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Chinese Quake Info Flows from Internet and Mobiles

Posted on: Monday, 19 May 2008, 13:50 CDT

Desperate for news following last week’s powerful earthquake, Chinese citizens are turning to the Internet in such numbers that the government has been forced to allow information to flow in ways it never had before.

Continuous, uncensored views of citizens are turning up on a fast moving network of Internet blogs, text and instant messages throughout the country, providing a commanding source of firsthand accounts of the disaster, calls for help and even fervent criticism of relief efforts.

China is now home to the largest number of Internet and mobile phone users anywhere in the world, but its government has long been known for controlling the supply of information to its citizens.

"Why were most of those killed in the earthquake children?" one post asked Thursday on the microblogging site FanFou.

"How many donations will really reach the disaster area? This is doubtful," wrote another.

"I don't want to use the word transparent, but it's less censored, an almost free flow of discussion," Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Associated Press.  Qiang directs the China Internet Project, which monitors and translates Chinese Web sites.

"We didn't know that hundreds of thousands of lives passed away during the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 until many years after the disaster took place," sociologist Zheng Yefu wrote in a commentary in the Southern Metropolis News last week.

But news about Monday's magnitude 7.9 quake spread rapidly to Web sites and microblogging services, in which users exchange short bursts of information via text and instant messages.   The services also publish the messages on the Internet.

"It all depends on the users; we don't edit it," FanFou founder Wang Xin told the Associated Press.  

"We just gather their words together."

Xiao said a series of crises over the last few months had taught the government a few lessons.  On Friday, government officials held an uncommon, real-time Internet exchange with citizens to address heated questions about why so many schools had collapsed in the quake.

"They understand better now that to react slowly or to cover up in the Internet age is a bad idea," Xiao said during an Associated Press telephone interview.

However, the government is still monitoring online dialogue.  And since the earthquake, seventeen people have been detained, warned or forced to write apologies for Internet messages that "spread false information, made sensational statements and sapped public confidence," according to reports Thursday from China’s state-run news agency Xinhua.

Officials also warned of scam text messages asking for quake relief donations.

One post, which was later deleted from the popular Tianya online forum, had complained about the government response following the earthquake.

"A politician visited Dujiangyan for less than two minutes, and police kept the people away . Most residents don't even know he ever came!" the post said.

"Who can tell me, where is the food and water that is being promised by the city government? ... I paid 50 kuai (about $7) to get on a vehicle to drive me away from this hell."

Tianya declined comment on why the post was removed, but a customer service agent said that posts might be deleted for containing "sensitive words" or for not being "relevant to the theme of discussions."   Tianya’s company policy does not permit the name of the agent to be quoted.
 
But fierce discussion was permitted on other popular online forums about whether the Chinese government should allow international rescue workers into the earthquake zone, and why so many schools collapsed in the quake.

Many citizens simply wanted to help, creating online projects to reunite quake survivors with friends and family and to distribute information about things such as how to donate blood and money and how to adopt children orphaned by the quake.

One local government even joined in, and with nothing but a satellite phone quickly turned its once-quiet Web site into the sole source of information from the quake’s epicenter.

"Whenever we heard any news, we immediately put it on the Web site," said He Biao, director of the Aba prefecture's emergency response department, in comments made to the Chinese portal Sina.com.  The Aba site shared the initial details of the missing and the dead after receiving information via satellite phone from forestry departments throughout the hardest-hit areas.

Phone and Internet connections were cut to the epicenter area for days, but a report on Friday by Xinhua provided a view of the network that had been in place even in one of China's most remote regions.   The report said that the eight worst hit counties had more than 16,500 wireless phone stations, with about 10,000 remaining damaged as of Friday.  A team of 12,000 technicians was working to repair the network, Xinhua said, amid strong aftershocks throughout the area.

Throughout the region, people congregated at emergency phone stations and power sources to recharge their mobile phones.

"A direct connection to the disaster zone!" read Sina.com’s headline Friday.

"All the major online communities, bloggers, all are very eager to help. It's quite amazing," said Xiao.

"I haven't seen anything like that, the freedom and the participation, how much the average Internet netizen wants to help."

The information ran the gamut from the helpful to the routine.

"The milkman has arrived," wrote 22-year-old British student Daniel Ebbutt on the microblogging site Twitter, shortly after the quake.   Ebbutt lives in Chengdu, the capital of the hard-hit Sichuan province.

"It seems people are just getting on with things now," he told the Associated Press, adding that rumors were sweeping the area through text and online services.

One rumor, that the water supply might be polluted with ammonia, led to a series of posts by Ebbutt about the frenzied search for bottled water.

But 26-year-old Kevin Morris, an American teacher and blogger living just outside the hard-hit area of Dujiangyan, said such rumors are the flipside of the free flow of information.

"The official media has actually been much better at keeping people calm and is surprisingly frank with its reporting," Morris said in an e-mail to the Associated Press Wednesday.

"The rumors are mostly damaging - causing people to rush out of their homes at the slightest hint of an aftershock or, now, causing people to buy as much water as possible because the government is supposedly turning off the water."

Source: redOrbit Staff and Wire Reports

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