I was a typical patriot before 2008. I believed that “hostile foreign forces” were responsible for most of my peoples’ misfortunes. As a soccer commentator covering games between Japan and China, I wrote lines like, “Cut off the Japanese devils’ heads.” I saw Japanese soccer players as the descendants of the Japanese soldiers who brutally killed Chinese civilians in the 1937 massacre of Nanjing. I used to curse CNN for its anti-China commentaries. I was one of the protesters who stood in front of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu and raised my fist after the U.S. bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999.

But my patriotism began to come into question as I stood in front of the ruins of Beichuan High School. It became clear that the “imperialists” did not steal the reinforced-steel bars from the concrete used to make our schools. Our school children were not killed by foreign devils. Instead, they were killed by the filthy hands of my own people.

I still believe that we should “build a New Great Wall with our flesh and blood” but now I also believe the Great Wall should protect our flesh and blood.

Li Chengpeng has become a popular blogger and has five million followers on Sina Weibo. He also ran for local election in Chengdu. Read more by and about Li via CDT, including an essay he wrote about his experience volunteering in the earthquake zone, “The True Story of the Miracle Survival of the Students and Teachers of Longhan Elementary School in Beichuan.” Read also more about the Sichuan earthquake of 2008.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Li Chengpeng, nationalism, patriotism
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The ‘Kony 2012‘ video, which urged its audience to join the fight against Joseph Kony’s coercion of thousands of African children into paramilitary activity or sex slavery, has now been viewed over 100 million times. A backlash quickly formed, with critics questioning both the video’s content and its creators’ finances. (The organisation, Invisible Children, responds here). Naturally, the video soon reached China—one subtitled version on Tudou has now received a further 2.6 million views—and chinaSMACK has translated a range of Sina Weibo posts on ‘Kony 2012′. While some found the video convincing, others saw it as just another case of “Americans using the banner of humanitarianism for their own interests and benefit”, an accusation often levelled at Western governments or organisations which criticise China. But still others saw China’s own problems reflected in the Kony campaign:

黑曼巴与老男孩: The people is power, democracy is the future. After watching, not only am I heartbroken for Africa’s children, I’m even more heartbroken for our China…

嘟嘟佳艳: After watching this short film, I’m reminded of China’s abducted children, who are forcibly crippled to go beg. Who has cared about them?!

有关部门林时恭: I wish they would come to the Heavenly Kingdom and save those children in impoverished mountain areas, as well as spread awareness of the behavior of the Heavenly Kingdom’s corrupt officials to the entire world.

See more reactions to ‘Kony 2012′ translated by Tea Leaf Nation.

Meanwhile, Greg Smith’s scathing New York Times op-ed on the declining corporate culture of Goldman Sachs, his former employer, was also translated and passed around on Sina Weibo. Rather than laying into the moral failings of American capitalism, reactions gathered by Tea Leaf Nation express dismay at a similarly amoral business climate in China, and lament the absence of whistleblowers like Smith.

… Many agreed with @hi-李力华 that “Chinese companies are even more rotten.” @熌銧 saw Goldman as “a very good fit for China’s conditions,” perhaps because, as @圈圈CD wrote, “This is the atmosphere in the entire ‘celestial dynasty’…as long as you can make money, everything else is secondary. Look how we are killing ourselves!”

But it’s not quite as easy to burn one’s bridges in China. @你要麽样就麽样 explained that “these phenomena in China are absolutely not astonishing; to the contrary, [managers'] resignation letters are always the same form: ‘Thanks to the leaders for their care over many years …[something] made me suddenly discover [that] because of family reasons [I must retire].’”

See also a satirical adaptation of Smith’s op-ed attributed (presumably falsely) to Bo Xilai, via CDT.

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Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Africa, Apple, Goldman Sachs, microbloggers, online activism, sina weibo, steve jobs, uganda, weibo
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… [T]he Chinese officially claim that 300,000 civilians were killed; this is based on the high estimate international war-crimes tribunals and local courts made after World War II. Meanwhile, many non-Chinese denialists respond that it was simply impossible for 300,000 people to be killed by a small Japanese force in a six-week period. A precise Chinese rebuttal, though, is difficult: The Japanese destroyed records of their actions in the city. Chinese historians have been able to name just 10,311 actual victims of the massacre.

For some, this inability to account for more victims represents much more than just a failure of research, but indicates the Communist Party’s patterned callousness toward human tragedy. In this context, one microblogger in Sichuan province went so far as to invoke the party’s alleged efforts to suppress the names of students killed in poorly built schools that collapsed during the catastrophic 2008 Wenchuan earthquake:

The names of the victims on the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall’s “Wailing Wall” totals 10,311 … Hiroshima announced a total of 253,008 victims of the atomic bomb based on accurate records. But up until today, the list of students killed in the Wenchuan Earthquake remains sensitive.

