James Fallows has been watching Chinese TV news cover the Chengdu earthquake:
- The coverage included a long segment of premier Wen Jiabao reading a speech about his deep concern for the people of Sichuan, from aboard an airplane en route to the disaster scene. Background: after the country was paralyzed by unexpected snow storms in February, the leadership was criticized for a Katrina-like slowness in dealing with the problem. Prominent coverage now of the main officials responding immediately to this disaster.
He compares this to TV from Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Germany and finds it lacking in visuals and detail. But it does show that Chinese leaders do have to respond, and look like they are responding to, disasters for the sake of their own domestic standing first and foremost. Not necessarily because they care about people’s welfare, but because the system is open enough to create political problems if they fumble. One can assume that the constituency here is the growing middle and entrepreneurial classes, which are plugged into the media, strongly nationalistic, and have a lot to lose in a major disaster.
Earlier, Fallows noted the Burmese leaders’ failure to respond to the cyclone:
My wife and I have been to Burma several times over the last twenty years. The first time was in the summer of 1988, around the time of the August 8 uprising and subsequent bloody repression of monks and students. The most recent was a little more than a year ago, a few days before another bloody round of repression. Like almost everyone who has been in the country, we have viewed its regime as a peculiarly pre-modern and backward form of evil. It does not seems capable of thoroughly-organized evil and repression, as in the old Soviet system. Rather it displays a benighted, superstitious, and almost unthinking indifference to whether its people suffer and die.
A minor illustration would be the decision that effectively bankrupted many Burmese people and helped bring on riots 20 years ago. This was the out of the blue decree that most denominations of Burmese currency, except those in “lucky” denominations like 45 and 90 kyat, would be valueless. The major illustration is of course its refusal to allow relief workers from around the world to spare tens of thousands of Burmese people disease and likely death in the wake of the cyclone.
The sheer weirdness here does not lend much hope for disaster victims, nor for any end to the regime other than through violence.
