Vast as they are, the numbers of dead and missing do not reflect the true horror of the recent earthquake in China. Fifteen million people used to live around the quake’s epicentre, nearly 4 million in the city of Chengdu. One consequence of this population density is that almost 2,000 of the estimated 50,000 victims were students and teachers trapped beneath collapsed school buildings.
(The country’s one-child-per-family policy will multiply the demographic impact of this death toll considerably.) One week later, 158 of the 140,000 relief workers have died in landslides, and nearly a quarter of a million survivors are seriously injured, many of them with limbs that need to be amputated. More than five million people are homeless, forced to live in makeshift shelters and sports stadiums while China’s factories work overtime to make them tents. Hundreds of dams and power stations are so badly damaged that they may not outlast the aftershocks that continue to hamper rescue efforts.
And yet, somehow, amidst all this horror there are also signs of China’s remarkable progress towards the ideals of an open, democratic society. The New York Times reports that Beijing’s Central Propaganda Department initially forbade any local journalists from travelling to the disaster area, but at least two reporters from Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post ignored the order, flew from Shanghai to Sichuan, and were soon filing dispatches from the frontline of the relief effort. The following day, their newspaper’s reports “included a graphic description of the scene and pictures of a mourning mother, a rescued child and corpses wrapped in white bunting [and] further risked offending censors by printing an all-black front page [to emphasize] the scale of the catastrophe.” This precedent encouraged dozens of other journalists to defy the censors and soon the CPD was forced to rescind its original order and to belatedly encourage reporters to stay close to the rescue teams.
One result of the ensuing coverage, one that will likely surprise the Chinese government, has been a flood of concern and sympathy from some very unexpected quarters. The American Red Cross, for example, has been able to raise more than 10 million dollars and has begun working closely with the China Red Cross. Bloggers from all over the world have spearheaded fundraising drives for relief effort, and have also tried to ensure that their donations are properly accounted for. The website 163.com recently announced that it would withhold future donations to the China Red Cross until it was satisfied that its money was being used effectively.
A comparison with the recent past shows how significant these changes really are. China’s great famine between 1958-1961, euphemistically known as the Three Years of Natural Disasters, claimed the lives of as many of as 30 million people. But because the famine was largely the outcome of the government’s absurd economic policies the true death toll was hidden from the public for decades. A similar silence enveloped a 1976 earthquake which claimed up to 250,000 lives. More recently, of course, there was the spectacle of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the stifling of any media critical of Beijing’s crackdown on the Falun Gong movement. Beijing has also gone to some length to discourage internal criticism of its morally dubious involvement with the governments of Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe and beyond.
What open coverage of the earthquake has shown is that public interest in China has now reached a level that the government can no longer easily control. Despite their fondness for censorship, China’s eagerness to exploit the global economy, has opened it out to many of globalization’s attendant nuisances such as a free press which can ignore or even criticise the government’s pronouncements.
Beijing should make a virtue of this necessity. For while this unexpected transparency has undoubtedly caused a great deal of handwringing in the corridors of power, it has also humanized one of the world’s least explained and most misunderstood societies. In Burma, by contrast, the generals’ continuing paranoia about foreign aid and media coverage, may well create the conditions for their eventual loss of power.
Worldwide coverage of the aftermath of this earthquake will ultimately create more sympathy for and appreciation of the lives of ordinary Chinese than the Olympic Games could ever do. If Beijing is smart enough to understand that, and to allow its media a breath of fresh air, then something positive may yet emerge from the awful tragedy in Sichuan.
