Countdown Beijing : China's Big Quake

Gimme Shelter: Relief Efforts Continue in Sichuan

Melinda Liu — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:48:52 GMT

Jennifer Conrad reports on continuing post-quake relief efforts in Sichuan:

British industrial designer Luke Cardew was traveling in France when
he received a voicemail from a friend: "China needs shelters." The
Sichuan earthquake had just struck. For Cardew, who works out of
Shanghai as a freelance designer, the disaster provided an incredible
opportunity for him to use his skills to help people.

By all accounts, the efforts of Chinese volunteers and workers have
been tremendous, but sometimes foreigners have provided specialized
knowledge that filled important needs. Cardew, for example, knows
quite a bit about creating temporary shelters in disaster areas.

He was studying design at Central St. Martins when the Pakistan
earthquake struck in 2005. Assigned to work on a self-directed
project, Cardew designed a temporary shelter made of Beeboard
cardboard. "Central focuses more on the conceptual and theoretical
side of design. However I am from a more practical background. I
thought it might be interesting to combine Centrals' conceptual
approach with a more practical project. The solution half-satisfied me
and half the school. But I continued to be interested in finding a
cheap design solution for disaster relief."

During six months os research, he learned the types of
designs people prefer: straight, house-like side walls (rather than
the slanted walls of a tent) make a shelter feel more comfortable and
secure.

Back to work in Shanghai a few days after the May 12 Sichuan quake,
Cardew began working on a prototype for a temporary shelter; he
coordinated with partners to secure funding. The result was a
structure made of split bamboo with a waterproof tarpaulin cover. The
design, inspired by bamboo greenhouses from the Anhui provice, houses
a six-person family for up to a year.

In some cases his group, I Bought a Shelter, delivers the shelters as kits. And
sometimes, he adapts the shelter to fit local conditions.

Once he was sent by a Chinese relief group to Zundao, north of
Mianyang. After spending a few hours talking to the locals about their
skill levels and looking at available materials, he was handed a piece
of white chalk and asked, "Can you draw?"

With a deadline in half an hour, he sketched a housing solution on a
school blackboard. The walls are made mostly of rubble (reducing the
amount of wood used) and the scheme further stretches materials since it houses
two families, each with a bedroom, living room, and exterior kitchen.
The families would each be given 500 RMB for constructing
semi-permanent shelters, so he encouraged them to use that money for
corrugated cement roofing.

Although he later had drawings printed to distribute to other
villages, Cardew hopes the villagers don't build the shelter exactly
as he presented it, but adapt them based on their preferences and
skills.

"I want to see what they've done. If they've morphed the shelters,
then I'll learn something," he says.

Post-Quake Camp: “Have You Heard of Communism?”

Jonathan Ansfield — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 09:42:53 GMT

Last week I was in Sichuan, where post-quake reconstruction is just beginning but the sense of utter ruin has faded fast. The down-and-out, albeit, are a relatively small and hard-to-reach minority: I met an ER nurse who couldn't forgive herself for not having saving a soul, for instance, and an eight-year-old boy who'd barely spoken since seeing his teacher consumed in the debris. But the civic spirit I saw in action disinfected some of the cynicism I carried going in. This was particularly the case at the displacement camps I visited, where the mood blended forbearance, levity and melancholy. Imagine an encampment of Deadheads on tour - without the Dead.

The quake leveled not only towns and villages but momentarily, the class consciousness of an increasingly stratified society. It's been many a decade since so many people in China found themselves lumped together in such sorry straits, and perhaps never before have so many across the country genuinely banded together to provide a safety net. Perversely put, Sichuanese can take solace in living out the socialistic ideal of the People's Republic. Not that the damage was egalitarian or equitable. The Big One mostly hit the ill-prepared underclasses up in the mountains, much as Katrina submerged their American counterparts below sea-level. But I'd take life in a Sichuan displacement camp over a FEMA trailer park any day. Here, at least, it signified development.

...

My work didn’t take me to the worst-hit counties like Beichuan and Wenchuan. People I interviewed who did go likened the experience to rediscovering lost cities of antiquity. “Ghosts' towns” became a familiar refrain. In portions of the sticks that have remained habitable, resources are often scare and peasants frustrated and angry. The day before I arrived, members from a small Chengdu-based “house church” piled into a couple SUVs packed with food and other necessities and drove to one outlying village they had been aiding.

But they never made the drop. When they got to the village, their local contacts worried about accepting the offering because it was only enough for about one villager in five, said one church member on-hand. And officials they encountered refused the aid because, according to them, they had things under control. It wasn’t clear whether the bigger hangup was the giver or the gift.

Such problems were not so visible in the official relief camps. Displacement grounds were blocked out in tidy city-like grids of tents, and residents had sunk into the controlled rhythms of ghetto life. The mood was generally constructive and cooperative.

In the heat and intermittent drizzle of the days, people spent a lot of time just lazing around in their tents. Come meal times, they queue up single-file for the communal grub (no ration tickets needed). Late afternoon, the elderly graze under canopies reading or playing mahjong; the young cavort in school or group therapy activities – they sing a lot, and squabble a lot, especially over the odd luxury like a bicycle.

Some days toward sundown, pop bands show up to play a benefit set. Stand after stand sells all variations on those now-ubiquitous “I Love China” T-shirts – some say “Go Sichuan” or “Go China”. Practically every other dweller wears them, many for lack of anything else.

Police and military were constantly on patrol around the perimeter. Rotating in and out were teams of military specialists; telecommunications teams; official media crews; and volunteers from NGOs, academy-based psychotherapy missions, and large companies, who’ve flocked from all over the country. Their ranks probably peaked a few weeks ago, but they continue to assert a big impact on the work in the camps.

The projects that remain have formal arrangements to work with state partners, such the schools or governments, official foundations, or local branches of the All-China Women’s Federation or the Communist Youth League. Kids and relief workers were frequent faces at tents set up to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric fallout. But this scale of "crisis intervention" is entirely new to the everyday masses in China. A lot of adults believed their biggest emotional problem remained, er, what was euphemistically referred to as "economics".

Every day I noted positive signs. At a couple of camps outside Deyang, thousands of residents were being moved out of tent cities into newly built yards of prefab housing resembling shipping containers, the temporary kind usually reserved for construction teams building other buildings. From the camps in Mianyang, the Rizhao Iron and Steel Company was in the process of transferring 600 schoolchildren, predominately orphans, to the coastal Shandong city on the other side of the country. There’s the smelter will send them to one of Rizhao’s top school and has been building a new dorms to house them – free of charge (just two per room, the kids had heard). The company has also pledged to support all of them through college or vocational schooling. Total initial donation: $110 million yuan (about US$16 million).

Despite all the counseling, we can only speculate how much emotional baggage has yet to surface under the weight of state propaganda, Olympic pride, and official coercion. Among Sichuanese, underlying complaints and appeals for justice abound: Could they have been warned ahead of time? How well are their leaders going to take of them now? Why did schools come crashing over their only children's heads, and who would pay for that irreplaceable loss?

Though the reality on the ground lay in full flux, there was a numbing beat of routineness to the transition and it pervaded the areas I personally visited. Which is an oblique way of saying that Chinese society functions pretty damn well when it has cause to.

All of the above comes by way of general observations. Since getting there is usually half the battle for us hacks, here’s the meta-journalistic breakdown, by the numbers:

1: number of trips it took me to process credentials to cover the quake zone. A week after the cataclysm, Sichuan’s provincial publicity department began issuing mandatory reporting permits. The new clearance regime helped the government get a grip over coverage after the initial free-for-all, and similar measures were extended to cover volunteers and non-governmental organizations. But the added layer of bureaucracy was not prohibitive in and of itself. Access-wise, I'd still call this story the anti-Tibet.

At the Shiye Hotel in Chengdu, the application process remained a breeze. The sign outside the office said that as a general rule, each news organization would be limited to one to two passes. Newsweek already had two. I should have come with one my colleagues’ existing passes to renew it, one young press flak informed me. It was already too late for that, though. “So what do we do now?” I asked. Without a word with their superiors, they said not to worry – and processed my pass. It was a ten-day pass lasting from June 13 to June 22 - not bad, though the day I arrived was June 19…

2: number of times I was refused an official extension to stay in Deyang. Though the aforementioned provincial credentials cover most of the disaster zone, some cities have taken to requiring their own reporting permits to roam locally. Even the provincial publicity flaks were genuinely fuzzy about this, and I was never asked to present the Deyang pass. But official interviewees are known to ask in places where parents are agitating over in school collapses or where landslides and flooding remain a threat.

When I pulled in to Deyang, the foreign affairs officer at the city government building was nice enough. She issued me a square slip of paper – my permit - in a matter of five minutes. But again there was a catch: It covered the period lasting from June 19 to June 19. No, that’s not a typo.

