This video shows the start of a three-day period of national mourning for victims of last week’s Sichuan earthquake, which started today at 2:28pm—a week to the minute after the quake hit.

In Beijing, the entire city shut down for what in the US would be a moment of silence but in China was a prolonged wail. It is Chinese tradition to cry out loudly at funerals, although in this case the wailing was done by air raid sirens and, appropriately enough for a city that continues to add motor vehicles in seeming violation of every law of urban planning and physics, car horns.

I can’t speak for the city as a whole, but from where I watched (the 20th floor of the Full Link Plaza, next to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at a major intersection on the east Second Ring Road) it was a truly astounding scene, equal parts pathos and spectacle. Like something Michael Bay would put in a movie if Michael Bay had heart and an imagination.

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Tags: beijing, China, nationalism, Sichuan earthquake

[See below for update] First things first, to the people who’ve asked: All in Beijing is fine. On the San Francisco scale, the Beijing earthquake hardly rated. I didn’t feel a thing, in fact, although friends who work in the higher office buildings report swaying ceiling fixtures and feeling vaguely like they may have had more to drink over the weekend than they originally thought.

As for the real earthquake in Sichuan, I’m in no position to add to the torrent of news, other than to laud the Guardian for it’s prescient coverage, not just of the tragedy that has befallen people near the epicenter, but also of the speed with which their grief has turned to rage at the real estate developers and government officials whose responsibility it is to make sure buildings have a certain resilience in such situations. To wit:

Twenty-four hours after the quake hit, they were losing hope and only rage was left. They blamed everyone: soldiers for coming too late, the builders for cutting corners, officials for – they claimed - siphoning off cash.

“The contractors can’t have been qualified. It’s a ‘tofu’ [soft and shoddy] building. Please, help us release this news,” the husband said.

“About 450 were inside, in nine classes and it collapsed completely from the top to the ground. It didn’t fall over; it was almost like an explosion.”

The distraught couple’s neighbour, still half-hoping for a sight of her daughter, burst out angrily: “Why isn’t there money to build a good school for our kids? Chinese officials are too corrupt and bad.

“These buildings outside have been here for 20 years and didn’t collapse - the school was only 10 years old. They took the money from investment, so they took the lives of hundreds of kids. They have money for prostitutes and second wives but they don’t have money for our children. This is not a natural disaster - this is done by humans.”

Sensationalism? Possibly. But I doubt it. “Toufu dregs”-style construction (豆腐渣工程) has long been a source of public anger in China, and a potent symbol of corruption at the local level. (Witness the fuming controversy over shoddy electric poles during this winter’s freak snow storms in the south.) And now it appears the widespread practice whereby officials and developers profit through architectural corner-cutting may have cost a few extra tens of thousands of lives.

Melinda Liu, Newsweek’s bureau chief in Beijing, and Richard Spencer, the Telegraph’s correspondent over here, both note that many Chinese saw the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 as an omen portending the death of Mao Zedong—the suggestion seeming to be that this earthquake could foreshadow something bad for the CCP. But if the Guardian’s report is at all reflective of the general mood, the appeal to superstition hardly feels necessary.

While it’s true Chinese people have been willing to give their central government the benefit of the doubt even in the worst of times, one has to wonder whether the death toll from this disaster—and in particular the role of corrupt officials in helping push it to such heights—doesn’t represent a serious threat to leaders in Beijing (and their dogged pursuit of social stability) beyond anything those protesting monks and flag-waving pro-Tibetsters could muster

[Image via Netease]

UPDATE [May 14, 6:40am, Beijing time]:
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Tags: China, corruption, earthquake, 豆腐渣, Sichuan

It’s become an annual spring ritual: Just as thousands of fresh-faced UC Berkeley seniors take delivery of their caps and gowns, complete one last drunken stumble through the ooze of Telegraph Avenue and emotionally prepare themselves to enter the illustrious world of Cal alumnihood, those with years still to spend on campus descend into paroxysms of helpless anxiety—alleviated briefly by participation in limp protests on Sproul Plaza—over the announcement of planned tuition rises and budget casualties. These announcements are so common, so inevitable, I usually ignore them the same way I’ve come to ignore double-figure death toll counts coming out of Iraq. But this year’s list of Berkeley budget casualties contains one item that, to me at least, is truly shocking: East Asian languages.

I use “casualty” here in the wide sense. The East Asian languages and cultures department at Berkeley will not die next year. It will, however, sustain egregious injury.

Come next fall, according an article in the Daily Californian, classes in Japanese, Korean and Chinese will have to be cut by 40 percent, 66 percent and 54 percent, respectively. The number of students taking those classes will have to be reduced by at least 1,500. As a result, no students outside the EALC will be allowed to study those languages.

In other words, the option of adding a little Chinese or Korean or Japanese to, say, a degree in history or engineering or business will no longer exist as of next year. At one of the world’s foremost institutions for the study of Asia. At an institution that just cut the ribbon on a new building—the C.V. Starr East Asian Languages Library, cost: $46 million—to house it’s world class collection of Asian language materials.

I will admit to taking a certain perverse satisfaction in this turn of events vis-a-vis the library. It pained me to no end to walk by that building while it was under construction, knowing it would open precisely as I was scheduled to leave the school. Oh, how I seethed with jealousy at the convenient access later generations would have to a legendary collection that, in my time, was scattered about campus in various dusty basement corners, half-lost in the abyss of pre-digital card catalogs. Now it seems those later generations won’t have the skills to make use of the collection after all. (”Ha ha,” he chuckles to himself, twiddling his fingers with Burns-like glee. “Suckers!”)
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Tags: California budget, China, Mandarin, public education, UC Berkeley

As the Olympics approach, Beijing descends once again into a spring cleaning frenzy, except this time it’s undesirable people, rather than unsightly construction rubble, getting swept out the door.

