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By CARA ANNA, Associated Press WriterSun May 18, 1:00 PM ET

When the order arrived, many reporters were already waiting at a Shanghai airport for a flight to Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu. A few were immediately recalled by their editors, but two reporters from the Shanghai newspaper The Oriental Morning Post, Yu Song and Wang Juliang, boarded a plane anyway. Soon, they were reporting from the heart of the disaster zone.

Displaced students in Mianyang scour a newspaper for news, which had overwhelmed the government’s ability to manage it/David Gray/Reuters

Their article filled an entire page of the next day’s Post, one of the first unofficial accounts of the tragedy by Chinese journalists. It included a graphic description of the scene and pictures of a mourning mother, a rescued child and corpses wrapped in white bunting. The paper further risked offending censors by printing an all-black front page that day, stressing the scale of the catastrophe.

The earthquake has tested this country in many ways, including a death toll that has steadily climbed into the tens of thousands and the logistical nightmare of reaching isolated hamlets in a mountainous region with narrow, treacherous roads.

One of the biggest challenges, though, is to the country’s sometimes sophisticated, sometimes heavy-handed propaganda system. China’s censors found themselves uncharacteristically hamstrung when they tried to micromanage news coverage of the earthquake, as they do most major news stories in China.

By Wednesday, so many reporters had ignored the government’s instructions that the Propaganda Department rescinded its original order, replacing it with another, more realistic one, reflecting its temporary loss of control. “Reporters going to the disaster zone must move about with rescue teams,” it said, giving tacit, retroactive approval to freer coverage.

One reporter from The Oriental Morning Post, who spoke on the condition that he not be identified because the workings of the propaganda system are often treated as state secrets, described the widespread defiance as “stepping beyond the boundaries collectively.”

He described with pride the proliferation of articles that had suddenly appeared, adding, “clearly they were not just from Xinhua,” China’s official news agency, which under propaganda rules generally has a monopoly on firsthand reporting of major breaking news events.

Another Shanghai reporter, who arrived early on the scene and also spoke on condition of anonymity, described his trepidation at having violated the censors’ orders. He initially asked his editors to keep his byline off his dispatch. “I was afraid they would track me down,” he said. “But then I found it was fine, not just me, a lot of reporters were actually doing the same thing. Everybody was free to move and free to write whatever they could.”

China’s censors operate in secret. Their orders are issued verbally to senior editors at thousands of newspapers, Web sites and television outlets so that there is no written record of their mandates, editors say. The Propaganda Department does not have a public address or phone number and does not answer queries about its operations.

A handful of publications consistently skirt the edges of censorship on delicate topics, like land disputes, environmental problems and corruption. But editors who regularly defy the letter or the spirit of propaganda guidance are punished, replaced or sometimes prosecuted.

Coverage of major accidents, epidemic diseases and natural disasters has long been a source of contention. Editors and some officials have argued publicly that overly restrictive propaganda controls can result in deaths if people remain uninformed about risks.

Even so, efforts have been made in recent years to restrict the leeway the news media have to report on major events viewed as having the potential to “disrupt social order,” reporters and editors say.

When China’s worst railroad accident in a decade occurred last month, killing 72 people, propaganda officials jumped in quickly, barring reporters from all but the central government’s tightly controlled main news organs from providing original reporting. With few exceptions, Chinese newspapers limply complied.

Similarly, during a prolonged storm that buried much of usually clement southern China in snow and ice last winter, the country’s news media were slow to pick up on the scale of the crisis and initially provided little aggressive reporting from swaths of the countryside that were essentially paralyzed.

But there have been antecedents to last week’s blush of independent reporting. The clearest example of defiance in the face of clear orders from the Propaganda Department may have occurred during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Many Chinese news organizations, including the leading state television outlets, reported freely on those student demonstrations until they were crushed by Chinese troops and strict censorship was restored.

If last week’s events and those of 1989 have little in common politically, they do share a deep and wide claim on people’s attentions and emotions throughout China. An editor with the Shanghai Media Group, a television company, conveyed the intensity of interest in earthquake news in terms of viewership, saying interest levels were too high to heed orders from above to discourage frontline reporting.

“This is about China,” said Shi Hong, the coordinator of the network’s news program on the earthquake. “Our rating right now is at four. That’s not doubling the usual rate, it’s 400 percent of the norm. The executives have instructed us to go deep into the frontline and send back vivid images of Shanghai people participating in the damage relief up there.”

For all of this aggressive reporting, nearly all of China’s news coverage has shied from exploring politically delicate questions related to the earthquake, such as the widespread collapse of school buildings, preferring to stick instead to the safer story lines of heroic rescues and human tragedy.