The next morning, I called the officer to renew. Conveniently, I was staying in a hotel right across the street from the city government offices. But she said she was down in Mianzhu, a hard-hit sub-city of Deyang, and it was not convenient for her to extend my permit.

“There’s some natural disaster out here.”

“What kind of natural disaster?”

“Some flooding, some landslides and so on.”

“But I’m just going to the displacement camps, nowhere dangerous.”

“You’d better stay in the city proper. You won’t need any permit there. You’ll be fine.”

I ignored her, and nothing came of it. I spent the day reporting from a Mianzhu displacement camp, without the slightest inkling of interference. When I called her again next morning, the Deyang foreign affairs officer gave me the same runaround. But again, not having a Deyang pass didn’t make a difference. By the fourth day, I stopped calling her. We haven’t spoken since.

2: number of tries it took to enter Shifang, another city in Deyang. Parents in battered mountain areas like Luoshui township are agonizing over the collapse of schools there. Many have been campaigning outside the township governments for weeks on end pending an investigation into shoddy school construction. Because of that, I was told by my volunteer contacts in Deyang, Shifang had barred journalists and foreigners from entering town. At the same, my volunteer contacts in Shifang had no reservations when I asked to visit, and I’d heard that foreign journalists had been waved in at police checkpoints in recent days. Mianzhu had been no problem the day before. Why should Shifang be?

The next day I got into cab and rode over from downtown Deyang, just a half hour away. At the toll station ahead of the bridge leading into Shifang, a couple of uniformed Shifang policemen stopped our cab. I rolled down the window and showed the officer in charge my journalist’s pass. He made no effort to finesse the reaction.

“Turn around and go back.”

“Why?”

“Traffic control.”

“Then why are all those other cars going past?”

“No journalists are allowed. Period.”

“I’m not going in as a journalist. I’ve got other business.”

“No foreigners are allowed either.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t tell you that. We’re just following are orders.

My cab retreated, and I called my volunteer contacts inside Shifang. To my surprise, they offered to come to pick me up. A half hour later, a pickup truck with a large cab pulled up to where I was waiting, several miles beyond the Shifang toll station. There were four of them, all Sichuanese. Just enough room for me to squeeze in. We stategically seated the two women on the left side of the vehicle, the side closest to the police. The prettier of the two sat in the front. I pretended to be sleeping as we passed the checkpoint unstopped. I opened my eyes soon after we did.

3: number of free lunches I ate at the displacement camps. Favorite dish: the spicy tofu at the Beichuan Middle School displacement camp in Mianyang. I wolfed it down over lunch with several junior high boys in their tent.

Funny thing was, each and every time we passed the food lines, some Chinese volunteer I happened to be with made a point of directing my attention to the scene. (The photo above shows that in Mianzhu.) All those folks queued up with their iron rice bowls -- probably looked as refreshingly retro to them as it did to me. “Excuse me, Reporter An,” an academic from Beijing remarked at one point. “Have you ever heard of Communism?”

5: number of text-pages in the longest of the many cell-phone messages I received from the Sichuan propaganda authorities while in Chengdu. Most concerned basic progress in rebuilding – bridges opened, road work to be completed, classes to resume, special regulations and courts to be established. But the direct marketing of model heroes also reached new and more sophisticated heights. The five-part text went like this:

“Dujiangyan interview notice: At the rescue scene of Xiang’e Township Middle School, the clever ‘folk’ engineer Ren Longfu recognized the need to use effective rescue measures in order to save some of the students. He used only those materials available at the scene...

…for instance a basketball stand and so forth, to build a makeshift crane, and began to rescue students. Around 10 p.m. on March 14, the body of Carpenter Ren’s daughter was pulled out, but the aggrieved Carpenter Ren did not carry…

…off his daughter’s body and leave the rescue scene. He continued to direct [rescue work] until the morning of March 15, when he transported his daughter’s corpse home and carried out the burial. And by that time, he had already worked at the disaster relief scene for about fifty straight…

…hours. In all, according to the township chief Fu Mintao, he rescued five survivors from the rubble. Carpenter Ren’s deeds were invaluable. Contact person: Ai Guangming (Xiang’e Township Deputy Party Secretary. Contact number: 1388193…

…9009. – Provincial Party Publicity Department.”

Inside Sichuan's Volunteer Scene

Melinda Liu — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:40:24 GMT

Everyone's been struck by the continuing altruism and idealism of
young Chinese who flocked to quake-devastated Sichuan province to
help, any which way they can. For some Americans the scene evokes
almost a kind of latter-day Chinese Woodstock. Jennifer Conrad
recently got a taste of life among the volunteers:

I flew to Sichuan a couple days ago, and met a twenty-something girl
from Guangxi province. Smart and witty, she had shaggy bangs and
wore blue pointy-toed snearkers. She told me she'd come from Beijing,
where she now lives and works, to help out with quake relief efforts.

     And she's found plenty to do, traveling to the affected areas to
assess needs and then returning to Chengdu each day. She also
helps foreign relief groups handle the logistics of working in China.
She'd seen a town cut in half by a landslide and temporary shelters
built with whatever could be scavenged, including pieces of
old billboards. During one trip, a group of children saluted the
volunteers' car as it drove into town.

      She stays in an apartment that was rented by a guy from Beijing so
that volunteers could have a free place to stay. She took me back to the house
where a bunch of guys were smoking cigarettes and sharing a big meal.
Several of them were shirtless; they sat around in shorts, looking
like they'd been through some hard days of work. A few others were
sacked out on the couch watching TV. About a dozen guys were sharing
the place; three women stayed in a separate bedroom.

     The volunteers--most in their 20s and early 30s--had come from all
over China, taking hard-seat trains to Chengdu to do whatever they
could to help out. One of the leaders I met had spent several days
pulling people out of the rubble. None of them was willing to be
interviewed or photographed. They said they didn't want to be
famous--I'm not sure how much of it was modesty and how much was
nervousness about talking to a foreign journalist. But they were all
excited to have an American girl around. I spent 15 minutes posing
for photos with them--some haven't met many foreigners.

      The apartment had a sort of college-dorm feel, with empty beer bottles
clustered in one corner and minimal furniture. There's been some
drama, too: The woman who took me to the apartment told me she got
into a fight with one of the guys the night before. He'd claimed her
experiences couldn't match his, saving people who were trapped in the rubble.
She brushed it off, though, attributing the oneupmanship to too many beers and
the stress of work.

     On the wall was a giant communist party flag that all the volunteers had signed.
Apparently, this was their second such flag--the first one had already been completely
covered with signatures. A few hours earlier, I met an expat who was
coordinating some relief efforts. He said there's been tremendous support
from the foreign community in Chengdu, but the majority of volunteers are
coming from within China. The young woman who showed me around told me
her experience had been incredible; she wishes she could stay longer.
It's inspiring to see so many young people -- without a plan or a ton of cash --
showing up to do whatever they can.

Go China! Olympic cheer -- or pain at the pumps

Jonathan Ansfield — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 09:37:58 GMT

Chinese typically root on heroes and peers alike with the cheer jia you!, the rough equivalent of “Come on!” or “Let’s go!”. In the lead-up to the Olympics, with national pride under assault from all sorts of natural calamity and human rights kerfuffle, people are sporting the pick-me-up on everything from T-shirts to bumper stickers. As in, “Go, Wenchuan,” “Go, Sichuan” - sites of the devastating quake - or “Go, China!” Beijing Games organizers have even begun promoting the "Go, China" chant as part of an officially sanctioned routine for Chinese fans, offset by hand clapping, fist pumping, and a double thumbs-up.

But as you may know by now, jiayou, literally, can mean to “add oil”, or refuel -- i.e., to gas up. And lately the price of the gas in China has gone way, way up.

Despite skyrocketing international oil prices, most analysts didn’t think Beijing would risk another major spike at the pumps, substantially subsidized in China, until just after the Olympics. Instead Chinese leaders sprung a surprise hike on June 20, allowing the costs to loft as much as 18 percent higher – to nearly $3 a gallon.

And so it’s been costing drivers a lot more to jiayou.

Put together the double entendre and you get a corny joke now making the rounds in China by mobile text message, under the guise of ingenious analysis. It came my way recently. In translation:

“The main reason for the current rise in gas prices is:

      Wenchuan jiayou!
        Sichuan jiayou!
        Beijing jiayou!
        Olympics jiayou!
        China jiayou!

Which has resulted in the exorbitant rise in the demand for gasoline, and inadequate supply to meet demand.”

More on Media: A 'Hallmark Moment' Indeed

Jonathan Ansfield — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 11:40:07 GMT

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^stCentral 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.

