How Many Planes Do You See, Winston?

The Crash That Disappeared

Videos and posts about the incident on Chinese platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, WeChat and Weibo were swiftly deleted. Because the censorship was so drastic and so fast, only a small number of people in China are likely to have learned about the incident at all. Such retrospective correction of reality is possible only when a state has turned its national internet into a sealed political space. China has plainly now reached that level of control.

What followed was what George Orwell had already described, with grim foresight, in his novel 1984. A historical event is simply deleted by the relevant Ministry of Truth. Truth is whatever the state says is true.

In a truly totalitarian state, this applies even when an event has already taken place. State censorship has proved that it can make the record of it disappear. The Orwellian question is no longer how many fingers Winston is shown. It is how many planes he sees and how many holes there are in the CITIC Tower.

Beyond China’s Firewall

What the Chinese government apparently could not yet prevent was news of the crash leaving the country. The arm of Chinese censorship does not extend beyond China’s borders. Images and reports therefore continued to circulate abroad.

https://twitter.com/nexta_tv/status/2070492277634396368

Only the following day did the authorities have to acknowledge the incident. A week later, the pilot was identified. Only then did officials even concede that it had apparently not been an accident but a deliberate act by the pilot. According to the authorities, Liu had left his approved flight area and lost contact with air traffic control. He was a freelance worker, lived alone after a divorce and is said to have suffered from insomnia and anxiety.

The international press needed several days before it could report fully on the crash. China’s strict censorship of traditional and social media had at least slowed the story’s emergence.

Although the news is now out in the world, and the Chinese version has moved closer to reality, questions remain.

Flight data from Flightradar24, which systematically tracks aircraft movements worldwide, showed that the aircraft was able to enter the heavily restricted airspace of the Chinese capital and approach Zhongnanhai, the seat of the party leadership.

This is a complete no-fly zone, into which no aircraft may enter. Beijing’s airspace is generally regarded as among the most tightly monitored in the world. Commercial flights often have to make wide detours around the capital. Drones have been completely banned for months. Private pilots cannot file a flight plan in this area without state permission.

Questions over Beijing’s Airspace

After entering the restricted zone, the aircraft’s transponder was switched off and the plane made another turn. It was now flying toward the tower. This very discrepancy – that an unauthorized flight could make it all the way to a skyscraper in such tightly controlled airspace – fueled speculation inside and outside China.

That was all the more striking because there was apparently no response from the air force. To this day, it remains unclear how the aircraft was able to penetrate so far into restricted airspace without being stopped in time.

The Financial Times wrote of a “cloak of secrecy” surrounding the incident. Yet if one applies the principle known as Occam’s razor, named after the English Franciscan monk and philosopher William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), a different explanation suggests itself. The principle holds that the most likely assumption is the one left standing once everything unnecessary has been shaved away.

Seen in that light, the reason for this large-scale cover-up may be much simpler. It must be a deep humiliation for the Chinese government that one lone pilot managed to breach the security walls of the Chinese surveillance state in a small private aircraft without being identified as a danger in time. In Beijing, the crash may leave a deeper mark inside the regime than on the tower itself.