Ran Yunfei expressed a similar view in a previously featured interview at The New York Review of Books:

Right now the government says 300,000 (were killed) and the Japanese say the number is much lower. Some Japanese even claim it wasn’t a massacre. They say, “Okay, if it was a massacre show us the list of the dead. Where’s your list of 300,000?” The government can’t provide this, not even 10 percent of it. Why? Because Chinese governments don’t value an individual life. It’s true. After 70 years they’ve only accounted for 10,000. That’s because they don’t care about individuals.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, history, Japan relations, Nanjing Massacre, Wenchuan
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According to our investigation over recent months, one-third of the reinforcing steel used in this project so far was purchased by 9th Metallurgical from Jintang (金堂), Guanghan (广汉) and other small steel works, and substandard steel materials such as the “inferior steel” (地调钢) that is expressly forbidden by the state are being used [in the project]. This reinforcing steel product does not carry a steel manufacturing number from the producer, and what’s more it has not product quality certification (产品合格证), and all of it was brought on to the construction site at Wanda Plaza in the middle of the night.

The Mianyang Wanda Plaza project is massive, with a construction area of 450,000 square meters. There are a total of seven processing areas for reinforcing steel, and each of these has massive quantities of poor-quality steel. According to our careful estimates made through undercover work, we found that this steel falls below national quality standards — for example 10mm steel reinforcements, which are nationally limited to no less than 9.6mm, are only 8mm at this project site (please see the photographs following this letter).

The final picture shows local offices of the main contractor on the project. A banner features the slogan, “China State Construction Engineering Corp: Quality is Weightier than Mount Tai”.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, construction, investigative journalism, Sichuan, steel
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They came from four directions, and departed in eight directions. We feel regret mingled with self-reproach. They should have had better deaths, with calm and unhurried remembrances, tears permitted to fly like the rain. In such haste, such haste, they departed forever from villages and cities left in sick-heartedness. Now, across mountain slopes where new green rises over the stones, they remain in the schools, on the roads, underground, in the nameless places. They are together with each other, the way wheat grows together. In the summer, in the midst of their final twilight, they went to a place we cannot see. They are the only anguish and the only comfort left to the survivors [NOTE: comfort by virtue of their continued presence in spirit].

In our hearts, we lowered our flags to half-mast for them. On the day of mourning we called them home and wished them peace. We gathered together all the human evidence of them we could. We read their names together [NOTE: This seems to be a reference to Ai Weiwei's piece "Missing," in which volunteers read the names of students who died in the Sichuan earthquake]. We promised that we would bear them constantly in mind, never forgetting, over and over again. We did so much, and yet we did too little. Those of you who were lost and did not return, where are you? Can the light we kindle shine across your path? We cannot do more. We can but present steel zodiacs, and offer up porcelain sunflower seeds [NOTE: This is a presumable reference to Ai Weiwei's exhibit at the Tate Modern, which incorporates sunflowers seeds and the Chinese zodiac], symbolic memorials to your lives once so tangible. What else would you wish us to do? [NOTE: Many would read the above passage as a reference to the collapse of school buildings and the work done by Ai Weiwei (艾未未), Tan Zuoren (谭作人) and others to remember the children who died in the quake and understand the underlying causes.]

We know these deaths have already happened, but to forget is to heartlessly hope they endure a second death. If we do not cherish their memory, oblivion [or forgetting] will only grow in strength. The sacrifices of this day are done to spurn forgetting, to avoid losing them all over again. Our future memorials are proof again and again before them: we will never be far from you, we will always be together, even though we meet with death and fear. This is a promise that we must bear firmly in mind. People are eternal, and they are always with us. As citizens of conscience, this is our duty to these [destroyed] villages and cities.

Update: China Media Project reports that the article is back up:

A daring editorial on commemorating the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which disappeared yesterday from the website of Guangdong’s Southern Metropolis Daily, has been re-posted at the paper’s site today. The decision to re-post the piece is a puzzling one, given that sources say the editorial has resulted in intense pressure on those responsible.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Ai Weiwei, Southern Metropolis Daily
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Art can be dangerous. Very often artistic fame has proved dangerous to artists themselves. Mr. Ai’s work is not polemical — it tends towards the mysterious. But his immense prominence as an artist (he was a design consultant on the “bird’s nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics and was recently ranked No. 13 in Art Review magazine’s list of the 100 most powerful figures in art) has allowed him to take up human rights cases and to draw attention to China’s often inadequate responses to disasters (like the plight of the child victims of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province or those afflicted by deadly apartment fires in Shanghai last November). The authorities have embarrassed and harassed him before, but now they have gone on a dangerous new offensive ….

