“If it wasn’t me, then next time it would be me”: How a district display bar left a common memory of the Zero Age

September 18 marks the fourth anniversary of the Guangzhou isolated transportation bus accident. Three days later, an old photo reappears on the X platform: a number of white papers are placed on the district announcement bar, with the most vivid handwriting in the middle: "If it's not me, then the next time is me."

The photo itself did not indicate the location and specific date of the shooting, but the words pointed to the end of 2022: someone wrote Guangzhou shipping back and forth, someone wrote Urumqi "11·24" fires, someone wrote months without income, can not buy a suitcase, someone repeatedly wrote "I"; on the other two papers wrote "Silence for the victims of the 11·24 Urumqi fires" and "Prefer to suffer, do not hassle".

“I” connects unrelated encounters into a line.

The Morning of September 18, 2022A bus transporting people from Guiyang to Libya was crashed on the side of the highway in Sili. Of the 47 people on the car, 27 were killed and 20 were injured. Financial News confirmed at the time that the passengers were passengers of the epidemic; the Guiyang officials subsequently informed,The vehicle departed at 0:10 in the morning, and an accident occurred around 2:40.and .

The accident itself is a traffic disaster, but it quickly became a national public opinion event because passengers are not ordinary night travellers, but people who are transferred centrally under an outbreak prevention and control system arrangement. People are asked not only about driving and road issues, but also: why it must be transferred across the region at night, who decides this arrangement, who is responsible for the safety in the transfer process.

Two months later, a fire broke out in the district of Urumqi.Official reports say 10 people were killed and 9 injured.It also denies that the network's unit doors have been sealed; at the same time, a large number of people have linked the fires to the restrictions of long-term blockade.Amnesty International reportsThe fires later became one of the triggers of numerous protests, with participants demanding an end to excessive blockade and censorship in memory of the victims.

The “I” on the banner is just turning these different events from “other’s misfortune” to the same generation’s risky experience: being transferred is me, being blocked and losing income is me, and the one who can’t escape from the fire may be me.

The white paper appears because the space for public expression has been extremely narrowed.

The most recognizable symbol of the 2022 white paper movement is a white paper with nothing written.The emptiness itself becomes an expression, because any specific text can bring more obvious risks.Amnesty International reportsSeveral peaceful protesters were detained and some were questioned, monitored or otherwise pressured by the police.

This column is special because it contains “white paper” and re-writes the word back. The words are not complicated: accidents, unemployment, unable to buy food, silence, not messy. They show that when the official media and public discussion space cannot fully accommodate personal feelings, the most ordinary life experiences also regain political meaning.

“A few months without income can’t afford a package” isn’t an ambitious narrative, but directly points to the social cost of extreme blockade. For people with stable wages and savings, living home may mean inconvenience; for day-to-day, part-time workers, small and low-income families, a long loss of work means that cash flows are instantly interrupted.

Between Guangzhou Big Bus and the Urumqi Fire, the real link is the lack of individual right of refusal

The two events are different in nature and cannot simply attribute all casualties to the same cause, but they share an important background: during the most severe periods of clearance policy, the individual has very limited autonomy for travel, isolation, transfer and daily life arrangements.

Guangzhou passengers are not free to choose the time and destination of their travel; the inhabitants of Urumqi have long lived under strict vaccination restrictions.In such a institutional environment, it is difficult for ordinary people to reduce their risks by withdrawing, refusing or changing arrangements once security judgments are wrong.

This is also where “if not me, then the next time is me” really has power. It describes not probability, but a state of right: when a person does not have the right to adequate information, the right to reject and the channel of appeal, the risk does not belong only to those who have already suffered an accident, but to all those who may be covered by the same set of administrative orders.

“Four years later, what really needs to be preserved is the system memory, not just the anniversary numbers.”

Disaster memories can easily be compressed into dates, deaths, and a lesson, but the most important part of the memories is lost if you remember only 27 or 10 people, without remembering why they would be in that place at that time, under that arrangement.

After the Grand Bus accident in Guangzhou, a local investigation team was set up and said that it was necessary to inspect the isolation of trafficking and traffic safety hazards involved. After the Urumqi fire, the authorities publicly apologized and denied that some blockade measures hindered rescue. The official handling emphasized the causes of the accident and safety management, but the public memory is preserved on another level: how the lives of individuals are restored by executive orders in an extreme policy environment, and how uncertain people can bear.

It has no official number, no official code, no statistical chart, but preserves several voices that will not appear in official documents at the same time: the victims, the unemployed, the confined, the remembrance, and the fear of being the “next.”

“Don’t get lazy” is not an expression of emotions, but a method of memory.

It reminds people that the way public memory is really easy to disappear is not always to delete a news, but rather to turn each disaster into an isolated event, gradually getting used to “occurring again.”

When bus accidents, fires, unemployment and blockade lives are rewritten on the same banner, personal experiences begin to form social memories.It doesn’t need to draw the same conclusions for all events, nor does it need to mix each subject of responsibility together; it just refuses to isolate those who suffer from each other.

Seeing this picture four years later, the most worth preserving is this connection: 27 transport victims are not a statistic, 10 deaths in the Urumqi fires are not just another group of numbers. Every public policy and administrative decision will eventually fall on specific people, and a society has no ability to remember these people, determining whether the same risks can really be identified and avoided.

“If it wasn’t me, then it would be me the next time.” – This phrase is still blinking because it rewrites the most easily neglected relationship in public events – the encounter of others with their own safety, never imagined so far.