainly included the Chinese authorities, who should have moved heaven and earth to protect those families from the media. They let them down, horribly, in their complete failure to do that.
CLICK HERE to read more ..especially the comments.
When Najib Razak, Malaysia’s Prime Minister, faced the cameras on Monday night with the news that there were no survivors from missing Flight MH370, families across the globe wept.
But for the parents of Wang Yonggang, a 27-year-old computer whiz from eastern China, the agony was particularly intense. (My comment: His CV is simply astounding! Only 27 and 20 publications! A real tragedy!)
Like many Chinese parents of their generation, the Wangs were permitted only one child by the Communist Party’s draconian family planning rules, implemented in 1979 amid fears of a population explosion.
Now, along with the missing Boeing 777, that son is gone.
“Both parents are in their fifties and Wang is their only child,” said Cao Kaifu, his former headmaster at Funing Middle School in Jiangsu province.
“It is so sad. Wang has always been the pride of his parents. They are heartbroken.”
Much has been written about the human rights abuses associated with China’s notorious one-child policy: the forced abortions, sterilisations and even cases of infanticide as rural families sought to rid themselves of girls they thought were less useful than boys.
But the disappearance of MH370 has cast light a less well-known but equally devastating phenomenon: that of the “orphaned” parents who, through accident or illness, lost the only child the Chinese government allowed them to have.
There are an estimated one million so-called “shidu” families in China, with state media reporting that around 76,000 new families are “orphaned” each year.
“When you lose your only child, it feels like the sky has fallen in,” said one bereaved Shanghai mother, who lost her only daughter and her husband to a 2012 car accident.
“Because of the one-child policy a million families have lost their offspring forever,” added the woman, who requested anonymity because of the politically sensitive nature of the subject. “It is an ethical tragedy. Nobody can take away the pain.”
Recent months have seen several major Chinese cities and provinces including Beijing and Shanghai start to change the controversial birth control policy, relaxing family planning rules so parents who are both only children can now have two children.
Xinhua, China’s official news agency, said the change was designed “to raise fertility rates and ease the financial burden on China's rapidly ageing population”.
However, the new rules will do nothing to soothe the pain of families such as the Wangs, who lost their only child when MH370 likely crashed into the Indian Ocean.
There were 153 Chinese passengers on the Boeing 777 when it set off from Kuala Lumpur international airport, around a third of them born in the 1980s, according to The Beijing News.
The majority of those young men and women, born in the first decade after the one-child policy was introduced, are likely to have been only children.
CLICK HERE for the rest of this very melancholic post that moved me so deeply...
My deepest condolences to all who lost their loved ones in MH370.
Here's a very well-written article by Stephanie Merritt of The Observer:
Excerpt:
The satirical website the Onion said it best on Thursday. The investigation into the fate of flight MH370 had been widened, it declared, "to encompass not only the possibilities of mechanical failure, pilot error, terrorist activity or a botched hijacking, but also the overarching scope of space, time and humankind's place in the universe".
Is it right to joke at all about what may very well turn out to be a mass tragedy? Perhaps a combination of gallows humour and conspiracy theories are our instinctive response to the confusion surrounding an incident like this. But an incident like what? Experts on all sides repeat the word "unprecedented" and it is precisely this sense of mystery that keeps us glued to the 24-hour news, awaiting the next instalment. I'd bet there isn't a thriller writer in the world who isn't guiltily wishing they'd dreamed up a scenario like this.
We thought we lived in a world so webbed around with digital surveillance and electronic footprints that it was all but impossible for an individual to vanish comprehensively, much less an international airliner. The story of MH370's disappearance has had all the hallmarks of a thriller over the past week: the red herrings, the misinformation, the suspicious passengers, the wider political ramifications. And yet, at the heart of all the theories and counterclaims, remains this black hole: the plane is still missing.
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