When a snow disaster cracks the land,
When Tibet splittists disrupt the torch relay,
When an earthquake shakes every single person’s soul...

No matter what hardships hit,
[We’ll] never leave any countryman stranded.

Go China! Stand up straight!

 
     Inspiring words from the Chinese Web portal Sohu.com, in a banner ad for its news channel. The plug on the home page, which has been running off and on for a couple of weeks now (between luxury car ads), sums up a troika of blows China has taken this year in one restorative pitch. It also suits the prescription of Community Party propagandists, who've ordered that coverage of the quake be unifying, positive, and conducive to national stability. Sohu, the operator of the official site of the Beijing Games, is simply playing to its market of course, albeit one confined by Web police. It might as well be parroting Communist Party leaders themselves.

     The biggie in Sichuan has served to unify the country, brought it more positive press than not, and thereby benefited national stability. First impressions have become critical to Beijing's record in responding to such crises. And Beijing made a good one after the earthquake, pulling together a massive relief operation, ushering in an official media blitz, and tolerating, if not engaging, most of the rest of the state and foreign press corps. It also embraced, on a massive and unprecedented scale, the Good Samaritan giving of public volunteers, private companies and foreign donors. After the highly contentious prelude to the Olympics, the flood of sympathy was a cleansing political catharsis.

     Nothing necessarily wrong with that. But there were darker undercurrents. Private charity, having barely just become an option in China, practically became an obligation. Aid from places such as Taiwan and Japan got knotted up in politics. And dissent over the handling of the quake has been mostly relegated to the blogosphere; for elite spheres like closed-door intellectual forums and the pages or Web pages of liberal media; and to those vexed Sichuanese who lost children in toppled schools or failed to get adequate relief, and have been repeatedly hushed up.

     Without sufficient breathing space for independent critique, coping and aid, repressed tensions could still boil over in disaster zone. And the progress that might come out of the quake might be much less than originally hoped.

     For all the hustle and bustle in the immediate aftermath of the quake, one could argue that the Party always controlled the message - the “main melody" (or "theme"), as its known in official parlance. More than a month on, it’s easier to reflect on the developments. On all the key fronts - publicity, charity, relief work, and even emergent field of psychiatric counseling - Beijing has come to circumscribe a circus of activity under the state's own tent.

     Did anyone expect any different? No. Nonetheless, state unity, when egregiously enforced, engenders the underlying strains of isolationism and divisiveness in China’s political DNA. It’s a family-oriented style of politics. Ancient philosophers and conquerors helped implant the notion, colonialist foreign powers exacerbated it, and the Party -- together with many (often rightfully) proud Chinese -- are feeding off it to the present day. If you’re not with China, you risk being branded “anti-China”.

     The evolution of the domestic media, post-quake, indicates how authorities have encircled the forces of pluralism and served to polarize public debate. (This I’ve touched on this in previous posts here, here, here and here.) Initially, thousands of journalists scurried to the disaster zone. No one stopped them, but no one invited them either.

     Propaganda organs, as in case of many crises and cover-ups in recent years, were initially disarmed. State media editors knowingly disregarded protocol on disaster coverage and an explicit ban on non-official reporting, knowing the demand for the story was huge and the risks (hence the openings) many. Premier Wen Jiabao, on the ground in Sichuan within just a few hours, was already out ahead of them. All the easier for them to chase.

     Suppose central and local officials had managed to shut all or most them out, or tried much harder. The backlash would have been bad and looked worse – something on the order of another SARS debacle. But that didn’t happen. Instead, the Chinese masses along with the international community promptly rallied behind the rescue and relief efforts. The propaganda department quickly retreated one step, drawing the line at bad publicity.

     And the vast majority of domestic media stuck within the newly established boundaries. In turn, the official broadcasters – especially China Central Television (CCTV) and Sichuan TV – dominated the story. The cascade of real, live, rolling coverage, official and non- alike, trained on the official response and reinforced the impression that under the leadership’s command, the government was doing about the best it could given the circumstances. In most cases, it probably was. But if it wasn’t, few dared say so.

     Within a week, media were being ordered to play down a growing list of salacious subjects. When some of the country’s most assertive media began needling away at the most sensitive point of all - the thousands of schoolchildren crushed to death under badly built schools - censors began ratcheting up warnings and punishments.

     It wasn’t a blanket crackdown, but a series of targeted strikes, just enough to send a message. Web czars planted key word blocks on search engines, warning of possibly illegal contents. Party propaganda bosses busted papers like the 21^st  Central Business Herald, for spreading “harmful information” in a couple of features. The official newswire Xinhua, presumably at their behest, took aim at the trailblazing Guangdong newspaper Southern Weekly for its investigations into the school construction controversy. Finally, according to insiders, they and other leaders exerted pressure on Guangdong Party Secretary Wang Yang, seen as a relative moderate, to call home watchdog reporters from that newspaper group.

     Where Party authorities didn’t directly discourage dissent, nationalistically-charged readers did. A rash of Web debates entangled online commentators in sticky standards of political correctness. A pair of young bloggers were detained by police after their critiques offended the sensibilities of Netizens. A Chinese property tycoon, and a bunch of big foreign brands, were pilloried for not donating enough at first.