Sichuan Pandas Premiered in Beijing

Manuela Zoninsein — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:23:54 GMT

After spending eight days in quarantine, eight visiting pandas from the Wolong Panda Reserve in Sichuan Province were presented to the public at Beijing Zoo last Saturday, June 7. Though their tenure had been planned for months in advance of the Beijing Olympics—and not, as some believe, because the Sichuan reserve was rendered unfit for the pandas by the recent quake—their arrival could not have been better timed to ride on sympathy for the people, and animals, that suffered from the May 12th natural disaster.

Eight two-year-old pandas settled into their newly-constructed home. They'll live there not just for three months as originally planned, but for a longer (as yet undetermined) period to allow the quake-damaged Wolong Reserve to be renovated. Wolong is located 30 kilometers from the epicenter of the powerful quake and damage to the facility was extensive; five staffers at the Wolong base died. Two pandas were injured and six initially went missing -- of which four subsequently wandered back to the ruins of their enclosures.

Notice that there are six in the far back...

Huge crowds visited the pandas in Beijing on June 7, opening day. Parents and grandparents with children, in particular, were present enmasse. Compare the pandas’ opening day crowds with the number of visitors just a week earlier at the zoo's front entrance.

Beijing Zoo was the first in the world to display Giant Pandas, beginning in 1955. The Panda Hall consists of both indoor and outdoor areas, with animals displayed in either outdoor or indoor individual cages. During summer and winter, when temperatures become extreme, they’ll all live indoors.

All the pandas appear to be pre-occupied with eating bamboo—of which Giant Pandas eat 20 to 40 pounds (9 to 18 kg) per day. No wonder they seem busy

Eating more bamboo....

The new panda cage has been in the works since as early as 2005. And of course, the zoo exhibition wouldn't be complete without an array of panda plush toys.

Vendors selling panda-themed items

A tree bound up with notes from well-wishers...

Chinese Pride: What the T-Shirts Are Saying

Melinda Liu — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 08:58:05 GMT

In China as elsewhere, a grassroots movement hasn't arrived until it can claim a t-shirt or two. The explosion of volunteerism and pride after the tragic Sichuan earthquake has triggered a wave of t-shirts. Jennifer Conrad, who works in Beijing, explains:

There's been quite a bit of coverage of Chinese nationalism lately, with the counter-protests against pro-Tibetan protesters, calls for boycotts of the French supermarket Carrefour, and the latest, angry words lobbed at actress Sharon Stone, who said—and then apologized for saying—that the Sichuan earthquake was the result of bad karma.

National pride—which, by the way, runs deep in almost every Chinese person I've met—is being expressed in a lot of ways, such as Chinese-flag bumper stickers and instant-messaging icons. But I think it's most interesting to look at the T-shirts that young people are wearing.

In early May, I went to Xi'an over a holiday weekend to see the famous Terra Cotta Warriors. As I elbowed my way toward one of the pits, I spotted a guy—probably a teenager—wearing a shirt that read "Tibet in China, Torch in Heart." (According to the media blog Danwei, T-shirts with this message were given out in Beijing's university district Wudaokou and mailed to overseas Chinese students a couple of weeks prior.

            At that point, the Chinese people that I know -- friends, coworkers, teachers at my Chinese school -- did seem truly hurt and surprised by the level of criticism China was facing during its big moment in the global spotlight.

            And then, on May 12, the Sichuan earthquake struck with such force you could feel it in Beijing. Since then, the T-shirts have taken on a softer tone as everyone rallies around the quake victims and follows news of the relief effort. At work the week after the quake, two of my Chinese coworkers came back from lunch proudly sporting matching white tees with green hearts on the front. The shirts, they explained, were for earthquake relief: when you bought a magazine
and made a donation, you received the shirt.

            I went to a benefit at the rock club D22 about a week and a half after the quake. (D22 is sometimes called the CBGB of Beijing and, for those of you who are wondering, they do play the New York Dolls and the Stooges, but the bathrooms are far too clean to match the legendary—and now shuttered—New York City club.) A few feet in front of me, a guy wore a T-shirt with 14:28 on the back, the time that the earthquake struck.

            I see shirts reading "I [Heart] China", with the Chinese flag in the form of a heart, all over town—I must've spotted a dozen when I walked around Tiananmen Square and the entrance to the Forbidden City yesterday.

            In China, T-shirts aren't quite the teenager and college student uniform that they are in the U.S. You don't see as many young people wearing shirts for their universities and favorite bands. (If anything, you'll see shirts with Western logos or questionable English. My American coworkers and I got a kick out of it when one of our Chinese coworkers showed up to work in a tee with bottles of the notoriously cheap beer Olde English on it.) But T-shirts are catching on here, and they're providing a fast and cheap way for young people to broadcast their politics and national pride.

The Tiananmen Generation: Ma Jian on his new novel

Melinda Liu — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 08:03:04 GMT

Ma Jian, one of the most influential modern Chinese writers, has published a new novel that starts with the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. After beginning his career as a photojournalist in the 1970s, Ma quit that job, travelled across China for three years - a journey he later described in his book ‘Red Dust’ – and wrote a novel ‘Stick Out Your Tongue,’ set in Tibet, which was severely criticized and banned by the government. In 1987 he moved to Hong Kong; after its handover to China ten years later he moved first to Germany and then to London. His new novel ‘Beijing Coma’ tells of a student shot in the government crackdown on the Tiananmen student movement of 1989, who remains in a coma for the next decade – but who gradually becomes aware of what’s going on around him in China’s post-Tiananmen society. It’s partly a fond memoir of the 1980s as a time of idealism and youthful romance. But it’s also a savage critique of contemporary society – and an attempt to secure a place for the events of 1989 in the Chinese collective memory. Newsweek's Duncan Hewitt spoke to Ma Jian about the book and his views on China:

Hewitt: Why did you publish a book about 1989 so many years later?

Ma: I’ve had the idea for this kind of story in my head for many years… You may know that a few days before June 4^th 1989 my brother had a fall and became a ‘vegetable’ - went into a coma. It was an accident; someone had hung a rope between two trees to dry their clothes, he was running past, and the rope caught him by the neck and pulled him up – he flew into the air and fell back onto the ground – this was on 28^th May [1989]. After his fall I rushed from Beijing to Qingdao to see him.

So in a sense he brought me back to Qingdao and therefore I wasn’t in Beijing at the time of the massacre, it’s very strange - as though one life was exchanged for another. Because if I’d been in Beijing I might well have lost my life, I was on Tiananmen Square every day observing what was going on. And as I sat beside my brother’s body in the hospital I was always thinking about this subject: a person in a vegetative state is a body which is dead, but its memory is still alive; I really wanted to describe this kind of life. In fact someone in this state can’t live for so long, and won’t wake up – but in the book I wanted to use this as a kind of symbol.

My point is that when he wakes up ten years later he discovers that he’s the only one who’s retained his memory – because people living in real life, whether those who are in the Communist Party or those who are under their control, are all collectively forgetting this period of history. Parents won’t tell their children about it – some clever kids ask their parents, but they tell them you’d better not know – don’t ask about this. So they’re all trying together to find way to forget this history. And he [the character Dai Wei in the book] is the only one whose memory hasn’t been taken away by others, the only living person who still has a memory…. So reality is the world of the comatose person, and his memory becomes alive - my aim is to say that we can live in our memories, or we live in our memory

Q: Did you feel that the events of 1989 needed someone to write about them in a literary way?

A: I originally didn’t intend that this book would be representative of June 4^that all. I was always asking my friends, why didn’t any of you who were in the square at the time write anything about it? I’ve read a few stories but none had real literary strength, and I thought this is really weird, so this [duty] fell on my shoulders… [First] I wanted to write about someone in a coma, I’d already got into this subject – because it was such a coincidence that my brother became a vegetable just at the time. As I watched him at the time I was thinking of what had happened in the square, the killings… so all these things entered my mind together. My brother died, but he was alive too: and then everyone started lying, only he didn’t… He was the only one they couldn’t arrest - already dead, but his mind was alive.

I felt I just had to write this… So in the end, by chance really, I combined the crackdown and a person in a coma with my own experience into a single whole. I wanted to combine the absurd life of someone in a coma with his real experiences… So you have a person who’s been living in a coma for ten years – and the things happening around him in real life are absurd – for example in the book his urine is turned into a medicinal drink to cure illness. I wanted to satirize not just commercialization but people’s loss of faith and beliefs.

Q: How long did it take you to write?

A: It took me ten years, partly because it was really difficult to write: one aspect is the historical difficulty – I wanted to know everything [about what happened in 89], about all the people who took part, their roles, what they said, what they felt at the time, what they feel about their history. So I did a lot of work, I talked to a lot of people… and I read almost everything on the internet, as well as records and eyewitness accounts published at the time. I also used my own memories from the Square.

