Shanghai citizens declare a day of mourning

Beijing Times

Dongguan Times

Yesterday marked one week after the catastrophic fire that consumed a 28-floor apartment building in Shanghai’s Jing’an District on November 15. The seventh day after a death, known as tou qi (头七), has special significance in traditional Chinese funereal customs, and a large crowd of mourners joined a parade through the streets near the burnt-up building.

The China Daily said there were “thousands” of mourners, while AFP estimated there were “tens of thousands” and Shanghai-based journalist Adam Minter estimated “easily hundreds of thousands”.

One of the mourners shown on the cover of the Beijing Times above is holding a poster bearing a black ribbon with the caption “Don’t Cry Shanghai” (上海不哭泣), the memorial’s unofficial slogan.

Oriental Morning Post

Strait Herald

Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post went with a white chrysanthemum above the headline, “Shanghai, at this moment we share a kindred love.”

Even the People’s Daily noted the event, running a tiny picture in the bottom left-hand corner of the front page.

Xiamen’s Strait Herald paired a picture of a mourner in Shanghai with a photo of an unrelated fire that raged through a residential neighborhood in Fuzhou, Fujian Province, yesterday evening.

The fire broke out at 9:20 and consumed several dozen wooden buildings. As of press time, no casualties had been reported. The catastrophe was believed to have been sparked by a cooking fire.

More memorial-related front pages are collected on Sina’s feature on the disaster.

Unofficial coverage and online memorials

Image widely circulated online: Shanghai Expo slogan and mourners

Reactions to the fire have been stronger online than in the press, with netizens circulating photos and critical cartoons about the fire, and using a black ribbon (modeled on the red AIDS ribbon) as a symbol of mourning.

In contrast to the officially declared mourning days for the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, April 2010 Yushgu earthquake and August 2010 Zhouqu mudslide, this display of mourning was initiated by citizens, not by the government.

This has gone unmentioned in Chinese media reports and official reports have tended tto gloss over the human causes of the disaster. But this has not been the case online:

Welders as scapegoats: Parody of popular advert showing welder as scapegoat

Last week, news that four welders who had been working on the building had been arrested because they did not have the proper licenses. Online commentary widely saw this as scapegoating.

The cartoon reproduced on the right was one of the critical images circulating. It’s a parody of a series of “viral” ads for clothing brand Vancl and shows a welder from the burnt down building identified as a scapegoat for problems caused by lax management.

Kaixin poll: 82% of users blame the Shanghai Party Secretary for the fire

Although much of this type of content has been deleted from Chinese websites, any Chinese netizen who spent time online in the last week would have seen some of it. To the left is a screenshot of a poll on Kaixin (the popular Facebook type social networking site).

The question is “Who should take responsibility for the November 15 Shanghai fire?” 9% of respondents say it is the welders; 82% say the Shanghai Party Secretary (the top government job in the city, currently held by Yu Zhengsheng).