Chinese blogger Paul Denlinger noted in his blog Monday that for the first time ever, Chinese flags are lowered to half mast to commemorate the loss of ordinary citizens. The flags have been lowered for the tens of thousands of victims down during a three-day national mourning period that ends on Wednesday.
Another Chinese blogger wrote about the three minutes of silence the country observed this week to remember the 40,000 people who are believed to have perished in the 7.9-magnitude quake. “I was by my office window and could see people stopped in their tracks on the sidewalk, all standing still,” the blogger identified as Richard wrote. “The traffic stopped dead while the horns blared. The migrant workers in the concrete and steel pit alongside my building all stopped their work and stood up as well. Everyone faced the same direction, their heads lowered.”
In the wake of the devastating earthquake, Chinese bloggers and reporters have been given much freedom – far more than the government usually allows — to publish details of the tragedy and to offer online expressions of mourning. Just two months ago, the same government faced harsh criticism for instituting a media lockdown following the dispatching of Chinese troops to Tibet to crack down on protestors.
The desire to avoid the type of national criticism it faced over the Tibetan situation, combined with a desire to appear more open to the world as the Beijing summer Olympics get closer, prompted the government to allow more transparency from bloggers and other online writers, according to observers who are familiar with the government’s traditionally strict requirements for the media. For example, they noted that the government often has yanked critical blogs posts from Chinese Web sites.
Daniel Chow, a law professor at Ohio State University who focuses on Chinese matters, said that the government has typically prevented any information pertaining to disasters from leaving the country until well after the event.
“China has come under a lot of criticism lately because of the Tibet protests,” Chow said. “This is a way for China to get some favorable international publicity. The Chinese government wants to show that it is caring for its people and is responding well to a disaster.”
Chow said that he doubts that the current trend toward Web leniency will last long.
“Does this mean a fundamental shift in policy toward opening up the Internet? I don’t think so,” he said. “If we didn’t have the Olympics and the whole Tibet protest issue problem there would not be as much transparency and there would not be the loosening of the control on the Internet.”
Other examples of the Chinese government opening the flow of online information out of the country, include a Chinese soccer commentator’s blog post describing a disabled student’s ordeal during the quake and photos of students from a school that was devastated by the quake playing at recess the day before the earthquake.
Denlinger’s blog, meanwhile, even goes on to take a stab at the Chinese government.
“For the first time, a Chinese government has embraced the idea that any human life, even that of ordinary human lives, has value,” he wrote. “Actually, this is a very western concept, and is a very important step on the road to democracy. Is this not a valuable change in China’s reforms and opening up? This will make it that much more difficult for any Chinese government to dismiss the value of any Chinese lives which are lost in the future, whether they are due to natural disaster, or war, or for political reasons.”
Children at school perished in particularly high numbers in the earthquake, and Chinese citizens have begun compiling online lists of damaged schools. Government officials even participated in a rare real-time online exchange with citizens to answer questions about why so many schools collapsed, according to the Associated Press.
Still, the AP story noted that the government has not completely eased up on its online monitoring as 17 people have been detained or warned for writing online messages that “spread false information, made sensational statement and sapped public confidence.” In addition, the government announced Monday that all Chinese entertainment Web sites would be shut down until the three-day mourning period ends Wednesday.
Anne Donohue, a professor of journalism at Boston University currently working at the People’s University in Beijing, said that it would be difficult to find a Chinese blog not currently discussing the earthquake. “And it’s not just the blogs that are wide open,” she said. “State-controlled newspapers and television are giving this wall-to-wall coverage with generally thorough reporting, including body counts, concerns about school building safety, nuclear facilities and dams.”
She noted that the magnitude of the situation has meant blogging is one of the natural media people gravitate toward for discussing the tragedy.
“This is not a political story, although it could turn out to have political overtones if the schools, dams or nuclear facilities are found to not be up to safe building codes,” Donohue added. “But this is not Tibet, or Taiwan or Tiananmen Square – the three T’s that are not discussed much and about which there is less freedom to write, report or blog.”
Donohue, whose own building in Beijing swayed during the May 12 earthquake, went on to note that a new Chinese law that went into effect May 1 is supposed to require more online transparency on issues that are of concern to the public, but that are not categorized as “state secrets.”
“The Chinese people are more sophisticated, plugged in to an online world. This would be difficult to control, so the government is just going with it,” she added. “In the initial hours, journalists were told not to go to the affected areas, and they went anyway, taking a big risk. But once the genie was out of the bottle, it was hard to put it back in. And the government did nothing to stop them.”
Zhihua Yan, principal of media and marketing consulting firm Z. H. Studio in Beijing, noted that the earthquake has meant that bloggers’ voices can be heard by a larger mass of people at a much faster speed than before the disaster.
Within a week of the earthquake, her company had mobilized several of its authors to write blogs describing Western practices and perspectives on crisis and catastrophe management.
“Amazingly, the government-backed Chinese mainstream media’s response to our articles was even much quicker,” she said. “Within only half an hour, editors-in-chief from two of the top business journals (both government-backed) confirmed to us that they would like to publish our articles. Global perspectives, cross-border practice sharing, and in-depth analysis of the key factors around such low-probability, yet high-impact events are particularly needed but hardly anywhere to be found from within the traditional [Chinese] system.”
