China’s Earthquake Candor Contrasts With Tibet Media Clampdown

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao boarded a plane within two hours to head earthquake relief in Sichuan, sobbing and calling out “this is Grandpa Wen'’ to children buried in the rubble of a primary school he toured the next day.

That image, footage of victims trapped under buildings and news that 86 giant pandas were safe, have been captured in minute-by-minute updates by government-owned media. China Daily, the biggest English-Language newspaper, confronted a vice minister over school collapses, and got a straight answer.

Such candor and access contrasts with the media lockdown during Tibetan riots two months ago, when the leadership stayed at home and sealed off the region. Wen’s rapid response also signals a determination to avoid missteps that followed January’s deadly snow storms and the 2003 SARS outbreak and shore up support for the ruling Communist Party.

“There’s very little effort to control information,'’ said Huang Jing, a visiting senior fellow at the National University of Singapore East Asian Institute. “Compared with the Tibet crisis, it looks almost like two governments.'’

After the 7.9-magnitude quake hit Sichuan Province at 2:28 p.m. local time on May 12, Wen scrambled to head relief efforts and the state-run Xinhua News Agency filed his comments from the plane. Sina.com, China’s biggest Web portal, established a special Web site for coverage; between 9:00 and 9:05 a.m. today in Beijing, 18 separate stories popped up.

Tibet Coverage

The quake, which has killed more than 12,000 people, shifts international attention away Tibet, which has roiled China’s relations with Western countries for the last two months. When riots broke out in the provincial capital of Lhasa in March and protests spread to surrounding regions, the government clamped down on both foreign and domestic news reports. A handful of selected overseas journalists were shepherded around the areas two weeks later and the death toll is still disputed.

“Certainly this will dilute various criticisms against China in relation to the Tibet riots,'’ said Joseph Cheng, a politics professor at City University of Hong Kong. “This is also a very important opportunity to demonstrate national solidarity.'’

Four Xinhua reporters arrived with soldiers at one of the worst hit areas today, while international media have been allowed free access to the quake region. Government officials held a press briefing in Beijing yesterday as the death toll climbed toward 12,000, many of them children.

“Schools weren’t the only buildings that collapsed, but of course we care most about the schools,'’ Luo Pingfei, Vice Minister of Civil Affairs told journalists, after a China Daily reporter asked why so many education institutions were destroyed while few government offices had collapsed.

Government Test

The quake is testing the government’s emergency response four months after the worst snow storms in 50 years killed 129, leveled 485,000 houses and caused 151.7 billion yuan ($21.7 billion) in economic losses.

The central government at first reacted slowly, and Wen didn’t visit the blizzard areas until more than two weeks after the storms began. China in 2003 drew international criticism for delays in reporting cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The disease infected more than 8,000 people between 2002 and 2003, killing almost 800 worldwide.

China’s response is also far more effective than in Myanmar, where the military junta is still hampering international aid efforts almost two weeks after a cyclone killed as many as 100,000 people, according to United Nations estimates.

Withholding Food

The U.S., Britain and the UN today pressed Myanmar to allow relief workers into the country amid reports that the regime was seizing food and withholding it from the country’s 1.5 million cyclone victims.

The two leaderships have different requirements for regime survival, according to Steve Tsang, a fellow in modern Chinese studies at St. Antony’s College, the University of Oxford, in the U.K. China is showcasing the government’s capabilities while Myanmar would be acknowledging its failings by opening up to the outside world, he said.

Wen and President Hu Jintao have based the party’s legitimacy on a promise of “harmonious society,'’ including better governance and a steadily improving standard of living. The country’s deadliest disaster since the Tangshan quake in 1976 tests their ability to deliver on those promises.

Events in Sichuan and Tibet touch the same political nerve of how to maintain one-party communist rule, according to Tsang. The earthquake, if not dealt with quickly and effectively, threatens the government’s legitimacy, while the unrest in Tibet threatened its control.

“They need to be seen to deliver relief when there is a natural disaster,'’ Tsang said. “It’s all about regime survival.'’

– By Dune Lawrence

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