Google the Chinese words for “earthquake + school building + collapse” here nowadays and you get nothing but a white screen and a warning:
 

搜索结果可能涉及不符合相关法律法规和政策的内容，无法显示。
 

    Which means:

“The search results may involve contents that do not accord with relevant laws, regulations and policies, and  cannot be displayed.”

    Not that this has snuffed out online rancor over the subject. Some 7,000 school "buildings” (or "rooms", depending on your interpretation) crumbled in the Sichuan quake, by officials’ own preliminary count, burying alive a disproportionate number of schoolchildren among the more than 80,000 dead or still unaccounted for – perhaps 10,000 kids died altogether.

     Blatantly substandard construction is to blame, and in some cases corruption too -- and on a deeper level, a system in which the average Chinese taxpayer exercises no oversight over their tax renminbi. The matter has incensed bereaved parents in Sichuan and ordinary folk nationwide. Some parents who lost children have banded together in protests, and now legal action. So ministry chiefs are promising to investigate and punish those responsible.

    Meanwhile Communist Party censors are working to stem the controversy. While they cannot manage to muzzle domestic coverage completely, they're carrying out damage control. One means is through "key term" blocks on search engines such as Google.cn and portals like Sina and Sohu.

 
    Beginning late in the week of the May 12 quake, the Central Publicity (nee Propaganda) Department (CPD) has warned state media to not to “play up” (xuanran 渲染) a long and growing list of sensitive questions that the calamity has stirred up. Collapsing schools are perhaps the prickliest so far, but there are others.

     In addition to shoddy schools, topics red-flagged in CPD directives and word-of-mouth exchanges, veteran Chinese journalists tell us, include:

   1) pre-quake warnings of major seismic rumblings;

    2) the operation of state charities since;

    3) the disbursement of relief, relocation and rebuilding funds;

    4) the role of aid workers from other countries (particularly Japan);

    5) the potential threat posed by nuclear facilities located in the disaster zone;

    6) the fallout from cracked dams, floods and aftershocks,

    7) and in particular, the movements of individual state leaders in response to the cataclysm.

 
    On state TV, reporters have constantly badgered ministry point men with questions on these topics, which is unusual enough. News on these issues is otherwise meant to originate exclusively from central media organs, which represent the party line, rather than unofficial news media outlets in China, which are still monitored and owned by state organs but largely run as independent businesses. “We might be able to touch on some of these issues,” notes one Shanghai-based magazine editor. “But we’re not supposed to write full-page stories focusing on them.”

    The commercial media haven't exactly bowed to their masters so far. So devastating was the 7.9-magnitude jolt (later upgraded by Chinese -- but not foreign -- seismologists to 8.0) that the state information regime soon broke into real-time news mode - a breakthrough for a major domestic emergency. Within hours, Premier Wen Jiabao had flown to scene. Central Television went live from the front lines. The Xinhua News Agency kept spitting out updates. Relevant authorities fed them casualty counts, and provincial and ministry officials began giving regular televised news briefings.

    Hundreds of journalists hit the ground from the official central and provincial press corps. A few thousand additional Chinese journalists, by some estimates, high-tailed it to the disaster zone as well -- most of them unauthorized. Propaganda minders, disarmed, were forced to tolerate their dispatches.

    The frenzy, while somewhat unscripted, proved to be a blessing in disguise for Beijing -- so long as it could keep the domestic media focused on the tragic fallout from a natural disaster, and government’s dogged efforts to help victims. Reports showcased its rapid response, relatively high degree of openness, and embrace of civic and international aid, which unified the international community in a cascade of sympathy and the Chinese people in a national catharsis. Both of which seemed sorely needed after months of pre-Olympic calamity and controversy.

    But the storyline of the quake has quickly shifted, from the tough work of rescue and remembrance to the tougher challenge of recovery and circumspection. It was only a matter of time before Chinese media, gleaning the popular subconscious from the blogosphere, began to dwell on causes and effects of the quake not up to Nature. In other words, what could officials be doing (or have done) differently? The question now is whether the government can stay ahead of the publicity curve as it bends toward the underside of the story.

    Back on the day of the quake,  the CPD came out with pro forma instructions, journalists with central media organs in Beijing told us later. It forbade first-hand reporting outside of four official organs – central TV and radio, the news wire Xinhua, and the Communist Party flagship People’s Daily. It thus activated emergency response guidelines, under which, as of last year, media outlets' licenses can be revoked if they report "false information" about natural disasters, emergencies or government responses to them without obtaining prior authorization. 

    But this was an incomparably massive disaster. Local propaganda and security officials, who would normally be counted on to enforce the ground rules, had no chance of blocking access to the disaster zone. They were busy enough getting in themselves. The CPD orders were unenforceable.

    Many newsrooms across the country, sensing there would be chaos, had already dispatched reporters by the time they got the initial orders not to. That was a loophole in timing that many have exploited in recent years. One of the more aggressive papers in Shanghai, the China Business News, sent out a pair of reporters. When higher-ups from its parent conglomerate rang, editors told them that the reporters had struck out on their own volition. The editors held back a second team, but only briefly. Seeing that everyone else was sending reporters, they did too. In fact, says the Shanghai-based editor, “a lot of reporters weren’t explicitly sent by their companies in the beginning. They went themselves.”

     Not everyone did, though. Those commercial dailies in Beijing administered directly by the city, not known for taking on big national news themselves, stuck predictably to the Xinhua copy. And in the Sichuanese capital of Chengdu, explains David Bandurski of Hong Kong U.’s China Media Project, provincial leaders asserted broader sway over the commercial press. The front page of the Huaxi Metropolis Daily, one of Chengdu’s saucier tabloids, morphed into a mouthpiece advertising their response.

    Other state media did take unanticipated risks. The provincial television crews of Sichuan, known in recent years for adventurous and sometimes invasive social and legal reportage, plumbed the rubble to interview dying victims pinned beneath (witness this LA Times report). At times they also shoveled out casualty tolls from the hardest-hit areas on their own, rather than through central disaster authorities. At the headquarters of one aging Communist Party broadsheet, editors who would never even consider bucking the rules gave serious thought to sending reporters in this. “Even we could sense from the beginning that (authorities) wouldn’t be able to enforce (their orders),” says a Party media editor. “It’s not that (authorities) didn’t want to keep the media under control. It’s that they couldn’t.”

    Not that all this unofficial coverage came off critically. Instead it mostly fed into the prevailing image of state officials, military men and journalists on top on the situation, or at least doing their darnedest to help the people amidst ungodly horror. Officials reported ballooning body counts quickly and with almost incredible precision, and offered detailed analysis, and the media gobbled it up. The dramatic effect satisfied iconic Revolutionary ideals of the PRC in crisis. 

    I've got more to say on this in tomorrow's blog.