NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2008
World in View
China: corruption kills
While the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that struck populous Sichuan province in China on May 12 was a natural disaster, it was a manmade disaster that extended the death toll to upwards of 70,000 people.
Quick dispatch of the army to search for survivors and distribute aid appeared in sharp contrast to responses costing lives in Burma by the generals and in New Orleans by Bush in 2005. The government tapped a deep vein of sympathy across the country for victims of the earthquake. It tried to confine the mood of mourning into a three-minute national period of silence, but also encouraged full news coverage from the earthquake zone, even by foreign reporters given more access as the Olympics approaches.
But the report on the first day of 900 students buried under the rubble of their school in Juyuan pointed to the connivance of builders and local officials. So many other schools collapsed while older buildings around them remained standing that nearly 10,000 students were killed. Because of the government policy permitting just one child per family, in most cases each student killed was an only child. Official support for these grieving parents quickly turned hostile. Within ten days parents had begun marching to officials to demand answers. By June 1, Children's Day, 600 parents and supporters in Dujiangyan wore T-shirts reading "We firmly ask for justice for dead students" and "Severely punish corruption in tofu construction."
A regional Chinese newspaper proved the truth of that charge of shoddy unsupported buildings by finding chicken wire in concrete rubble where rebars should have been. As a result the government pressured Chinese newspapers to end earthquake coverage, and began moving foreign reporters from the earthquake zone.
Officials tried to prevent a march on June 3 from the Juyuan school by intimidating the parents. They then overwhelmed the hundred parents who marched--in spite of pressure--with riot police and finally dragged away those who remained.
When the last earthquake in China leveled Tangshan, near Tianjin, in June 1976, party rulers imposed a news blackout, treating the earthquake like a military secret, and foreign reporters could not visit the site for seven years. Mao Zedong well knew that emperors had claimed the "Mandate of Heaven" to legitimate their power; natural disasters would be seen as a sign to their subjects that a dynasty had lost its legitimacy and could be toppled. Mao himself was dead two months later, but no total regime change has replaced state-capitalist rule in China. Now survivors of the earthquake join existing Tibetan and Uighur movements for autonomy, and resistance from peasants and workers to the accumulation of wealth for the well-connected and increasing impoverishment of the producers.
--Bob McGuire
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