More than a hundred years ago, Houdini fired a pistol at Jennie the elephant and made her disappear. P.C. Sorcar (Jr) made the Taj Mahal vanish for two minutes. He also vanished the Victoria Memorial and a train full of passengers. Disappearing acts are most enjoyed when they come as part of a magician’s show; when the state mutters abracadabra it can only be calamitous. No sooner did Chinese athlete Peng Shuai make public allegations of sexual exploitation by a senior Chinese politician than her tell-all post disappeared from social media. Next, all mentions of the allegation disappeared from the virtual world, and her Weibo account also disappeared in a sense — it was blocked. And then Peng herself disappeared.

Hide and Xi

The speculation continues. Is Peng really safe? Is that really her in the freshly surfaced pictures and videos? Why is she with Winnie the Pooh in one of those frames? Speaking of Pooh, some years ago, when memes comparing Chinese President Xi Jingping to Milne’s affable bear came to be the flavour of many seasons, censors in China made Pooh disappear. The film Christopher Robin also disappeared from China because of the Pooh connection. Reportedly, China’s list of the disappeared has expanded many times over since Xi assumed power in 2013. It could be an actress like Zhao Wei or a business magnate like Jack Ma. In Zhao’s case no reason was afforded, but online streaming platforms were “scrubbed clean” of her films and TV shows. It was said she had reappeared in Bordeaux in France, and when she uploaded a social media post denying the same, that disappeared as well. At a public event in 2020, Jack had criticised China’s regulatory system. He disappeared soon after and reappeared in Hong Kong a year later.

Remembering

The reason given out for actress and model Fan Bingbing’s disappearance was tax evasion. Artist-activist Ai Weiwei was under state surveillance for a long time. In a 2008 earthquake in Sichuan many people died, including 5,000 school schoolchildren. The government suppressed information on student deaths; the schools were supposed to be quake proof. Ai carried out his own investigation and started to publish names of the disappeared children on his blog. He was under house arrest for four years before resurfacing in Berlin. He lives in Portugal now. It was Ai's father, poet Ai Qing who wrote some poignant lines about erasure. He wrote, “Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows, not a trace can be found/ You who are living, live the best life you can/Don't count on the earth to preserve memory.”