Q: What were you doing at the time?

A: I was there for around a month – I didn’t join any of the [activist] groups, I didn’t want to… I wanted to be there as an observer. I was living in Hong Kong then and went back to Beijing specially – I took my camera, went to a lot of universities and read the posters, helped them write some... My main feeling was that Chinese democracy had hope. At the time almost everyone - not only opponents of the party but lots of officials also - came out [to join the demonstrations], so the movement included the entire population, apart from the army – it was maybe the only time when all the Chinese people were so united, a rare moment.

This background is very important to my book – that if you compare before and after June 4^th 1989 the Chinese people totally changed. I was really surprised by this. For example just 20 days later [after the crackdown] the same Beijing citizens who had been giving water, steamed buns and popsickles to the students were suddenly denouncing the students, helping the police to arrest them, wearing their red armbands again.

Q: Not all the Beijing people turned against the protestors like that.

A: Not all. But it shows how fear of political power can make people change at any moment. So this had a big impact on me at the time… Also you found that overnight the government had already changed history: a democratic movement had turned into a counter-revolutionary riot within a few hours. It was frightening.

Q: Are you writing about real people in the book?

A: No – after I’d collected all the material I combined some real characters to create composite characters. But all the main characters in the book were not real people… I feel that we can respect history without describing history. I respect history greatly, but from a literary point of view you don’t need to describe history all over again. I’m not interested in that.

Q: But you go into a lot of detail.

A: Right: even people who were in the square after reading my book have to acknowledge that that’s how it was. I wanted to combine the most realistic things and most absurd things - for me this was my challenge.

Q: Why don’t you think other Chinese fiction writers have written much about the events of 1989? Is it just because they’re not allowed to write about this subject?

A: No, that’s not the reason: In China they don’t control what you write, they only care about whether you publish it or not. But I feel in China’s current reality people have become fragile. So people who went through June 4^th don’t have the energy to face up to what happened. I even feel that now in China the faster you forget something, the greater a writer you are, the more advanced you are - it proves that you’re writing literature, that you have nothing to do with politics…This is a particular situation in China. I think it’s a kind of weakness.

Q: You also write a lot about what happened in the decade after 89:

A: Of course I’m always interested in Chinese society and how it’s changing, and I want to describe these changes…

Q: You make it sound like a pretty terrifying society – there are lots of shocking or grotesque things in the book…

A: In real society there’s one thing I find scary – that people don’t want to reflect, don’t want to face history. They want to live in a vacuum. This vacuum can make you very happy for a while, but you can’t dare to connect with your experience, your memory. And it’s not just the party which doesn’t want to make this kind of connection, I think ordinary people don’t want to do it either. It’s like the way the French have amnesia about what was done by the Vichy government in the Second World War: they killed Jews, helped the Nazis - but then after the war everyone pretended they didn’t know anything about this period of history.

A: You also write about a lot about earlier political movements –including those which protagonist Dai Wei’s parents experienced in the 1950s and 60s. Was it important to you to include this?

Q: It’s very important: I feel that in any nation - whether German, French, Chinese, Japanese - if you forget history then I don’t think you can be a great nation… You become very weak, I feel. Whether or not a nation really has a soul is connected to whether or not you can face your entire history, not just the parts of your history that you choose to remember. A nation which runs away from history is always a weak nation…

Q: But lots of people in China would say ‘we know this history, we know what happened, but we feel that there are more important things to worry about at the moment, we have to look forward…’

A: Yes – for Chinese people the ideal state is to forget history and look ahead, earn money - but I actually feel that all the nation’s problems are now being revealed, [such as] low morality. Our nation doesn’t have a concept of values, so the way we decide between right and wrong, our standards of behavior are all random, bizarre.

Q: The government has talked a lot about moral standards recently. Isn’t it aware of this problem?

A: Yes but the problem is that these standards are the bare minimum – just about enough to qualify you to be a person! Which means that our standards have really fallen low. One main reason is that we have never gone back to the point in our history where we fell down, and tried to stand up again at the same place...From the point of view of psychology, someone who doesn’t dare to admit that they’ve been hurt will always be sick, can never be healthy.

Q: Some will say you’ve been abroad for a long time, you don’t know everything about Chinese society anymore. There are lots of problems, but many intellectuals would say there are new NGOs and grassroots activism, and people are very sincere about these things. Yet in your novel China seems to be a totally corrupt society.

A: I think that if we’re outside China we can see it more clearly – I can only see the shape of a mountain if I’m not on it – the people who live in the mountains can’t see it. Plus with the internet, I think I know more about Beijing than lots of people who live there. They may only know one part, and I go back every year: the prices, which houses have been demolished, where they’ve dug a ditch, I may be more aware than people who live in Beijing, because they may only stay in one area. I go all around. I don’t feel I don’t understand this society. And people will also say 'You don’t live in this society so you don’t have the right to criticize it'. I feel this is complete rubbish. It’s as though if you’re not Chinese you’re not allowed to talk about China’s problems – that’s completely ridiculous.

Q: Do you think people in China would be interested in this novel if they had the chance to read it?

A: I don’t think they would be interested. To them, this period of history has not affected China’s development – they mean China’s economic development. They think the economy is so good now why should we go back and remember that period of history? But I feel that when the economy gets strong and people have the ability, they should go back to history and slowly reassess it… to give a fair judgment to the people you’ve abandoned and forgotten. If you still trample these people under your feet and say ‘you lost’, then I think you’re a bad person.

Q: You mean the victims [of 1989]?

A: There are too many victims in Chinese history… But if you ask one of the Chinese students in London they’ll think you’re strange, they’ll say, ‘No there aren’t any. My parents are all fine, my grandparents too, they haven’t suffered’. I often hear this.

Q: So did you write this book because you felt the young generation has lost this memory?

A: Of course. If young people do have any memory of what happened, then they’ve already consciously or subconsciously closed their minds to it… I find a lot of young Chinese people are like this. It’s very hard to tell them that history is important; they say, oh that’s my parents’ problem, now we’re fine…

Q: Is this [attitude] because of patriotic education…?

A: It’s connected to the party’s patriotic education.

Q: Is it only because of education or because this generation is just different anyway?

A: Both factors are relevant. The values we got rid of during the period of socialism - such as materialism - have now become the most trendy things, the very values people admire most in Chinese society, such as money. So as our values are overturned, you find that young people are not aware of their own problems… Since they were young, their parents, and society have given them patriotic education, which in fact is education in how to love the Party – dyeing them red! …

Also because the nation has no faith, and because since 1989 you’re not able to critique morality: people don’t dare to discuss moral questions. The party doesn’t dare either, because they’re the ones most lacking in morals. So they turn morality into something very naïve and childish, a question society can’t face up to. So in these circumstances young people chase after money – the party has opened up this route for them and said ‘do what you like’. So it’s become very absurd and lopsided - as though you have two hands and one of them can grow as much as it wants, but the other hand… sorry, you’re not allowed to move it.

Q: Are you mainly talking about the decade after 1989? Now authorities are talking a lot about morality?

A: My point is that when they start talking about morality it shows there isn’t any morality.

Q: But do you feel the 90s was a key period in this change?

A: My point is that when they fired their guns on June 4^th they didn’t just kill the bodies of a few people or a few thousand people; I feel those guns killed the soul of the Chinese people… Since then Chinese people have changed – they’re not so genuine – whether in business, all these fake products, I feel it’s because people’s souls are fake. And this is directly linked to 1989.

Q: Since June 1989 have you always felt that those events cast a shadow over you?

A: It’s very hard to get away from it – I feel that every Chinese person, however wealthy, cannot get this out of their mind. We can pretend we’ve forgotten – but you can’t forget what’s really inside.

Q: Do you depict the students as naïve, or idealistic, or as heroes?

A: These students all had a similar education – under the red flag – but all had slightly different backgrounds. The more someone’s family suffered [in the past] the more they might be able to reflect on things, be more aware of dictatorship, more likely to call for democracy...But at the time many didn’t really understand the meaning of democracy, because they were too young, and because of their education – some of them just went then to the library to check what the US constitution was… Still they had an instinctive sense that people need freedom and democracy – though many just blindly followed the student leaders. Previously they weren’t interested in politics. They spent their time playing mahjong, chasing women, trying to go abroad, very few seemed concerned about fate of China.

Q: People who went through 1989, particularly as students at the time, often say their generation understands politics – because they saw for themselves what it can do. Do you think some of them might still have some ideals, might still want to create something in society?

A: I think to simplify you can call them the Tiananmen generation. This generation, wherever they are in the world, they are still a generation with ideals – because this historical incident was forcibly etched in their mind. Wherever they work....if they have a chance they will try to move this society towards democracy or in a positive direction - that’s certain.

