Gratitude

gǎn'ēn 感恩

"Thanks for digging my grave, man!" (Source: CDS)

At a video meeting of the Novel Coronavirus Epidemic Prevention and Control Command on the evening of March 6, newly-stationed Hubei Province Party Standing Committee member and Wuhan Municipal Party Secretary Wang Zhonglin touted "gratitude education" for the people of Wuhan, who by then had been under lockdown for 43 days and had seen 49,871 confirmed cases and 2,349 deaths in the city. "We must undertake gratitude education throughout the city, so that the populace is grateful to the General Secretary and to the Communist Party, listens to the Party, follows the Party, and forms strong positive energy." Wang Zhonglin continued, "The people of Wuhan are heroic people. They are also people who know how to be grateful."

The Wuhanese were infuriated to hear that they were supposed to be "grateful" for the government's gross mismanagement of the outbreak, from suppressing doctors who identified the first cases to the heavy-handed lockdown on 11 million people:

@G***周: What can I say? I'm grateful I haven't been killed, I guess

@小***2: Thank you, Master, for your extraordinary kindness

@m***g: Grateful, I'm not so sure, but I do wish the best for eight generations of your ancestors

@卧***w: even the destruction is a blessing

[Chinese]

The backlash forced a withdrawal of coverage from Wuhan's official newspaper.

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