For the past few weeks, the capital’s foreign community has been hunkered down in bars, nervously peeling the labels off its bottles of Qingdao in collective anxiety over China’s new visa regulations. Various reports, most out of Hong Kong (where the majority of the Middle Kingdom’s long-stay guests go to re-up on visas), indicate the government has essentially decided to stop issuing anything but tourist visas from now until October. Rumors have also been circulating that foreign students and political refugees will be forced to leave–a rumor that appears to have been confirmed by Monsters and Critics yesterday. Finally, separate sources with knowledge of China’s visa “graymarket” recently told me the government has decided to eliminate all visas of any kind for people from Africa and the Middle East for the duration of the Olympics.

The Foreign Ministry’s responses to questions about visas have done little to clarify the situation. In an AP report last week, spokeswoman Jiang Yu denied any change in policy, saying only that “China’s visa policy is formulated according to China’s laws and regulations.” But in the Monsters and Critics article she pulls a flip-flop worthy of any Washington politician, confirming the change in policy while insisting (rather incredibly) that it “will have no influence on normal business activities in China.”

The foreign business community in Hong Kong apparently disagrees.

So why, on the eve of its own $40 billion debutante ball, has the Chinese government decided to make such drastic changes to its guest list?
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Tags: Beijing2008, HongKong, visas

From the Ch-infamous.com Shameless Self-Promotion Department, a new article on China Dialogue (based on the trip Zachary Slobig and I took to Xinjiang last year, co-written by myself and Mr. Slobig):

On a hazy afternoon in the city of Urumqi, northwest China, Song Yujiang steps into the cramped outdoor equipment shop he runs on South Youhao Road, and gently wrests control of the store’s computer from his two-year-old son. He clicks through a folder of photos from his trips leading moneyed weekend warriors into western China’s rugged mountains, and stops at a photo of several hikers standing on a field of grey mountain shale, dwarfed by dozens of eerily beautiful towers of white ice.

“This is an ice pagoda forest,” the guide explains, his face sliding from reverent to grim as he aims his finger at one of the obelisks. “These are formed when the bigger glaciers melt.”

A search for the typical Urumqi resident would not start with Song. He is too quietly thoughtful, and too hopelessly in love with nature, to fit in with the hard-bitten natives and industrialist migrants who otherwise populate the polluted capital of the Xinjiang autonomous region. But the mountain enthusiast shares at least one thing with others in the city: he stands to benefit from the region’s fast rising temperatures; even if the increased heat means his future grandchildren — or even his son — may eventually have to find somewhere else to live.

Read the full piece here (English) 或这里 (中文).

Tom Engelhardt, the editing guru whose baffling enthusiasm once prevented me from dumping journalism to go back to skimming the fat off of veal stock in some cut-rate San Francisco brasserie, would probably sooner suck the ink out of his pen than see me start a post on a topic by confessing I have nothing real to say about it. Sorry, Tom. In this case, I have no choice.

It’s not that I couldn’t go on about the riots in Tibet. I could. For pages, probably. But there are two problems with that: 1) Hundreds (if not thousands or tens of thousands) of people have already done it; and 2) Very little of what those hundreds (or thousands) have said is based on reliable information.

As Roland Soong at EastSouthWestNorth was astute enough to point out when all this erupted last weekend, virtually everything we hear about Tibet comes filtered through one of two very well-oiled propaganda machines: one in Beijing, the other in Dharamsala (where the Dalai Lama maintains Tibet’s government-in-exile). Even in the best of times, independent reporting on the place is both rare and restricted. Now? It’s anybody’s guess what’s really going on.

Rather than add to the blather, then, I’ll simply post a few useful links and hope everyone takes what they find with due skepticism:

—For a reliable first-hand account, the best choice right now is The Economist, which has the only accredited foreign journalist actually reporting from inside Lhasa.
—For reactions from the Chinese media and blogosphere, see Rebecca MacKinnon at RConversation, Roland at ESWN and John Kennedy at Global Voices
—For a more general overview, go to China Digital Times, which has done its damndest to set up a one-stop-shop of riot information and commentary.

And if the above don’t satisfy your Lhasa riot information jones, Kenneth Tan has complied the authoritative link list over at the Shanghaiist.

If it’s opinion you crave, then I’ll join the chorus in support of Dave at the Tenement Palm blog, who makes an unassailable yet somehow seldom heard argument that regular people on both sides of the China-Tibet shouting war need to stop waving their flags for a moment and try actually having a conversation.

[Photo by 2 Dogs]

Tags: Buddhism, China, crackdown, Lhasa, propaganda, riot, Tibet

The above photo, from a “water appreciation walk” organized by a Beijing environmental NGO last weekend, captures nicely what to me is the most stunning characteristic of China’s new green movement: It’s almost incomprehensible optimism. These people are standing next a shallow, fetid ribbon of water filled with algae blooms that runs (or rather, sits and festers) between a pair of sloping concrete banks along the western edge of the new Olympic park. The paper in the kid’s hands is a set of statistics detailing the doom that awaits Beijing as its water supplies dwindle. Yet he is smiling. His audience is rapt, not in the least defeated. The scene reminded me of another Chinese movement that once produced similar imagery (see below). Let’s just hope for better results this time around.

For more photos from the water walk, click here.

Tags: beijing, cultural revolution, Environment, water pollution

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