The Earthquake in China

I've been told by quite a few people that last Monday's devastation has been covered extensively in the overseas press. One of my friends said that it had temporarily eclipsed the Lhasa/Torch/Freedom polemics which, of course, it has done here too. However, I think that the coverage of this earthquake has also been influenced greatly by those events in Tibet.

In a previous blog I spoke about the lasting effect on young people and students of the Western coverage of the Lhasa riots. I have since talked about it with a couple of ex-students who also agreed with me that from then on they have started to look at news coverage of the world and, in fact, at the world itself from a different perspective.

Judging from the local coverage of the earthquake it seems that the face of Chinese news coverage has also begun to change.

In a country with such a large migrant worker and student population at any one time a large percentage of any city population will comprise people who are not locals. In a disaster of this magnitude then, interest from all over the country is not disinterested, but comes from distressed family members. And, as most people will be aware, in China Family is of paramount importance.

As the extent of the disaster became known news centres on television and radio realised that, with communication down in such a large part of the country, they would have a huge role to play. It was interesting to watch how this role expanded until, on the weekend, it had reached a point where it was indistinguishable from the kind of disaster coverage seen in the West.

Switching on the t.v. at any time over the past two days reminded me of the coverage at the time of major international stories such as the death of Prince Charles' wife in England or 9/11 in America.Scheduled programmes were suspended while on every channel there was breaking news and readers being interrupted with this-just-in messages. We crossed extensively to on-the-spot reporters who were just as stuck in airport lounges as they had been last time we crossed and who did the familiar (to Westerners) mix of re-hash, speculation and desperate interviews with fellow travellers. Interviews with distraught family members were interrupted with new footage, constant up-dates ran across the bottom of the screen and there was even the ubiquitous telethon.

When we did veer from direct coverage there was instead panel discussions and expert testimony from anyone with a geological degree to climate-change experts to victims of other natural disasters. Studio discussions covered everything from personal anecdotes about people who were missing, to speculation as to the future, and the fate of the children who had been so traumatically orphaned. (Adoption schemes are already up and running, by the way.)

Importantly too, although criticism of Government policies or interventions are not unknown here, this time the feelings of dazed, angry and grieving people demanding to know why the Government hadn't done more in advance were treated as just that: a variation on the eternal "Why?" theme and not any serious threat to internal stability.

Anyone in doubt about transparency issues is not going to find much fuel for their arguments in the way the national press has handled this latest crisis. There have, I believe, been the usual claims from the West that journalists were not given access everywhere. However, all but the most unreasonably biased know that the nature of the damage, continuing aftershocks and the natural inhospitable terrain have been one of the most heartbreaking and frustrating difficulties for everyone concerned in rescue operations. In areas where it has taken vital days to reach entire communities public outrage was already putting pressure on rescue teams, the military and medical personnel to do more. Journalists of any ilk who took the place of any of the above in arriving at such centres would have found themselves in a perilous position in every way.

At twenty eight minutes past two this afternoon people in every corner of China - from taxi drivers, to office workers, to rescue workers and students all stood for a three minute silence at the exact time when the quake struck exactly one week ago. As I stood in my living room with a student the silence from the usually frenetic campus outside and the absence of traffic noise was melancholy. I don't knew what my student's thoughts were, but I stood there feeling such horror for those who had - and those who were still - dying alone in dark places under the ground that I willed my thoughts to reach them and perhaps somehow permeate the unimaginable alone-ness of their deaths.

Already committees have been set up, think tanks organised, provisions for new and different strategies in future national emergencies are being given urgent attention. It is certain that many changes in disaster prediction, rescue operations and management of refugee centres will come about because of the events of the past week. International experts are being invited to pool their knowledge and different strategies formulated with co-operation from all sectors of both the national and international communities.

It will be interesting, some time in the future, to see how many changes come about because of the extraordinary difficulties that were experienced in rescue operations here. And for me there is also the speculation as to whether Chinese journalism has also reached a point of no return from which it will advance into a whole new era.