Q: Their ideals haven’t been destroyed? They’re not just interested in earning money?

A: I’ve met some in China who are millionaires but they’re still idealistic. They keep it well-hidden. They say they’re not interested in politics, but I think if they have a chance...any [future] changes in Chinese society will still have to rely on this group of people… So some people are still really nice, still striving – but others have been destroyed. There are two kinds.

Q: There’s a lot about the ‘80s in the book: do you feel that was a very important time for modern China? Because there certainly seems to be a lot of nostalgia for that period in China now…

A: If there’s a chance for people to be nostalgic about the 80s then maybe if you go a bit deeper this [feeling] will include June fourth: because that was the high point of the 80s. So maybe this nostalgia for a time when people were idealistic, though poor, might lead to something like this, that’s a good thing… I feel that the 80s were a time of opening up, despite the various political campaigns of the time. It was a time when we emerged from Mao’s dictatorship to a time when the party no longer regarded Mao as a good – the era of abandoning Mao Zedong thought. So dictatorship ended and we moved towards authoritarianism – which was relatively much more relaxed! (Laughs) So in our memory the ‘80s gave us a lot - at least now we knew who Ginsberg, Marquez, Kafka, Hemingway, Faulkner [and] Freud were.

Q: Recently we’ve seen young people expressing their anger at the West. What’s the difference between students now and those of the 1980s?

A: There’s certainly a difference... ‘80s students were idealistic: OK, before the student movement they were playing mahjong, chasing women, going to America, but as soon as this movement came along they all got so involved: so this apparent lack of ideals was false – they had had no choice, because the party didn’t give you the opportunity.

But now young people really do have the opportunity to choose idealism – but I think they intentionally don’t want to, they look down on it. They feel that in this system we can live comfortably, so there’s no need to challenge the government. The ‘80s’ students were attracted to democracy and to the US; today’s students are the opposite: they look down on democracy and the US, their values are completely different. They can study in Europe, go to school in the US, but they don’t like the US – they think that authoritarianism (zhuanzhi) is actually good: it keeps some people under tight control, and the others have the chance to earn money…. So they’re not interested in politics

Q: Are there exceptions?

A: There are too few [exceptions]. Most of them still read the Chinese news websites – they think that the foreign media write too much about the negative side of China. So they don’t read it. I often forward them information about foreign websites that [Chinese] intellectuals often read, and then I ask them if they’ve looked at them – but they don’t look at them; it’s bizarre.

Q: Is that because they’re scared?

A: It’s not fear – they despise these things.

Q: Has government turned their ideas of youthful rebellion around so that they're targeted against the West?

A: They’ve turned the party, the nation and the individual into one thing – this is what the party wanted, these are the kind of people the party wanted to produce. But that’s not so strange. What is strange is that when they go abroad they don’t have the ability to choose different views of their own.

Q: You’ve said that you think the recent protests against Western individuals and media [over the Tibet unrest and so on] are very significant…

A: It’s extremely important. All these demands for people to apologize to China – this has become a problem which contemporary people must face up to. I say to people [abroad], if you don’t pay attention to this, the next person who’ll have to apologise will be you... This culture of apologies is similar to Islam – but in China it’s for political reasons. I think it’s terrible... As soon as someone speaks you say ‘you’ve attacked me’. Have you seen Western people asking China to apologize for anything? This [expression of different views] is normal life in western countries… We can’t allow that in the early 21^st century we should become so narrow [in our thinking] – this is tragic.

So my point is that these young people all look same as everyone else on the outside, and they’re very nice and polite. But their whole political system, their soul, has been created by the communist party. So for example when there are problems with the Olympic torch relay they’ll come out of every corner of your Western society… Normally they’re all separate, but as soon as the [Chinese] embassy calls them out they come together.

Q: But maybe the western media does sometimes present a simplistic picture of China, or sometimes it may reflect some prejudices?

A: That doesn’t matter. Only China has this wenziyu – that if you write something wrong you have to confess to a crime. In the west, whatever I’ve written I haven’t killed anyone, this isn’t a crime…

Q: You’ve described this clash of values in terms of a new Cold War…

A: People felt that the so-called socialist camp -- the Soviet Union or China -- had already collapsed, and that commercialization and middle-class development meant it would slowly vanish. But I think western people are too optimistic: ideology doesn’t just arise in a day. The party spent years making it part of everyone’s spirit, you can’t just get rid of this immediately. And so once [Chinese] society gets wealthy, a new cold war may begin. Of course it’s no longer so overt – not promoting Marxism or Maoism in the same way – but I think in the future this [kind of thing] will continue to happen…

Q: But since the Sichuan earthquake we’ve seen some openness in Chinese media, greater access for the western media, and ordinary people making sacrifices, giving donations. Hasn’t this shown another, positive side of China?

A: I feel the earthquake awoke the Chinese people’s conscience – and in this time of suffering people have shown sympathy for others. This is good, it shows their hearts are alive… It’s a good start - but I don’t know how long it will last… And in our pain can we not weep just for the [quake] victims, but also for those who died in 89? You can lower your flags to half mast for these victims [of the earthquake] – but do you dare to lower them for all those who have suffered in China?

Q: Your book was published first in English. Will there be a Chinese edition – not in the mainland obviously?

A: The book will be published in Chinese for the 20^th anniversary of 1989 next year. I feel there should be something like this to commemorate what happened.

Q: People might say that publishing at this time you’re trying to cash in on a commercial opportunity?

A: No, it’s just to commemorate what happened. And I don’t think there is any commercial opportunity. I don’t think too many people will be interested in the anniversary! But I want to put this out there. And I welcome people to make pirate copies to sell in China – I don’t want any money – I just hope people will read it…

CSI Sichuan: Bodies of Evidence

Melinda Liu — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:47:54 GMT

With nearly 18,000 earthquake victims still missing, China's police have mobilized an unprecedented forensic identification campaign to help survivors learn the fate of missing relatives. The Ministry of Public Security in Beijing organized crime scene investigators, police photographers and other forensic experts into 22 teams that fanned out across the quake zone. Their mission: to process unidentified corpses and establish a DNA database that relatives can consult in the months, or years, to come.

CSI Sichuan: Police forensic experts in Yingxiu,...

The scale of the task is huge. "We need more technicians and more chemicals used in DNA analysis. That's our biggest difficulty right now," says Wang Qinghong, vice director of the Sichuan province public security unit in charge of criminal forensics, who was assigned to hard-hit Yingxiu town in Wenchuan county, the quake's epicenter. Although the process of matching DNA from remains with that of presumed relatives takes less than two weeks, the sheer volume of data that needs to be logged is daunting.

While every country has crime scene investigators - made famous by the American "CSI" TV series - China's DNA collectors bear little resemblance to those glam prime-time celebrities and their gleaming high-tech implements. Police in Yingxiu wore full protective gear while processing corpses in the disaster zone, usually Dupont protective suits replete with gloves, galoshes and mini-gas masks. With the lessons of the 2005 SARS epidemic in mind, authorities are obsessive about the need to prevent disease epidemics and contamination.

Moreover their working environment looks post-apocalyptic. In Yingxiu, not a single sound structure was left standing after the May 12 quake. Mountains of rubble tower two stories above the street, with smashed and upended cars poking out of the pile. China's CSI's are processing many more remains under much worse conditions than any of them have experienced before. While their labwork will inevitably involve precision equipment and lots of stainless steel at some point, some field personnel working on corpses used basic tools, including what looked like rusty wire-cutters, to remove items from a set of remains.

All survivors and easily removable corpses had been extracted within ten days of the quake in Yingxiu. Now bulldozers rooted noisily through rubble, and occasional BOOM's echoed though the valley when dangerously tilting buildings were dynamited, using shaped charges that caused the structures to collapse in directions that allowed soldiers and firefighters to remove bodies trapped underneath.

Soldiers and firemen waiting to recover corpses...

A three-man police team - including two trained investigators and a photographer - went to work after a long-haired woman's corpse was recovered from the ruins of a shop on one of Yingxiu's main streets. After police sprayed disinfectant on the decomposing remains, they searched for identifying documents in trouser pockets, then removed a necklace that might be identifiable by family members. The body was photographed from several angles by a forensic photographer. Finally authorities shooed away news cameras as the specialists removed three types of samples: rib cartilage, fingers and teeth.

Here's another contrast with the sanitized TV version of CSI: China's DNA collectors slept in tents in a sprawling military camp, and were compelled to cook their own alfresco meals of congee, sweet potatoes and beef stir-fired with red-hot Sichuan spices in a huge open-air wok. "At least it's better than the first five days, when we ate just instant, noodles, " says Zhang.