     The pressure to empathize with quake victims hit absurd heights. When Chinese media discredited a news-making text message purportedly written by a dying mother to her daughter, the China Media Project reported, Netizens seemed less upset with the sham artist than the media itself - for being too cynical. The respected Shanghai writer Yu Qiuyu urged orphaned parents to set aside their festering grievances against officials and contractors, reasoning it would only bring China bad press.

     Many Netizens turned on Yu, though he did expose a core truth behind the manipulation of public opinion. There's always the risk free expression can always be used against China. Thus it's forever prone to charges of subversion.

     Even the most "democratic" countries fall into this trap at times. Un-Chinese? How about un-American? Is the stiflingly patriotic climate of political correctness here much different than what we found in the United States following 9/11? We all know how since then, in the eyes of most Americans today, the U.S. paid for the surge of nationalism.

     But China, by comparison, was never so blatantly divided to begin with. A single-party political system, the homogeneous Han majority, and the Olympic fever have kept political and socioeconomic divisions submerged beneath the surface all year. The snow disaster that crippled the nation's railroads and coal pipelines and left millions of people returning home for New Year’s out in the cold - now that was a temporary P.R. disaster for the government, both domestically and abroad.

     But the Tibet conflagration completely split the sides, and kindled the worldwide face-off over the torch relay between pro and anti-China protesters. The Communist Party leadership, whose chief concerns lie on home front, came out of it feeling pretty good. Within the Standing Committee of the Politburo, says one Party media editor in Beijing, the internal appraisal of the ordeal was: “’We won. Not because the torch relay was successful but that Chinese young people showed their disappointment with the West. This means that West’s ‘peaceful evolution’ policy is not a success with the youth. It’s failing.”

     Peaceful evolution to a Western-style democracy, he explains, is "their biggest fear of all,” He explains: “It was a result that Communist Party leaders themselves did not expect. They spent all these years with all this patriotic education, but none of it had the impact of this single event. People could view the West with their own eyes and realize, ‘Hey, it’s not always so friendly.’”

     The quake response displayed a flash of the civic spirit of reform behind China’s rise - the thing Beijing Olympics were ideally meant to reward and further encourage. This spring, the prevailing icon in China has been the heart, as in “I (heart) China”. But at first it was a hard heart, not to be broken by anti-government protesters. Folks started boasting the heart on My Space  sites and on T-shirts during the international torch relay.

     Now the heart has softened somewhat, since being adopted by Beijing in the latest mass publicity campaign for quake relief. Propaganda posters show a red heart beating with the slogan: “Shaking the hearts of China”. It’s paired with images signifying the recovery or reconstruction, and related couplets rooting on the effort. Here's a translation of one:

The heavens and earth have been overturned/
But hope has broken through.

 Here's another (pictured above):

 Hot tears have been shed/
But strength has been gathered.

      Still, the question is, "hope" and "strength" for whom?

     Last week in Beijing, I sat in on a forum for Chinese media marking the one-month anniversary of the quake. The hosts were the SOHO group, the preeminent developer on the capital’s corporate East Side, and the Shanghai-based China Business News. CBN’s well-travelled chief editor He Li moderated and celeb SOHO founders Pan Shiyi and his wife Zhang Xin joined a panel of prominent scholars.

     For a few hours, they meditated on the quake and how they might build on its aftermath toward a civil society. Xu Jilin, an intellectual historian from Huadong Normal University in Shanghai, helped frame the discussion in his introductory remarks. China is again a great economic power, he held, but not a “great political power”, nor a “great civilization”. Xu questioned whether the public outpouring in response to the quake would come to signify a revival of Chinese civilization, or rather its “hui guang fan zhao”. He was referring to a Chinese phenomenon similar to the Lazarus premonition, that last burst of vitality before death.

     It was hard to be optimistic in the case of the media expression, observed Zhan Jiang, the straight-talking journalism dean at China Youth University for Political Sciences in Beijing. Comparing official openness at the scene of the quake to unrest in Tibetan regions, he stressed that every case of media coverage still had to be weighed separately. Increasingly, Professor Zhan pointed out, "certain elements" within the central government had been putting the clamps on quake reporting. He predicted that one day soon, all of the sudden, the August Olympics would take its place as the official media's lead story.

     Indeed even as I write, the leadership is tweaking the “main melody” - or melodies - of state publicity. This from Xinhua on Sunday (italics mine):

       BEIJING, June 15 (Xinhua) -- China's top publicity official Liu Yunshan said here on Sunday that more publicity should be given to post-quake reconstruction and the Beijing 0lympic Games.

    "People's efforts in rebuilding their hometown after the massive quake and patriotism as well as great spirits involved should be highly praised," Liu, a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee, told a national conference of publicity officials.

    Liu said models and heroes in quake relief should be publicized by the media, and literatures relating to the quake relief should be created to encourage the nation to weather the storm.

    He said more publicity should also be given to Beijing's preparation for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.