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The Western Intellectual Behind China’s Distrust of the Crowd

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This article by Simon Luo was originally published on Palladium Magazine on February 19, 2020. It was featured in PALLADIUM 16: After Populism. To receive PALLADIUM 16: After Populism, subscribe today. The outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus in Wuhan has since been proved to be more than a crisis of public health. It has now become an issue of political trust. The government’s early suppression of whistleblowing, the bureaucratic apparatus’s inefficiency in dealing with a health crisis, and the Red Cross Society of China’s monopolization and mysterious distribution of public donations are all under massive fire. Amid this rare episode of collective anger at the government, a specter that has been haunting the Chinese public sphere for two decades has promptly returned. It is Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 book, The Crowd. Since the early 2000s, Le Bon’s mass psychology has appeared in numerous discussions of collective sentiments and collective action in the Chinese public sphere. The name-dro

Joseph Chan/Wan Chai, Hong Kong This article by Simon Luo was originally published on Palladium Magazine on February 19, 2020. It was featured in PALLADIUM 16: After Populism. To receive PALLADIUM 16: After Populism, subscribe today. The outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus in Wuhan has since been proved to be more than a crisis of public health. It has now become an issue of political trust. The government’s early suppression of whistleblowing, the bureaucratic apparatus’s inefficiency in dealing with a health crisis, and the Red Cross Society of China’s monopolization and mysterious…

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