"This is the biggest job I've ever had," says Wu Dengchao, 26, a forensic specialist from another county in Sichuan; whose only comparable previous experience was processing the scene of a chemical plant explosion in which nine people died. Wu confesses to knowing little about the CSI television programs, though he knows of their existence: "Some were aired by Chongqing TV a while back, I think". Instead, he asks about the famous Chinese-American coroner Harry Lee who's been involved in high-profile celebrity cases in the U.S. Lee was a forensics expert in the O.J. Simpson trial, for example, and was consulted after the assassination attempt on Chen Shui-bian, who stepped down as Taiwan's president in April. "[Lee] is a prominent criminologist, not just a technician," says Wu, "He's like a hero to us."

Police CSI's in Yingxiu: not exactly a Jerry Bruckheimer production

Raised Fists in the Square, Again

Melinda Liu — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:07:21 GMT

Some readers said they experienced difficulty trying to access an article my colleague Mary and I wrote about the "Tiananmen Effect." This is the 19th anniversary of the crackdown. I'm pasting the article here:

The Tiananmen Effect

The Sichuan quake has inspired a powerful, and unpredictable, movement among China's youth.

Melinda Liu and Mary Hennock

Newsweek Web Exclusive

Updated: 7:02 AM ET May 26, 2008

At 2:28 p.m. on May 19, hundreds of people filled vast Tiananmen Square, the symbolic heart of China. They bowed their heads in silence for several minutes, many weeping, then raised their fists and exploded in deafening chants. Authorities are inordinately twitchy about demonstrations in the square, site of a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy students almost exactly 19 years ago. Yet green-clad police watched this gathering as impassively as the towering portrait of Mao that hangs nearby.

That's probably because the crowd was chanting, "Long live China!" They had gathered in Tiananmen, as elsewhere across the country, to commemorate the victims of a magnitude 8.0 earthquake that killed at least 55,000 people in Sichuan province, perhaps many more. Yet if their purpose was different, their passion sharply echoed that of the students in 1989. Susan Shirk, author of "China: Fragile Superpower" and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, says the Sichuan quake is "going to be a memorable moment in their lives for many Chinese, like Tiananmen was, like the Cultural Revolution was." Hundreds of Chinese youth have already headed to Sichuan to help with the relief effort. The Communist Youth League in Henan dispatched trauma counselors; a team of yuppie extreme-sports enthusiasts from Xian rappelling into remote hamlets in Beichuan, one of the hardest-hit areas, to deliver relief supplies. "We're here to tell quake survivors that they aren't alone," says Hu Fang, a volunteer from Xiamen. Earlier this week, Hu and four fellow members of a Buddhist association—including a former airline hostess and a rally-car driver--pulled up to a half-collapsed Taoist temple near Shifang, hoping to use it as a base to distribute relief supplies. The temple's 60-year-old abbess, her hair in a characteristic Taoist topknot, welcomed them with open arms. "It's exciting to meet so many volunteers from all over China," says Hu.

Youth movements like this are rare events in China. In 1968, during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong sent millions of educated, idealistic youth "down to the farm" to work the land. In 1989, a different generation of students turned against the regime. At times in the last few years, Beijing has begun to rally Chinese youth around nationalist causes, but always pulled back once emotions got too heated. In the current outpouring of altruism, nationalism takes "a much more civil and compassionate form," says Tsinghua University philosophy professor Daniel Bell.

That happens to suit Beijing's needs perfectly. Before the quake, the regime's foremost priority was to ease the growing tensions between China's rich and poor, city and countryside, rich coast and underprivileged interior. Bell points out that ordinary Chinese have been struck by how many of the Sichuan villages demolished by the quake were deeply impoverished. In Chengdu this week, groups of young professionals chanting "Go! Go! Sichuan" marched through the streets collecting donations for quake victims. Others sang peace-and-love folks songs in a public square. Bell expects the new, strongly compassionate mood to boost "fair society" politics and give rise to civic organizations involved in protecting the environment, fighting against local corruption and promoting the rights of migrant workers. "Some of us hope to stay in touch, maybe even set up a 'volunteers' forum' online," after the initial recovery effort in Sichuan ends, says Hu. His Buddhist organization plans to station volunteers in the quake zone for at least 18 months.

The regime may yet grow suspicious of these private networks; the lesson many hard-liners took away from Tiananmen was to block any force that had the potential for mass appeal outside the party. Or authorities could realize that citizens are helping do their work for them—not only stabilizing the situation in Sichuan but perhaps healing divisions in the country at large. "It might give [the leadership] more confidence that an open media and a more vibrant civil society are compatible with continued Communist Party rule—not a poisoned pill that means the fall of party rule," says Shirk. Even Chinese who are still grieving for victims of the June 1989 crackdown are rallying around. Ding Zilin, who founded a group of mothers who lost children in the 1989 crackdown, says she was particularly struck by the call to publicly mourn the deaths of ordinary Chinese in the disaster, an honor that had previously been reserved only for top leaders when they passed away. "What the government did after the quake has shown to the world ... the idea of respecting lives has started to take root and will become even more deeply rooted" in China, she says. From the rubble in Sichuan, that's a fine sprig of hope.

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/138418

Post-Quake: Beijing's Benefits

Quindlen Krovatin — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 09:46:49 GMT

Sunday, May 25 was a rare day in Beijing -- sunny, warm, clear, beautiful -- and its clarity brought home the enormity of the Sichuan quake. Out at 3 Shadows Photography Art Center, the grass was emerald green, the sky was sapphire blue, and an eclectic cross-section of the city's art and expatriate communities gathered to give back to the country they call home.

The photographs were hung on the walls without frames. People milled about, nibbling chocolate-drizzled organic strawberries and somosas, perusing the work and talking with one another about how gorgeous the weather was but how heartbreaking the last two weeks had been. An impromptu shrine was erected in the center of the room, and guests occasionally stopped to light a candle or a stick of incense or to kowtow before a photograph of buildings collapsed by the earthquake.

By the end of the afternoon, 3 Shadows had raised more than RMB 560,000 (USD 80,672) auctioning off an array of photographs with opening bids as high as RMB 105,000 (USD 15,126). The event was a "very big success", according to Development Director Jiang Yipeng. The list of artists who donated work included several from Sichuan, such as Xiong Wenyun who donated a series of photographs taken at Wenchuan, the earthquake's epicenter, in 1999. Here's more about the event, including and images of and information about the donated photographs

Just a few days later, meanwhile, Poly Group held its art charity auction, featuring a top-drawer list of Chinese artists and organized by two Sichuan-born personalities of the art world.

Then on Saturday, May 31, Beijing's prestigious Summit Club, which aims to bring cultural sophistication to China's newly rich, hosted the Sichuan Artists Gratitude Concert at Century Theater. Musicians and poets, all from Sichuan -- and some of whom were themselves quake victims -- performed for a crowd of hundreds, playing music by composers ranging from Rachmaninov to Tang Qingshi, conductor of the Sichuan Symphony Orchestra.

The music was beautiful and the emotion palpable, as each artist poured out his or her heart on stage. Particularly affecting was the majestic "China, My Motherland" sung by baritone Liao Changyong accompanied by the Sichuan Symphony Orchestra. Standing ovations were frequent, and the crowd was obviously moved by the display of national pride and indomitable spirit by their fellow Chinese citizens

Pushing the Envelope: Media Questions about the Quake II

Jonathan Ansfield — Sat, 31 May 2008 13:40:32 GMT

Still gotta marvel at the Party's ability to bend but not break. In the immediate aftermath of the quake, many domestic media documented the post-apocalyptic squalor at the scene. But few reported anything directly damning of officialdom. China Newsweek (no relation to Newsweek) investigated purported forewarnings of disaster, including a mass migration of toads and claims of suppressed reports by seismologists predicting a major quake. The story cited officials who denied ever being formally warned; even if they were warned, it noted, earthquakes in general cannot be pinpointed.

Some of the most incisive press comments came in the form of “told-you-so” editorials. In the most liberal print outlets, like the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolis and its one-time cousin paper The Beijing News, columnists lavished cajoling praise upon the central government for its transparency -- their implicit wish being that Beijing make this case a real precedent, and live up to recent reforms and legislation regarding the official release of information.

Embattled newsman Chang Ping, widely criticized and ultimately demoted in the wake of the Tibet crisis, was once again pressing his case for the "universal value" of freedom of information, independent of national (or "nationalist") interests. But even then, the conventional wisdom amongst journalists was that the initial chorus of voices was just a passing phase of the story, its rite of spring. As the Party editor noted three days after: “When they [propaganda authorities] can get control, you can be sure that they will.”

