Published on September 29, 2025 1:55 PM GMT
9/11 and the immediate ractions to it has one of the biggest distortion fields of any topic in the English language. There is a polite fiction maintained when any Americans are present that everyone everywhere was sad about the incident. We shake our head, frown, and say that everyone shed a tear when we saw the towers fall on TV.
The truth is, there were celebrations around the world. I have talked to multiple Chinese people who were in the US at the time who told me some variant of "I was absolutely celebrating on the inside, and honestly kinda pissed that I had to pretend to be sad publicly". I had a middle school teacher in China who told a story about how he was literally the only people in a room who wasn't publically celebrating people burning to death in the towers. Something about the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia often gets brought up as justification. I'm absolutely certain there are many people on LessWrong with a similar experience.
Again, this is something that hundreds of millions of people witnessed in China. Almost every Chinese-American who has some contact with people in China knows about something like this. I'm sure there are similar stories in the former Soviet bloc, Serbia, Israel, ect. I'm not talking about some guy's uncle who clapped. I'm talking about spontaneous gatherings of 20+ people cheering around public TVs.
It is very surprising to me then, that I could find exactly one article about this in English. This is blood-libel sounding stuff and absolutely fodder for anti-Chinese articles, and yet zero Americans have written about this? In fact, stories about 9/11 celebrations are often cast as racist conspiracy theories, "dancing Arabs" and "dancing Israelis" in particular. I would be shocked (Jeb Bush is a reptilian alien level shocked) if absolutely zero such celebrations happened in the United States. I don't think it would say much about the nature of their cultural or ethnic group though.
This realization has made me seriously rethink how hard it is for millions of people to be aware of a conspiracy and just not talk about it for 20 years, but only around a specific group who might make things awkward. I guess if a large powerful group feel strongly enough about something, the entire world warps itself to fit their world-view.
IRL though, I'll still frown and say that everyone was sad for the American people if anyone asks me about how China felt about 9/11 - it'll be too awkward otherwise.
Author's note: I have sometimes considered myself Chinese-American.
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