05.21.08
Mourning on Demand
In writing this post, I do not wish to bring down the wrath of the Chinese blogosphere. I do not mean any disrespect by my comments. I am merely pointing out what I have observed since the awful earthquake last week.
The day it happened, there was a bit of buzz in Beijing, mostly because of the minor earthquake/aftershocks in this area that led many to evacuate their office buildings. I had a 4pm business meeting at China World Hotel (Guomao), but by the time I arrived, it was business as usual there. Later that night, on the subway ride home, I did not hear any conversations about the earthquake. In conversations with friends and family, I spceulated that hundreds, if not thousands, of people must have died, if the quake really was as strong as we were hearing. But the immensity of the disaster didn’t seem to sink in here for several days–not really until the weekend. The peak came a full week after the disaster on Monday, when the three-day official mourning period started.
When I mentioned this to some friends here, many speculated that the earthquake damaged communications systems so much that no one was able to really understand the full extent of the damage for several days. I find this unlikely…
The Chinese and international media channels, blogosphere, and informal peer-to-peer networks (SMS, email, etc.) were passing around information of the disaster minutes after it happened. Indeed, it seemed as if Beijing heard the news and answered with a collective shrug, at least on May 12.
I also find it unlikely that the government was (or is) able to control the national mood so quickly and effortlessly, as if it was merely flipping a switch. Clearly it has tried to spin things a certain way in the past few days, in its typically clumsy way, but there’s surely more to it than that.
A story from a multinational company here in China offers a more plausible explanation. A close friend, who shall remain nameless, works at an American company here in Beijing. When the earthquake hit, her office (which is in charge of donations and other CSR activities) was beseiged by calls from regional offices, with local managers asking for guidance. Where can our employees donate money? To which charities? Is the company going to provide its own donation or any matching funds? The regional offices were much better prepared to react than the the country headquarters in Beijing, which needed almost two full days to decide on a comprehensive plan of action. By then it seemed, to many, almost too late. I suspect that something similar may have happened at other companies and government offices across China. When the earthquake hit, no one knew how to react. After a few days, a clearer directive emerged–reporters were given more access; government officials took action (including the three minutes of silence on Monday) to nip in the bud the growing rumors of corrupt officials building shoddy schools and hospitals.
Now, amid shouts of “Go China!”, the media and people seem to be most concerned with showing unity against the “enemy”. One reason for this may be purely linguistic in nature. The phrase 抗震救灾 (Kang Zhen Jiu Zai), seen everywhere these days, translates as, “Resist the earthquake and provide disaster relief.” The “kang” character has strong overtones of “fight back” and is more commonly seen in real fighting situations, such as the “War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression,” or the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) as it is usually called in English.
UPDATE: Similar discussion of media and government post-quake attitudes in the IHT.
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