By the end of the first week, to some extent, they already had. Sichuan designated certain disaster sites off-limits and regulated access to the disaster zone as a whole, by means of an official (albeit easily obtainable) permit. The CPD gave up on blanket orders in favor of stressing that coverage should be positive, unifying, and conducive to upholding stability. Reporters in the field were firmly ordered to disregard rumor and "false information" and to stick by official and military rescue parties - providing rare insights - though they many opted to go it alone.

A few outlets were also reprimanded for going too far. After officials reported on a dam that showed serious cracks, journalists began investigating whether it might rupture. On May 15, the 21st Century Business Herald ran a spot feature stressing the precariousness of the situation in the lead. It was promptly branded you hai xinxi, "harmful information”, according to the Shanghai-based editor. A few days later, on May 19, the paper followed up with a front-page investigation.

Then there was this little ethical infraction, as reported by Beijing-based uber-blog Danwei: "New Travel Weekly (旅游新报), a Chongqing-based newspaper was suspended from publishing because it used bikini-clad women on the front page of its May 19 issue, which was allegedly dedicated to earthquake relief efforts. The newspaper was accused of 'violating journalistic ethics' in its earthquake reporting."

Fairly edgy stuff has flowed day in and day out, nonetheless, from the Web platform of Caijing magazine, one of China’s most celebrated sources of investigative journalism. (Its irrepressible founding editor, Hu Shuli, in her latest editorial, urges Beijing to institute a system to better ready it for future catastrophes). Regulations forbid Web sites in China from doing original reporting, but Caijing is among a number of Chinese-language financial sites that skirt those rules, including the local embodiments of major foreign news brands.

Reuters, for instance, was quick to report the now-notorious case of the lower-class primary school that toppled like a house of cards in Wuhu, killing 200 to 300 young pupils, while other structures all around were barely affected. Parents and kids who survived the collapse charged that teachers had locked a couple classes of kids in a classroom over the lunch break, and then gone out to play mahjong. Reuters' Chinese site posted the piece in translation, and it got wide play in the mainland blogosphere. (The original page on the site was later scrambled within China, or so it would currently appear.)

China’s best-reputed newspaper, the Guangzhou-based weekly Southern Weekend, took few chances in its package of stories the week of the quake. One story probed a dilemma many people faced - that of where donations could be best put to use. The piece portrayed the government charities as the most reliable and largely glossed over questions of past corruption scandals, institutional inefficiency and hefty deductions for operational costs.

But by Week Two, Southern Weekend dug into the imbroglio over "crumbled tofu" construction in a Page One probe, translated in part by China Digital Times: "One member of the rescue team explodes with anger: 'It’s this tofu dregs construction! Inside the concrete, there’s only wire, not a single bit of reinforcing bar.'"

The paper right back at it last week, reconstructing the story of another school that was squished, translated by ESWN: "We wanted to try to determine if the deaths of the 127 students were due to a natural disaster or a manmade one."

The Beijing News bit to the rotten core of the issue a few days ago in an analysis by Peking University professor Zhang Qianfan. The China Media Project's Bandurski translates: "…how can we ensure that schools in other areas do not collapse? Essentially, this needs to happen through local democratic mechanisms making local officials answer truly to the local people." More specifically, ordinary people must either directly or indirectly participate in the government budgeting process so that expenditures become truly 'public expenditures' rather than budgets made at the discretion of the local governments themselves."

Call that "playing down"? These and other articles emerged despite a lot of finger-wagging from Chinese media czars urging otherwise.

Yet Beijing was smart to at least own up to the staggering number of school collapses early on. This makes it more likely that the brunt of the blame will fall on local officials, should the government be forced to respond further. In coming weeks, it's safe to expect that either a head or two will roll or the speech police will get much tougher on media critics - probably both. One way or another, notes the editor in Shanghai, “They’re going to have to ‘placate the people’s anger’,” an old turn-of-phrase connoting political damage control.

It would be difficult for media anywhere to ask unvarnished questions at such a tragic time, of course. In China, that's especially so. To a remarkable extent, the quake ordeal has demonstrated, the Party still guides the mass process of coping in times of crisis, and sets the standards of public decorum and political correctness. And helping enforce the Party's tone and tempo are the Internet “lynch mobs”, the easily inflamed anti-imperialist Red Guards of the Chinese digital age, who have gone on the attack against a couple of Chinese bloggers for mounting unappetizing critiques of the government, resulting in said bloggers' detention by police - precisely the kind of twists that free speech defenders like Chang Ping rail against.

A mob of viral messengers is also behind "Donations-Gate", as ESWN explains, wherein Western companies stand accused of being too slow to ante up, or too cheap.

Would-be muckrakers face more practical impediments. Knock-on emergencies like the "quake lake" have kept traditional media preoccupied, while aftershocks have made it that much harder for journalists to do cutting-edge reporting. By Week Two, the Shanghai-based editor said at the time, a lot of his friends in the field were physically and emotionally beat. “A lot of media are really, really exhausted right now,” he sighed. One Southern Metropolis reporter was narrowly saved after being washed away by a landslide, punctuating the extent of dangers in the field.

Meanwhile, telecommunications failures around the epicenter have limited the impact Indie bloggers might have had on quake reporting otherwise. Instead, the single-most publicized post to this point, it would appear, was the blow-by-blow eyewitness account of Premier Wen Jiabao's efforts the night of the quake, filed by a journalist in his traveling press corps (viz. our earlier blogs on that). The leaked IM transcript so lionized the Premier that state papers and radio broadcasts used sound bites. It turned out to be better P.R. than a Party puff piece could ever be. Far better.

The din of criticism is unlikely to die down, though, even as the censors try to move the story along. You get nowhere searching “earthquake+school buildings+collapse”, which has been blocked and branded "may be" illicit for more than two weeks now. It's the same treatment "Carrefour" got in April after Chinese protested the hypermarket over reported pro-Tibet ties. But key in something slightly different, “earthquake+collapse+schools”, and thousands of Chinese links pop up. "School buildings" or "rooms" (xiaoshe 校舍) is the term officials have used, which would seem to explain why it’s the term Web authorities have banned. The big sites typically comply to the letter of the block orders they get, but don't go any further than asked. Sometimes they even neglect to go that far. On Google's main indigenous rival Baidu, for whatever reason, the "school buildings" search went through fine at last check.

Search and Destroy: Tough Media Questions about the Quake

Jonathan Ansfield — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:52:24 GMT

Google the Chinese words for “earthquake + school building + collapse” here nowadays and you get nothing but a white screen and a warning:

搜索结果可能涉及不符合相关法律法规和政策的内容，无法显示。

Which means:

“The search results may involve contents that do not accord with relevant laws, regulations and policies, and cannot be displayed.”

Not that this has snuffed out online rancor over the subject. Some 7,000 school "buildings” (or "rooms", depending on your interpretation) crumbled in the Sichuan quake, by officials’ own preliminary count, burying alive a disproportionate number of schoolchildren among the more than 80,000 dead or still unaccounted for – perhaps 10,000 kids died altogether.

Blatantly substandard construction is to blame, and in some cases corruption too -- and on a deeper level, a system in which the average Chinese taxpayer exercises no oversight over their tax renminbi. The matter has incensed bereaved parents in Sichuan and ordinary folk nationwide. Some parents who lost children have banded together in protests, and now legal action. So ministry chiefs are promising to investigate and punish those responsible.

Meanwhile Communist Party censors are working to stem the controversy. While they cannot manage to muzzle domestic coverage completely, they're carrying out damage control. One means is through "key term" blocks on search engines such as Google.cn and portals like Sina and Sohu.

Beginning late in the week of the May 12 quake, the Central Publicity (nee Propaganda) Department (CPD) has warned state media to not to “play up” (xuanran 渲染) a long and growing list of sensitive questions that the calamity has stirred up. Collapsing schools are perhaps the prickliest so far, but there are others.

In addition to shoddy schools, topics red-flagged in CPD directives and word-of-mouth exchanges, veteran Chinese journalists tell us, include:

1) pre-quake warnings of major seismic rumblings;

2) the operation of state charities since;

3) the disbursement of relief, relocation and rebuilding funds;

4) the role of aid workers from other countries (particularly Japan);

5) the potential threat posed by nuclear facilities located in the disaster zone;

6) the fallout from cracked dams, floods and aftershocks,

7) and in particular, the movements of individual state leaders in response to the cataclysm.

On state TV, reporters have constantly badgered ministry point men with questions on these topics, which is unusual enough. News on these issues is otherwise meant to originate exclusively from central media organs, which represent the party line, rather than unofficial news media outlets in China, which are still monitored and owned by state organs but largely run as independent businesses. “We might be able to touch on some of these issues,” notes one Shanghai-based magazine editor. “But we’re not supposed to write full-page stories focusing on them.”

