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 .
The paralysis and paranoia of Tangshan, while still a touchy subject in China, is now more and more a marker for measuring improvements in combating emergencies. And an easy standard of measurement at that. Party leaders wouldn’t dare let anything similar happen now.
Quite the contrary, especially in the case of this quake. The same afternoon it hit, Premier Wen Jiabao jetted into Chengdu and started the trek toward the epicenter; that set the tone for the state media charge. It took just a few hours for numbers to emerge on those dead or thought to be buried alive in the surrounding mountain enclaves, which are far tougher and more treacherous to access than Tangshan was from the nearby capital. Official figures from the stricken area in Western China have climbed fast since.
The government’s show of openness, zip and apparent precision has been impressive – so far - even by today’s careful standards of political stress management. It's an old storyline, of course: the people, soldiers and officials unified in a Revolutionary-style with nature. But with Wen already on the ground, Central Television and its provincial affiliate in Sichuan wasted little time launching into overdrive, their dramatic displays of pathos, pictures and analysis brightened with messages of state service and international goodwill. The state publicity machine must be under intense pressure to stay on top of the chaos on the ground. If state news is seen falling behind, officialdom will be suspected of falling back into its naughty habit of withholding information to cover up negligence.
The anxiety’s coming from all fronts. The present generation of Party leaders have perfected the drill of coming to the aid of the people. But this past week, they’ve been taking heat for not pressing Burma’s junta to do the same. The tragedy has also furnished a prime opportunity for them to defuse the divisiveness over Tibet and the Olympic torch relay, and soften the mood ahead of the Games.
In recent memory, Beijing has suffered its share of crises of confidence: from SARS in 2003, to the blizzards that shut down much of the country just before Spring Festival this year, to the Tibetan unrest since March, death tolls from which remain starkly contested abroad.
Info on natural disasters, at least, is not supposed to be as sensitive as it once was. In 2005, the government declassified death tolls from natural catastrophes; last year, it enacted regulations that authorize petty cadres to go over the heads of local bosses and report to Beijing in the case major disasters. It also spent the past year hyping a new ordinance on “openness of government information”, effective on May 1, which prioritizes release of data on health emergencies. The quake is a big test of those commitments.
Then there are thousands of bloggers from a disaster zones posting photos and video online, along with the newer microbloggers simply punching out text messages. The primal buzz they made immediately after the quake might have been a small triumph of the "Twitterati", but one smugly self-declared, as Ogilvy China's Kaiser Kuo reports.
Notably, Chinese reporters from more aggressive state outlets have been racing to the scenes as well. An editor with a leading national news magazine had deployed three teams of reporters to ravaged areas on Monday. As of mid-day Tuesday, she told me, she had yet to receive any specific reporting guidelines on the quake from the Central Publicity Department. One of her teams was in an SUV with all-terrain bicycles mounted on top. It suggests Chinese reporters can really pull out all the stops when they're allowed to. No wonder CCTV and company are feeling the pressure to keep up.
