Listening to French radio this morning (it could have been any radio really) I heard about the gigantic efforts deployed by China in order to locate the lost Malaysian airlines plane. At one point the Chinese PM was reported as saying how important it was for China to find the lost plane – because “we value human life”. I needed to stop and take this in. To me China and the Chinese government has always been a gargantuan entity that operates far beyond the value of human life. I mean this in the sense of what we have been used to read about in the news – huge projects that wipe away swathes of the population in certain regions without too much batting of eyelids.
The authoritarian attitude to human life was reflected in the run up to the Beijing Olympics (as it has been, for what that matters, reflected in the Sochi run up as well as the Brasil World Cup). To hear the Chinese PM speak of the value of human life was new to me and a sort of reality check. Then there is the matter of the huge amount of resources being deployed (including satellites) to locate a wreck (with all the respect that is due to those who passed away). There is a huge irony in all this – the Chinese megastate mobilising expensive resources to search for the dead because it apparently respects human life.
Taken from a wider angle there is also the matter of how long news can dwell on the death of a particular set of people because of the nature of their death – an airline tragedy – when in the event of deaths in similar numbers in other corners of the earth the news is reported as though it is routine. The currency of life and death in news value is certainly one that fluctuates.
end note: The accompanying image is a famous photo of Otto von Bismarck snapped surreptitiously while he was on his deathbed. It is believed to be one of the first paparazzo photos ever – as the morbidity of death makes the news. Read more about this here.
