Helping Hands

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A Nation's Agony
If the crisis had a defining moment, it came on May 19 at 2:28 p.m., exactly a week after the Wenchuan quake, named for the county at the epicenter. That was when the entire country paused for three minutes to remember the dead. Traffic came to a halt, flags were lowered to half staff and Chinese everywhere stood in oft tearful silence. Drivers honked car horns and factories blared their sirens in mass keening. The ritual marked the start of three days of national mourning during which Internet activities such as online gaming were halted and all TV channels except those broadcasting news were blacked out.

This cathartic outpouring of national grief helped put paid to the notion that China lacks civic spirit. Academics have long argued that Confucian ideals, which emphasize duty to family, have mutated over the millenniums into a mentality that viewed contributions to non-relatives as a waste of precious personal resources. This trait was exaggerated by the beggar-thy-neighbor capitalism that has been Chinese society's driving force for the past two decades. Charitable donations from individuals and businesses in China amount to around 0.09% of GDP, compared with 2% in the U.S.

But in the space of two weeks, China has shown that not only do its people know how to grieve, they know how to give. Bullog, a prominent Beijing blog website, launched a donation campaign soon after the quake; so did Chinese digital-media giant Tom.com, garnering around $240,000 by May 21. Nine days after the quake, contributions from Chinese and foreign donors totaled some $1.5 billion, according to the government. Much of those funds are coming from people making enormous sacrifices. Waiting patiently in line at the Red Cross Society of China office in Beijing on May 19 was Liang Baoying, a 63-year-old retired teacher. Clutching an envelope containing $287 — the equivalent of her monthly pension — Liang tearfully said she could no longer watch news of the quake on TV because it is too sad. "I believe in this national tragedy, so we have no choice [but to give]. I'm sure the Red Cross will use the donation properly."

The masses are doing even more. The China Youth Daily newspaper reported that some 200,000 people from all over China have descended on the quake zone, providing food, shelter and medical treatment, their convoys of vehicles sometimes causing traffic jams on the narrow mountain roads of Sichuan province. Private aid takes many forms: beef trucked in from Inner Mongolia, sleeping bags shipped from Shenzhen, building materials from Chongqing, millions of bottles of water and packets of instant noodles. Volunteers are working in areas overlooked by government relief efforts. In the village of Yongan, south of the devastated city of Beichuan, quake victims, from the very young to the very old, line the road waiting for the citizen cavalry to arrive. "We're counting on volunteers to bring us food," says Wang Shaoqing, 82. As he speaks children run up to the cars of volunteers who stop and hand them food and water bottles through car windows.

Spreading the News
The volunteers' dedication has been covered in the state media with almost the same enthusiasm as the performance of People's Liberation Army rescue crews. The normally muzzled Chinese press has been freed by the information ministry to saturate the airwaves with quake coverage. The leash was also loosened for the unruly Internet. Popular blogs were relatively uncensored; commentators posting to mainstream discussion forums were even allowed to criticize the government's handling of some aspects of relief operations — the failure to use helicopters during the first three days after the quake, for example. As surprising as the freedom is the sophistication of the coverage: it's on television and radio around the clock, and newspapers have put out special editions. One news anchor even dressed down a reporter on air for broadcasting from the comfort of her hotel room rather than venturing into the field. "Three to five years ago both the state media and the online world simply wouldn't have had the energy, experience or skill to do coverage on this scale," says Xiao Qiang, a Chinese media expert at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's going to progress just as much in the next three to five years, too. It's not going to be total media freedom but it is a big step in the empowerment of China's civil society."