Not Katrina: Beijing's media monopoly spins quake disaster and avoids obvious questions
Tuesday, May 20, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
Nothing so characterizes the critical decision facing China and the world at this moment than the fact that the army engineers trying to rescue victims of one of the worst natural disasters in recent times have been building a secret submarine and naval base on the southernmost Hainan Island.
In the analysis of the inevitable chaos of such a tragedy, China’s priorities again are coming into sharper focus.
Are they to be vast sums spent on creating a huge military machine against an unidentified and presumably unknown enemy, or are they to be devoted to continuing to expand and broaden an economic miracle that has, albeit, only touched a very small part of its 1.3 billions.
Such natural disasters have a way of punctuating history, sometimes sending it off in another direction. Some Japanese historians are fond of speculating on whether the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 did not change that country’s history. It cost 142,000 lives and destroyed much of the country’s two largest cities, Tokyo and Yokohoma. But an even darker side was the pogrom against ethnic Koreans which followed the fires. All this, according to some, was the end of more than a half century of rising — if not always peaceful — toward Japan’s becoming the modern, industrial, democratic state it is today. The interregnum of the Great Depression, the 1936-45 military rule, cost Japan and the world enormously.
The still confused picture of what happened in Szechuan and its aftermath already contrasts remarkedly with the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976 when 255,000 officially were reported dead. Perhaps three times that many actually succumbed in what would have been the worst disaster of the 20th century. Then the world — and even the rest of China — learned little of what had happened. A tottering regime, unable to extend assistance, tried to hide as much as it could in the throes of end of the Great Cultural Revolution which had brought the whole country to near chaos.
Whatever else is happening now, Beijing’s leadership is not trying to hide the depths of the tragedy. Both President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao have been on the scene and their presence has been widely publicized. The Chinese propaganda organs are making much of the dispatch of the military — even when they have had to be parachuted in — for rescue and to restore and maintain order. After mixed signals — at this writing still confused — Beijing [unlike their sadistic Burmese military protégés] is accepting foreign expert assistance including shipments by the U.S. military, expert rescue crews from Japan, Taiwan, and India.
Reporting on the scene by foreign observers has exposed that there has been additional loss of life — even beyond the inevitable in such a disaster of such magnitude — through faulty building construction due to China’s systemic corruption. Complaints to reporters named the local Communist cadre as the culprits, generally excusing the national leadership.
At the same time, there has been an enormous wave of national sympathy and giving for the victims of the disaster. A visiting U.S. National Public Radio team recorded a memorial meeting in the stadium of the provincial capital of Chengdu, not far from the epicenter of the quake but spared damage except through feeling the aftershocks. It went from grief, to exultation, to an expression of Chinese nationalism [with the chant of “China go!”].
It is obvious that the Communist Party leadership, whatever it might have done earlier or wanted to do now, is living in a new era. The ubiquitous cell phone and internet – even with tens of thousands of censors employed to try to control these new modes communication with the of the technology lent by such firms as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google — makes it no longer possible to hide such tragedies. Nor is it going to be easy to quell the reports and rumors of government malfeasance.
Beijing leadership will exploit again, as it has so often done in the past, the overwhelming fear among the Chinese elite of a breakdown and chaos in the Chinese system to justify its continuing petty and gross acts of suppression and internal violence against its own people. But the Party’s monopoly of power and control of the media makes corruption endemic and guarantees that it will conrtinue to grow along with the economy, perhaps the greatest threat to stability — as it has been for dozens of earlier Chinese imperial dynasties.
Failings of governance take place in all societies at all times. But under democratic systems, there is hope of reform and renewal. The dismal failure of local government in Louisiana has apparently stirred a movement for reform that could return New Orleans to its once proud position as one of America’s most vibrant port cities instead of the burlesque and corrupt theme park caricature for business conventions it had become.
In recent months, through the haze of inner Party dealings and a rootless pursuit of some sort of new ideological basis to replace defunct Maoism, Beijing has been alarmingly consistent. It has shown more and more evidence of hubris arising out of its very real economic accomplishments. And it had pursued a vicious, adventurist foreign policy by supporting and defending the most morally corrupt regimes in the world — from Khartoum to Harare to Yangon. If Beijing thought that were real politische, it has been severely deluded. All of these regimes are fragile as coming events are bound to prove.
In a few weeks the Chinese will be tested by the Olympics. But the games are already not the coming out party that the Chinese had wanted, a celebration of its emergence again as a major world power. The kowtow which was to have come from world leaders at the inauguration of the games won’t come off, at least not as planned. Beijing has encouraged its elite to see criticism of its actions in Tibet, Darfur, Zimbabwe, and Myanmar as part of an orchestrated campaign against China’s “peaceful rising”. That kind of manufactured nationalism can be turned on, but not always turned off, as China and other authoritarian regimes have found in the past.
As the results of the earthquake play out — the economy is already under great strain from rising food prices — there may also be a reconsideration of policy and strategies. If not, the world is in for even worse news than the loss of life and destruction of property this natural disaster has delivered.