Many Chinese acquaintances who spend time online are buzzing about Sharon Stone's comment that the devastating Sichuan earthquake might have been "karma", implying it was cosmic retribution for authorities' response to Tibetan rioting in March. The Chinese reaction to Stone's brief interview evoked the mood of a few weeks earlier, before the quake, when emotional nationalistic youth called for a boycott of Carrefour and a campaign to denounce CNN because a commentator had likened Chinese authorities to goons and thugs.

 In the wake of the quake, much of the strident nationalistic rhetoric had died down. But some of us foreign correspondents did receive the following message by e-mail this week:

(here's how the e-mail began) 

Sharon Stone says in the interview that the earthquake in sichuan is a kama!!!
  We cannot accept Sharon Stone's words.
Let's Boycott Sharon Stone!Boycott Dior!Boycott French products!
  Atteched is a list of French products.
Never Buy any of them!!!

                                    Boycutt Sharon Stone association
                                    boycott.sharonstone@gmail.com
                                    http://sharon-stone.cn

 (end)

The campaign criticizing CNN was initially spearheaded by a website too.  

To many Chinese readers, the report of an outburst by Premier Wen Jiabao helped define Beijing's take-charge response to the quake—though that report has never been officially corroborated. Nor has it run on state TV, or over the Xinhua News Agency wire. Yet the individual who filed it figures to have been with one of the four press and broadcast organs in China’s official press detail. The word around journalist circles is that he or she works for China Central Television.

His or her dispatch was neither agitprop wire copy, nor an “internal report” designated strictly for high-level consumption. Rather, it was a barrage of voyeuristic tittle-tattle fired out over OQ, the leading Chinese IM interface. From there it was spewed across Chinese bulletin boards and blogs (such as this one).

In the exchange, purportedly recorded the night of the May 12 quake, the mystery micro-blogger claims to be in the company of Premier Wen Jiabao. Amid the craggy rubble of a decimated school building, Wen is seen stumbling and suffering a bloody cut on his arm. Yet he waves off medical assistance. Minutes later, he’s taking command of this rescue scene, and going commando on military officers being tested by conditions up ahead. Sometimes the chronicler refers to Wen by the reverential moniker lao yezi, which means Grandpa. The term was often reserved for the just magistrate in dynastic times.

It all seems the stuff of Red Army lore, except the drama is bloggishly raw. A number of Chinese journalist sources said they took the thread to be the real deal. Most added that the leaker, who seems to be messaging to and fro with a friend or junior colleague, likely acted alone, rather than on behalf of the propaganda apparatus. One said the text messenger was a journalist for CCTV.

The transcript offers a relatively rare behind-the-scenes peep not made for official dissemination. But more interesting and unusual is the fact that it did officially surface. Domestic publishing rights to the words and actions of central leaders are exclusively held by official media outlets, and Party offices must vet the material first. Yet state radio cited one of Wen’s barbs, and the Guangzhou Daily, administered by the Communist Party committee of China's tabloidish town, picked up a detailed bright about the QQ exchange from Hong Kong’s Wen Hui Po, under the headline: "Wen Jiabao: I Just Want the 100,000 People out of Danger, That's an Order." Reposted on Sina.com, it drew nearly 35,000 comments in nine hours.

Besides the parts that filtered out, according to one Chinese journalist source, Wen also had far less palatable words for the military men at the time. Words which the journalist deemed unfit to repeat.

Herewith are highlights of the transcript, translated by my colleague Wang Zhenru:

Here are some of the main charities accepting donations for the victims of the earthquake in China.

Americares

Doctors Without Borders

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies

MercyCorps

Save the Children

U.S. Fund for UNICEF

World Food Programme

World Vision

    Now this is bizarre.  In early May a massive toad migration freaked people out in a village near Mianzhu, Sichuan province. Hundreds of thousands of the amphibians were milling around near a pharmaceutical factory, many getting crushed by passing cars on the road, according to the West China Urban Daily on May 10.

    The paper reported that some residents were wondering if the weird animal behavior could portend an impending disaster. Others interviewed on local TV thought the toad congregation was a lucky sign  instead. "They appeared in 2008, the year China hosts the Olympics. Maybe even animals are coming out to welcome the Olympics!" speculated one, who said he'd never seen such an assembly of toads before.

     Experts of the local Forestry Bureau were sent to check it out. The scientists found a large number of the amphibians hopping around in a drainage ditch behind the factory, where the water  was warmer than elsewhere. Bureau head Shu Shi was quoted as saying the fact that it was the final phase of the toad-breeding season, plus two days of nonstop rain and the warmer temperature of the ditchwater, had created perfect conditions for the creatures to hatch and then hop en masse to higher ground: "This is a normal phenomenon, it has nothing to do with a natural calamity."

    The official reassured residents that toads were not a bad sign, but in fact were good for the farming population because they kill mosquitoes and "protect crops. This is a good thing. It shows the environment in Mianzhu is getting better and better"

    Now, in the wake of the massive May 12 Sichuan earthquake, Chinese Netizens are commenting with hindsight on the teeming toad activity in Mianzhu. "Many animals can give out warnings [about earthquakes]", commented Zhanglinjun007. (It's true that certain fish and farm animals have been known to exhibit unusual behavior just prior to some earthquakes. Maybe we shouldn't dismiss so easily those studies of animals' sensing seismic activity.)