The commercial media haven't exactly bowed to their masters so far. So devastating was the 7.9-magnitude jolt (later upgraded by Chinese -- but not foreign -- seismologists to 8.0) that the state information regime soon broke into real-time news mode - a breakthrough for a major domestic emergency. Within hours, Premier Wen Jiabao had flown to scene. Central Television went live from the front lines. The Xinhua News Agency kept spitting out updates. Relevant authorities fed them casualty counts, and provincial and ministry officials began giving regular televised news briefings.

Hundreds of journalists hit the ground from the official central and provincial press corps. A few thousand additional Chinese journalists, by some estimates, high-tailed it to the disaster zone as well -- most of them unauthorized. Propaganda minders, disarmed, were forced to tolerate their dispatches.

The frenzy, while somewhat unscripted, proved to be a blessing in disguise for Beijing -- so long as it could keep the domestic media focused on the tragic fallout from a natural disaster, and government’s dogged efforts to help victims. Reports showcased its rapid response, relatively high degree of openness, and embrace of civic and international aid, which unified the international community in a cascade of sympathy and the Chinese people in a national catharsis. Both of which seemed sorely needed after months of pre-Olympic calamity and controversy.

But the storyline of the quake has quickly shifted, from the tough work of rescue and remembrance to the tougher challenge of recovery and circumspection. It was only a matter of time before Chinese media, gleaning the popular subconscious from the blogosphere, began to dwell on causes and effects of the quake not up to Nature. In other words, what could officials be doing (or have done) differently? The question now is whether the government can stay ahead of the publicity curve as it bends toward the underside of the story.

Back on the day of the quake, the CPD came out with pro forma instructions, journalists with central media organs in Beijing told us later. It forbade first-hand reporting outside of four official organs – central TV and radio, the news wire Xinhua, and the Communist Party flagship People’s Daily. It thus activated emergency response guidelines, under which, as of last year, media outlets' licenses can be revoked if they report "false information" about natural disasters, emergencies or government responses to them without obtaining prior authorization.

But this was an incomparably massive disaster. Local propaganda and security officials, who would normally be counted on to enforce the ground rules, had no chance of blocking access to the disaster zone. They were busy enough getting in themselves. The CPD orders were unenforceable.

Many newsrooms across the country, sensing there would be chaos, had already dispatched reporters by the time they got the initial orders not to. That was a loophole in timing that many have exploited in recent years. One of the more aggressive papers in Shanghai, the China Business News, sent out a pair of reporters. When higher-ups from its parent conglomerate rang, editors told them that the reporters had struck out on their own volition. The editors held back a second team, but only briefly. Seeing that everyone else was sending reporters, they did too. In fact, says the Shanghai-based editor, “a lot of reporters weren’t explicitly sent by their companies in the beginning. They went themselves.”

Not everyone did, though. Those commercial dailies in Beijing administered directly by the city, not known for taking on big national news themselves, stuck predictably to the Xinhua copy. And in the Sichuanese capital of Chengdu, explains David Bandurski of Hong Kong U.’s China Media Project, provincial leaders asserted broader sway over the commercial press. The front page of the Huaxi Metropolis Daily, one of Chengdu’s saucier tabloids, morphed into a mouthpiece advertising their response.

Other state media did take unanticipated risks. The provincial television crews of Sichuan, known in recent years for adventurous and sometimes invasive social and legal reportage, plumbed the rubble to interview dying victims pinned beneath (witness this LA Times report). At times they also shoveled out casualty tolls from the hardest-hit areas on their own, rather than through central disaster authorities. At the headquarters of one aging Communist Party broadsheet, editors who would never even consider bucking the rules gave serious thought to sending reporters in this. “Even we could sense from the beginning that (authorities) wouldn’t be able to enforce (their orders),” says a Party media editor. “It’s not that (authorities) didn’t want to keep the media under control. It’s that they couldn’t.”

Not that all this unofficial coverage came off critically. Instead it mostly fed into the prevailing image of state officials, military men and journalists on top on the situation, or at least doing their darnedest to help the people amidst ungodly horror. Officials reported ballooning body counts quickly and with almost incredible precision, and offered detailed analysis, and the media gobbled it up. The dramatic effect satisfied iconic Revolutionary ideals of the PRC in crisis.

I've got more to say on this in tomorrow's blog.

Sharon Stone's Fatal Retraction

Melinda Liu — Thu, 29 May 2008 14:46:15 GMT

What made actress Sharon Stone apologize? Many assume she was compelled by her five-year cosmetics advertising contract with Dior, or her desire to sell more "Casino" cinema tickets to a population totally enamored of Los Vegas. Market forces -- and the risk-averse nature of many top brands -- were undoubtedly a factor.

But, hey, everyone knows Chinese cinemas only show a very small number of foreign films anyway; "Basic Instinct" isn't one of them. Stone's name is known on the mainland mainly through pirated DVD's of her movies, which earn her some fame but no revenue.

What really happened is simple: Stone made some insensitive remarks, in the wake of a massive natural disaster that has left more than 68,000 confirmed dead and another 20,000 some missing. Flippancy in the face of so much suffering is bad PR and both Stone and Dior (which removed her from its mainland ad campaign) know it.

This is the first time a major Hollywood celebrity has said sorry to Beijing, though those who've criticized Chinese human rights abuses in the past make for a star-studded cast. There's Mia Farrow, who's campaigning for a boycott of the "Genocide Olympics" due to atrocities in Darfur and China's support. of the Khartoum regime. There's Steven Spielberg, who stepped down as artistic director of the Beijing Games opening ceremonies, also over Darfur. There's Richard Gere, who says "cultural genocide" is taking place in Tibet and is a devotee of the exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama.

But the qualitative difference here is that Stone's comments came just as the Chinese population is rallying behind the quake relief effort and grieving over the victims, displaying a unity of purpose between grassroots citizens and officialdom that never seemed so closeknit before. In other words, Stone may really have come close to "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people," as the cliched saying goes. (When we foreign media write something the government doesn't like, that's traditionally the charge leveled against us). Chinese bloggers have called her "dirty swine" and Xinhua news agency dubbed her the "public enemy of all mankind."

For the record, Stone's original comment -- suggesting that what goes around had come around for Chinese authorities -- was made during a brief red-carpet interview at the Cannes Film Festival (and it was somewhat tempered by additional statements). Asked about her Buddhist faith, she said "I'm not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans...I've been concerned about how should we deal with the [Beijing] Olympics, because they are not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine. And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened. And then I thought, 'is that karma, when you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?'"

Indeed. Let's go to the videotape:

Children of the Quake: Single Kids and Orphans

Melinda Liu — Tue, 27 May 2008 05:19:53 GMT

The loss of so many children in the May 12 earthquake -- estimates range from 5,500 to 10,000 or more -- has prompted the Chinese government to announce a new exception to its "one-child" family planning policy. Applied mainly among urban couples, the three-decade-old "one-child" regulation has meant that many parents who lost sons and daughters in the quake became childless overnight.

(Rural Chinese families typically are allowed to have two kids if the first-born is a daughter, and families of non-Han Chinese ethnic origin are allowed two ore more kids. Therefore larger families are not uncommon among families of the Tibetan and Qiang ethnic minority group -- of which there are many near the quake epicenter, which took place in the Aba Autonomous Tibetan and Qiang Prefecture.)

Now, urban couples whose single children died young are being told that each can get a certificate allowing a second birth. Of course, this policy relaxation won't bring back loved ones who are lost forever. But the idea could help comfort some distraught parents in Sichuan -- and dull growing grassroots anger over shoddy construction standards that apparently allowed so many schools to come tumbling down, during peak classroom hours no less.

Visiting the ruins of the devastated Juyuan School in Dujiangyan recently, I saw a number of parents haranguing a government delegation about the so-called doufucha gongcheng or "bean-curd engineering" (meaning substandard building) of the collapsed school. The disturbance ultimately escalated into an emotional grassroots riot.

The quake could also create an increase in the numbers of Chinese couples looking to adopt kids and orphans available for adoption. Here is my colleague Manuela's interview with Robert Glover, head of Care for Children which runs 180 orphanages throughout China, including nine child welfare institutions in the quake zone.

Here's an update on children of the quake: Chinese authorities revealed that thousands of kids and parents separated by the disaster have been reunited by social workers. More than 7,000 in fact. That came from Ye Lu, director of social welfare at the provincial Civil Affairs Department. He also said "a little more than 1000 children remained unclaimed or orphaned," and that authorities have been flooded with calls from Chinese parents seeking to adopt quake orphans. “We’re still getting thousands of calls per week asking about how to adopt, but we are still hoping to find the parents of these 1,000 kids," he said.