The issue of fireworks is probably the first time in the past decade that ordinary Chinese people have participated in politics on a larger scale, in the form of direct decisions by the National People's Congress.
Unlike the epidemic "Class B A control" based on administrative orders, the ban on fireworks has the Air Pollution Control Law as a more solid legal basis, voted on by the national and local people's congresses. To go and set off wildcrackers in such a situation is a real extra-legal fanaticism and a lower level of "protest".
So it's not to say that the Chinese don't have political nerve. The government seems to have taken a step backward on epidemic control, and the fight for civil rights immediately catches up with them and demands that the cannons be fired.
Ironically, a decade ago, the last public political issue in China that had a large social impact was the 'haze'. The topic had been brewing for several years, and finally came to a head in early 2013 when Chai Jing's documentary "Under the Dome" was brought into the national public eye. But the documentary was soon blocked, and started a decade of Chinese people's "loss of words" in the face of political issues.
Ten years later, the paradox here is not just that fireworks create a haze that harms the respiratory system of ordinary people. It is also that the leaders of the struggle for civil rights back then were media professionals like Chai Jing, aka public intellectuals. Now this group has long lost its collective voice, and the subjects fighting for rights, and the methods of communication are beginning to show a tendency toward populism, and inevitably falling into the populist trap.
In the past month, the Chinese have just experienced a wave of universal Covid infection, and the respiratory system is in a compromised, more vulnerable state, superimposed on atmospheric pollution, which may bring more serious secondary damage.
This problem, like the epidemic, originally required society as a whole to assess and respond rationally. But right now, chaos is the order of the day. Chinese people without Paxlovid, without mRNA vaccines, and even without antigenic reagents and ibuprofen, will die and live in the air that smells of sulfur dioxide.