The Art of Wearing Mask

Covid-19 in Beijing is diminishing, at least for now. Everyday life is coming back to that before the pandemic. But something is definitely changed. For example, 95% of people here wear masks in shopping malls and other indoor places, which gives some interesting clues to people's thoughts.

Many people wear "neck" masks. that is, although the ear loops are still hanging on the ears, the mask itself is pulled down to the neck, rather than covering the face. Do their necks need to be protected? Obviously no. Then why do they wear a mask in this way? Maybe it is a good demonstration of the latent functionality of face masks in an autocratic and mutually supervised society: the identity of an obedient citizen.

As protective equipment, we know that it's used by respiratory doctors and patients as a mechanical barrier that interferes with airflow in and out of the mouth and nose. However, why masks can be used as a social identity? Well, this is a story from 3 years ago.

In the earliest stage of covid-19, when it was still an "epidemic" rather than a pandemic, there was a debate in China on the justification of mandatory mask-wearing regulation for citizens. The government declared that the regulation is based on medical proof that surgical or N95 masks can block the transmission of the covid-19 virus, while many oversea studies gave the opposite conclusion. Some medical experts and public intellectuals argued that mask-wearing should be voluntary rather than mandatory. Like all the stories between intellectuals and the CCP government who can't stop its instinctive obsession with control, the proposal was rejected. Its supporters were labeled as "agents of foreign hostile powers" and "motherland haters". In the following 3 years, people were forbidden to enter all indoor and many outdoor places, public or private, otherwise it will probably be reported by scared citizens, and the owner of the place will be punished by the government. As the covid-19 mutated more and more mild and contagious, people found gradually that the zero-covid policy was infeasible, with the cost of destruction of the economy, freedom, and lives of patients other than covid-19. At this stage, wearing masks and supporting zero-covid became an identity of a "good" citizen. A mask on your head, no matter before or under your nose, told the government and people around you that "You see, I am one of us, not an enemy".

Now the zero-covid is gone. but the meme stays. The neck-wearing style of the face mask reminds us no matter how modern Chinese society looks in its physical dimension, there is still a long road before us to understand what is humanity, how to treat people, treat each other with humanity.