The lives of artists are more fragile than their creations. The poet Ovid was exiled by Augustus to a little hell-hole on the Black Sea called Tomis, but his poetry has outlasted the Roman Empire. Osip Mandelstam died in a Stalinist work camp, but his poetry has outlived the Soviet Union. Federico García Lorca was killed by the thugs of Spain’s Generalissimo Francisco Franco, but his poetry has survived that tyrannical regime.

We can perhaps bet on art to win over tyrants. It is the world’s artists, particularly those courageous enough to stand up against authoritarianism, for whom we need to be concerned, and for whose safety we must fight.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei detention 2011, art, artists, Liao Yiwu, new york times
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Changsha-based Sany Group Co. says its 62-meter truck-mounted concrete pump, used to build some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, is on its way to Fukushima at the request of Tokyo Electric Co., or Tepco. The plan, according a statement posted on Sany’s website, is to use the machine to pump water toward Tepco’s reactor No. 4.

Already well known in the construction industry, Sany is making a name for itself in disaster relief as well – partly with its own stream of press releases.

A huge crane Sany built was instrumental in the rescue of Chilean miners last year. The Chinese company also claims a role in rescuing Colombians trapped in mud). On the domestic front, the company sent a team to the site of Sichuan’s 2008 earthquake to help clear roads and extract survivors from the rubble.

Sany says the truck sent to Japan, originally ordered by a Saudi client and worth roughly $1 million, is being sent free of charge to the nuclear plant and was requested personally by Tepco President Masataka Shimizu. “Since the break out of Japan’s nuclear crises in Fukushima nuclear power station, the determination and the strong will of Japanese people have touched the whole world,” the Sany statement said.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, construction, Japan earthquake 2011, mining accidents
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China began cleaning up on Friday after a magnitude 5.8 earthquake hit the far southwestern province of Yunnan near the border with Burma, killing at least 25 people and injuring at least 250 others.

About 127,000 people were evacuated from the immediate area after 18,000 homes were destroyed and 50,000 others damaged, state media reported ….

Two four-story buildings, one containing a supermarket, collapsed on to their lower floors, crushing a number of people in the county seat of Yingjiang, near the epicentre.

Some experts expressed concern that so many structures had crumbled in the temblor, which most buildings should have been able to withstand had they been constructed according to the country’s building codes.

If building codes had been followed “or if they had made any conscious effort at all to strengthen the houses, then the houses should not have just collapsed like that,” Wang Yayong, a chief engineering adviser at the Chinese Academy of Building Research in Beijing, told the Associated Press.

Xinhua, on the other hand, focuses on rescue efforts:

Many soldiers used their hands to dig through the rubble as machines could not be operated there.

More than 6,100 people, including soldiers, police officers, medical staff, and civilians, have participated in the rescue operation, saving at least 40 trapped people and sending more than 200 injured people to hospital.

The county needs 5,000 more tents for the homeless, said Zhao Jin, Party chief of Dai-Jingpo Autonomous Prefecture of Dehong, which administers Yingjiang.

Zhao said he had asked the provincial government for help.

The provincial and local governments have earmarked 23 million yuan (3.49 million U.S. dollars) in emergency aid to the quake-hit regions.

“We are now short of disinfectant, crucial for the post-quake epidemic prevention work,” said Zhang Tao, president of the People’s Hospital of Yingjiang.

As with the recent evacuation of Chinese citizens from Libya, and in addition to the obvious humanitarian concerns, authorities will be keen to mount a visibly effective response to demonstrate their ability to look after the people. As Austin Ramzy wrote in Time after last year’s Qinghai quake:

In the past, the government’s first response would more likely have been to downplay the extent of the disaster, as it initially did with the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which killed 242,000, or more recently during the 2003 SARS outbreak. But in recent years, Beijing has emphasized a robust and more open approach to disaster management. “Crisis response has entered the set of things expected from government,” says Björn Conrad, a researcher with the Berlin-based Global Public Policy Institute. “That’s what you have to do to maintain legitimacy.”

Large-scale relief efforts are more eye-catching than the unglamorous enforcement of building regulations. Nevertheless, the extent to which Japan’s painstakingly earthquake-hardened buildings and infrastructure managed to withstand a quake more than 22 times stronger than the one in Sichuan has not gone unnoticed.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, earthquake relief, Japan, Yunnan
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China’s government, often at odds with Tokyo, offered support to Japan after Friday’s powerful earthquake, with Premier Wen Jiabao expressing “deep sympathy and solicitude to the Japanese government and the people” and telling his counterpart, Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan, that China is willing to offer whatever aid is necessary.

