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A Shanghai resident’s defiant response to an area police officer’s warning that non-compliance with town’s COVID coverage would have a deleterious impression on the person’s future offspring went viral throughout Chinese language social media—till it was censored. “After we punish you, it should affect your subsequent three generations,” the officer, swaddled in full PPE, warned whereas standing in an condominium hallway. The person’s response, “We’re the final technology, thanks!”, has turn out to be a viral meme on the Chinese language web used to specific despair in regards to the state of the world and the nation’s political trajectory.
In feedback collected from throughout the web, many related the video to resonant occasions previous and current, together with: the chaining of Xiaohuamei, the 1989 pupil motion, and the One Youngster Coverage:
zxzlaw：“We’re the final technology, thanks.” This phrase, redolent of tragedy, is an expression of the deepest type of despair. The speaker declared a choice of a organic nature: we is not going to reproduce. The choice is underpinned by a psychological and existential judgment: a future price striving for has been taken from us. That phrase is, maybe, the strongest indictment an adolescent could make of the period to which they belong. // The truth that he stated it so calmly and matter-of-factly is exactly what makes it so stunning to listeners.
Leeing1992：Again within the day, I usually heard individuals say, “Chinese language individuals love kids greater than anybody on earth. Not even the One Youngster Coverage can cease them. They’ll danger an enormous positive simply to have extra children.” At this time, the phrase “We’re the final technology, thanks” is reverberating throughout the web. No natalist insurance policies can evaluate with the direct impression of their accelerationism.yamadarunzhi： [A couplet]
This world doesn’t need me
We’re the final technologyXyczgmyx1：
1989: As a result of it’s my responsibility
2022: We’re the final technology, thanks
~ I’m weeping ~ [Chinese]
On Weibo, many shared memes derived from the phrase:
The favored movie and social commentary account 导筒directube shared a movie poster for the 1987 biographical drama about Puyi, the final Qing emperor, with the hashtag “final technology.”
One individual handwrote the phrase on her t-shirt, which already bore the slogan “that is what a feminist appears to be like like.”
Calligraphy studying: “A chive’s awakening: We’re the final technology.”
This meme, a screenshot from a dramatized biopic of the executed late-Qing reformer Tan Sitong, that has been circulating since a minimum of 2018, exhibits his spouse saying, “Fusheng [Tan Sitong’s courtesy name], we don’t have kids but,” and his response, “In right this moment’s China, is it yet one more youngster or yet one more slave?” The meme initially circulated in response to information a couple of proposed “beginning fund” to extend Chinese language ladies’s’ fertility charge. [Chinese]
Censors shortly stepped in to erase dialogue of the video. On Weibo searches for the hashtags “final technology” and “we’re the final technology, thanks!” returned a press release explaining the subject couldn’t be displayed “as a result of related rules and insurance policies.” Memes like these proven above had been additionally censored. WeChat essays bearing on the phrase had been additionally deleted. In defiance of the censorship, some Weibo customers modified their usernames to variations on the “final technology” theme or wrote the phrase into their bios, each of which seem much less topic to censorship.
The phrase was not merely delicate for the context by which it emerged—opposition to Shanghai’s pandemic coverage—but in addition for its inherent rejection of the Chinese language state’s current natalist push. In the face of a 30 p.c drop in beginning charges, the biggest such lower for the reason that famine attributable to the Nice Leap Ahead, the Chinese language state has pushed a number of natalist insurance policies: state-run matchmaking, a divorce cool-off interval, abortion bans, actual property perks, and expanded maternity advantages. The state has additionally made gestures towards stronger safety of womens’ rights, however many stay skeptical: “As quickly as they need entry to your uterus, they begin sweet-talking you.” In 2021, censors shut down Douban dialogue teams the place feminist adherents to the South Korean 6B4T tactic—which rejects heterosexual relationships and procreation—mentioned their determination to not give beginning. In Overseas Affairs, Carl Minzner warned that China, though in some respects nicely positioned to reverse the tide of falling beginning charges, is doubling down on patriarchal values and political constructions that dampen enthusiasm for extra kids, growing the probability of “final generations”:
Xi seeks to steer China again to an earlier, extra patriarchal period with respect to ladies. In early 2021, authorities printed a compilation of his speeches on the household as a part of an ongoing marketing campaign to remold the party-led All-China Girls’s Federation. In it, Xi extols household unity and invokes Chinese language imperial precedent to reward “ladies’s particular position” as “virtuous wives and good moms, aiding their husbands and educating their kids.”
Such calls usually are not merely rhetorical; they mirror a decisive shift in coverage, as nicely. For instance, the CCP is steadily turning in opposition to divorce. Students comparable to Xin He, Ke Li, and Ethan Michelson have documented that Chinese language judges are more and more unwilling to approve ladies’s requests to dissolve their marriages. Within the early years of this century, Chinese language courts authorized 60 p.c of divorce petitions. That has now declined to roughly 40 p.c. Concurrently, the proportion of divorce purposes withdrawn by candidates has soared—from 5 p.c within the late Seventies to over 25 p.c right this moment.
[…] Such developments may worsen but additional. Ought to authorities prioritize China’s demographic future as a political crucial beneath Xi, they could undertake express fertility targets and incorporate them into efficiency analysis techniques for native officers, fast-tracking the careers of these whose counties hit an annual TFR of 1.5. That is removed from hypothetical. It’s how Beijing managed anti-natalist inhabitants planning efforts throughout the a long time of the one-child coverage. [Source]
In a small transfer towards a extra open system, Guangdong province final week confirmed that it had scrapped numerous onerous bureaucratic hurdles for brand new mother and father and single moms. Expectant mother and father want now not search approval for births from state household planning workplaces, nor will they face restrictions on registering kids, regardless of what number of they’ve. Youngsters born outdoors of marriage can even be permitted to be registered, a significant change. The province can even subsidize maternity depart for second and third kids.
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