    Was this toad-infested community the same Mianzhu that, according to Chinese media, now has thousands of residents tragically buried by the earthquake -- and if so did the toads know something they didn't? At least some Chinese netizens suspect so. A chatroom participant with the cybernym Hslyliu wrote on Monday evening, "Today on CCTV news they emphasized [that we] not listen to rumors about earthquakes. You should get news issued by the government...haha, the toads are laughing." 

    Of course, the earthquake's horrific death toll is no laughing matter.  The big question is whether there's some way to forecast such disasters in the future, even if it involves studying the activities of the lowly toad. Here's a Youtube clip showing the creeping critters, from a Sichuan TV report (the soundtrack's in Chinese, which should be no problem for this blog's many Chinese-language readers):

Check it out.

We've all noticed how Chinese state media's reporting faster, further and much more energetically about the earthquake -- yielding some ironic moments. At one point in the middle of a broadcast Monday night, thanks to a forward-leaning onscene reporter (who no doubt thought she was just doing her job), the state television flagship nearly leaked data that was either not ready, or not fit, for public consumption.

Soon after 10 p.m., the China Central TV news channel was hours into live breaking coverage, a CNN-style propaganda function that’s only become routine since the Iraq war, but is still reserved for must-cover developments. The presenters in the booth in Beijing announced the death toll had surpassed 7,000, according to the latest official figures circulated among central government media. Next the presenters turned to a female reporter in Sichuan, and asked her to describe rescue efforts on the ground.

The reporter piped in that she had just gotten the latest circular from the State Seismological Bureau, and pointed out a “discrepancy” with the count her colleagues just given. But before she could say any more, a male presenter broke in: “Now, let’s not quibble over the exact figures.” Nothing more was heard on the subject. It was an awkward exchange.

Would her count have been larger or smaller? “Well, obviously it was larger,” opined one friend who caught the broadcast, a Chinese publisher. When we spoke today, the first thing he asked was: “What’s the death toll reported by foreign media?” At this point, I told him, we could only rely on the government figures. I heard him ***.

Death tolls in China are still tightly managed, but they’re certainly no longer taboo. We’re not just hearing “nearly 10,000” or “more than 12,000” fatalities at the moment. As of a cabinet news conference on Tuesday afternoon, the latest official tally of the dead from yesterday’s massive earthquake in Sichuan was, to be precise, 11,921. And rising.

This is the deadliest quake since the 1976 Tangshan cataclysm, which was also the mother of all cover-ups of natural disasters in the Communist era. More than three years passed before Beijing even coughed up an official body count - 240,000. It took Mao's death, Deng's return from the political dead, and a Xinhua news agency reporter with the dumb luck and derring-do to file it .

Although thousands were evacuated from buildings in Beijing and Shanghai, for me the swaying ceiling lamps and window blinds (and my barking dog) were my only hints of the earthquake that hit eastern Sichuan province at 2:29 PM local time. Now we hear the temblor was 7.9 on the Richter scale and that state media are reporting that as many as 5,000 people were killed in a single county. According to the official Xinhua News Agency, 80 percent of the buildings collapsed in Beichuan county in Sichuan province, with 900 high school students said to be trapped in the rubble of their building. The U.S. Geological Survey says it took place 93 kilometers (about 56 miles) northwest of the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu.

Chengdu's a city of 10 million with all the tall buildings, crowded streets and dense urban malls that characterize modern Chinese metropolises. I've been trying to phone friends and sources in Chengdu and another Sichuan city, Mianyang, but so far no luck on either land lines or mobiles. According to its Web site, Chengdu's Shuangliu airport was closed temporarily for safety reasons after the quake.

So they've done it. Chinese mountaineers finally raised the Olympic torch on top of Everest this morning. To get there they overcame difficulties that threatened to derail the ascent, or delay it beyond China's weather-related May 10 deadline. They sat out high winds and snowstorms that buried or destroyed their camps and rope-routes. Then they dug through fresh snow to repair equipment. This morning, they headed for the summit against a backdrop of steely clouds and blowing snow, though mercifully the wind had dropped.

Once they reached the peak, they behaved like any other summit party, though perhaps a little more solemnly, as they slapped each other on the back, and passed the torch from hand to hand. Official congratulations on state television all emphasized how they'd conquered their difficulties.

They deserve their success, but in one sense they were beaten before they started. Olympic organizers had visualized the Everest ascent as the high point of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Torch Relay. It was meant to provide the most dramatic images in a relay chock-full of superlatives--the longest, the highest, the largest number of countries, runners etc.

This hasn't happened. The defining moments of the Beijing 2008 Torch Relay will forever be from London and Paris, where 'Free Tibet' protesters jostled torch bearers and police tackled demonstrators to the ground. Those pictures triggered an international online slanging match about China's place in the world. Angry young Chinese netizens bubbled with fury at what they saw as a deliberate slight to newly-confident China, while Western human rights activists jabbed away at China's short-comings.

The sight of the torch on top of Everest cannot override these events.