Chen Jianmin, director of the China Earthquake Administration, said its International Rescue Team has put its members, equipment, materials and medicines in place and ready to depart for Japan, after the 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck off the Japanese coast, triggering a major tsunami and leaving dozens dead and displaced tens of thousands of people. “We are highly concerned about the earthquake in Japan and its consequences such as fires and building damages,” the state-run Xinhua news agency quoted Mr. Chen as saying ….

An earthquake has been an occasion for China and Japan to set aside their differences before. After the 2008 earthquake that crippled China’s southwestern Sichuan Province and killed at least 68,000 people, Japan’s Self Defense Forces–as the country’s military is known–was the first foreign aid and rescue team allowed into China. Japanese corporations donated to aid efforts as well. Appliance-maker Panasonic, for example, contributed more than 10 million yuan to relief efforts in the aftermath of Sichuan quake, Xinhua reported at the time.

Among chinaSMACK’s collection of translated Weibo posts is a second-hand account of the Japanese response in 2008:

自然免疫:

@ PhoenixTV’s chief reporter Li Miao in Japan: During the Wenchuan Earthwuake [Sichuan Earthquake], many Japanese ordinary common people organized donations on the streets, while restaurants, 24-hour convenience stories, and many other places all had donation boxes. Japanese rescue teams deployed at the earliest time possible (waiting for the “yes” from the Chinese side), waiting an entire night for orders at Narita Airport; Apart from the government, various political parties also did what they could, the Liberal Democratic Party chartered planes to deliver supplies to Chengdu, and as the only Chinese journalist in the same industry, I can confirm this.

While some “netizen reactions”, inevitably, have been gleeful—there are examples on chinaSMACK for those with strong stomachs—celebration has been by no means the universal mood. At Foreign Policy, Adam Minter describes another current that he saw gradually emerging online:

In part, it’s a reaction against the nakedly inappropriate nationalism that marked some of the earliest reactions to the tragedy; but buried in that nationalist critique is an unflattering national critique as well. Take, for example, a message that was lifted to Weibo’s front page late in the day (similar to Twitter’s front page of popular tweets), that read, in part: “How many Japanese would write, ‘Congratulations on the Wenchuan earthquake?’” It’s an uncomfortable question that was, in a sense, revised and extended onto Twitter by a Chinese user who, tacitly invoking the crumbled buildings in the aftermath of the Wenchuan quake, pointed out, late in the day: “The casualties from an 8.9 event in China would be hundreds of times higher than in Japan.” That kind of comment, most likely, wouldn’t last long on China-based Sina Weibo, which is heavily “managed.” Indeed, as some began to point out on local and international microblogging platforms late in the day, natural disasters — whether in China or elsewhere — are politically sensitive events from the perspective of the leadership. This one, like Wenchuan, is increasingly becoming so.

Meanwhile, back at Starbucks, two young Chinese women in their twenties, one with iPhone, and the other gadget-less, overhearing my English-language conversation, brashly reached out to me. “We Chinese people feel very badly for Japan,” one said, while declining to give me her name. “We know that Japan cared very much for China after our earthquake. So we will want to help them.” When I asked if either one would consider donating to the Red Cross, just as Chinese had done in droves after the Wenchuan quake, they looked at each other, then back at me. “Why not?,” answered the one who already done all of the talking. “China is becoming a great nation these days. We should.”

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, earthquake, Japan, sinaweibo
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“During the Richter magnitude 8 Wenchuan earthquake of 12 May 2008, 1803 concrete and embankment dams and reservoirs and 403 hydropower plants were damaged. Likewise, during the 27 February 2010 Maule earthquake in Chile of Richter magnitude 8.8, several dams were damaged. However, no large dams failed due to either of these two very large earthquakes … It is very difficult to predict what can happen during such a rare event as very few earthquakes of this size have actually affected dams. Therefore it is important to refer to the few such observations that are available. The main lessons learnt from the large Wenchuan and Chile earthquakes will have an impact on the seismic safety assessment of existing dams and the design of new dams in the future …  At this time we are still in a learning phase as very few large modern dams have been exposed to strong earthquakes.”

The report highlights still greater uncertainty over the earthquake resistance of older dams. With the sophistication of dam design and construction advancing rapidly in recent decades, those built as recently as the late 1980s are now considered obsolete. This is particularly relevant to China, where over twenty thousand large dams (higher than 15 meters) were built in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The authors also examine the issue of “reservoir-triggered seismicity”, inconclusively implicated in the Wenchuan earthquake. Here, the focus is on the possible effects of RTS on dams themselves: modern dams should not self-destruct by triggering seismic activity severe enough to destroy them. However, other structures nearby may be more vulnerable, while landslides set off by RTS could significantly magnify the potential damage.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 2008 Sichuan earthquake, dams, earthquake, Wenchuan
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