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.