In March 2020, weeks after the coronavirus outbreak in Hubei and the lock down in Wuhan, the local government rushed to announce a “gratitude education” campaign, to teach local denizens to “thank the General Secretary, and thank the Chinese Communist Party.” The subsequent negative pushback online forced the original announcement and social media posts to be swiftly deleted. In this paper I examine how the term gratitude (“Gan-en”) has become intrinsically linked to gifts, philanthropy, and propaganda in recent China, especially in the wake of disaster. Yet as Leinaweaver (2013) notes, “ingratitude” is often more revealing of the fault lines in relations and hierarchies in different societies, and the episode of pushback in Wuhan is revealing of how power dynamics are constantly negotiated between community and state, all the while being filtered by state controlled digital media. By looking at examples of how denizens around China responded in the wake of tragedy vis-a-vis the central government push to be “thankful”, I uncover tensions between how people and state imagine disaster and reciprocity, with implications on what philanthropy might mean in China today.