“So many criticisms that one can see online have not been reflected in the mainstream media, such as why the air force was activated so late and why foreign rescue teams were not allowed in earlier,” said Li Datong, former editor of the weekly newspaper Freezing Point, who was removed for his outspokenness.

Gu Zexu, a commentator in Guangzhou, who wrote a column in the newspaper Xin Kuai Bao urging the opening of the country to foreign aid teams, said there had been no real breakthrough by the Chinese media in the current crisis.

“You still cannot have criticism in the opinion pages, but you can advise,” Mr. Gu said. “How you phrase things also matters. You touch upon something and leave it, or you must make circumlocutions.” The media have been faster and more efficient in this crisis than in many others, “but there has been no big difference in content,” he said.

Indeed by midweek perhaps the most prominent story line had become a celebration of the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, who moved many Chinese with his shows of sympathy for the victims throughout the crisis, spending long hours traveling in the quake zone and listening to the stories of some of those who had been hardest hit.

Although it has been consistently pro-government, the coverage of Mr. Wen may have broken new ground, when online messages from someone who seemed to be a news reporter covering the prime minister’s relief work made their way from the Internet into a newspaper, the Guangzhou Daily.

Information about China’s leaders, including seemingly trivial details, is traditionally the most tightly controlled news of all. The Guangzhou Daily report said Mr. Wen had hurt himself in a fall and was bleeding, but refused medical assistance.

“The premier is shouting into the phone,” the reporter’s account of a conversation between Mr. Wen and army generals said: “ ‘I don’t care how you do it. I just want those 100,000 people out of danger. That is an order.’ ”

Fan Wenxin, Li Zhen and Shi Jing contributed research.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/world/asia/18press.html?fta=y

Chinese Flee Flood Threat From Quake

The new threats came as government officials said that more than three million homes had been destroyed by Monday’s earthquake, and more than 12 million had been damaged. The government again raised the death toll, to nearly 29,000.

The resulting humanitarian crisis is the largest in China in decades, and in the process of covering the developments, Chinese news organizations have been testing strict government censorship in new ways — and even winning some concessions.

With the scale of the disaster becoming ever more apparent, the United Nations announced that it would provide a grant of $7 million from an emergency response fund “to help meet the most urgent humanitarian requirements.”

The danger of flooding on Saturday was so severe that some rescue workers had to abandon their efforts, at least temporarily, to find people buried beneath rubble in Beichuan, one of the hardest-hit counties. Such interruptions could doom the relatively few who could be expected to be alive under debris.

The greatest threat of flooding came from a lake in the far north of Sichuan Province that had already begun to overflow because of a blockage in the Qingzhu River, according to Xinhua, the official news agency, which cited experts at the province’s land management department. Heavy rains began pounding large parts of Sichuan on Saturday night, adding to the threat.

A rise of only 6 to 10 feet will cause the lake to “threaten more than 2,000 people who are staying in shelters after the earthquake downstream,” one expert said, adding that it was inevitable that debris would continue to flow down, adding to the blockage.

Early on Sunday, a tremor with a magnitude of 6.0 struck northern Sichuan, one of the largest quakes since last Monday. Other tremors over the past several days have caused new landslides.

Relief officials in the county where the flood threat is highest, Qingchuan, have begun evacuating people and are considering blasting the embankment to divert water from the overflowing lake. “We were informed that the Qingchuan government is requesting urgent evacuation because the water level of the dammed lake has reached 70 meters,” or 230 feet, said a worker at the control center of the Guangyuan Petrol Company who gave his name as Mr. Wang. He said workers were being evacuated.

Farther south, closer to the epicenter, people around Beichuan, a town that was flattened by the 7.9-magnitude earthquake, also began fleeing because of flood warnings related to a choked river. Thousands of people are buried under rubble in the town, the county seat of Beichuan, and it is the scene of one of the most intense rescue efforts in the disaster zone. But on Saturday soldiers, rescue workers and medics had to stop their work and seek higher ground or leave the area. People who were fleeing described soldiers from the army heeding the flood warning, packing up and driving down from the mountains.

There were unconfirmed reports that the immediate danger had passed by evening and that rescue operations may have resumed.

Landslides continue to pose one of the greatest threats across the mountainous terrain of Sichuan. Daily aftershocks and tremors — at least 168 significant ones since Monday — set off new slides. At least 13 rivers and lakes have been dammed up by the quake, the state-run China National Radio reported Saturday, citing an official at the Land and Resource Ministry.

People in the disaster zone have had to grapple with the rising threat of flooding. On Wednesday, the top economic planning body in China issued a report saying that the quake had damaged 391 reservoirs. The same day, 2,000 soldiers were sent to inspect cracks in the Zipingpu Dam, upriver from the hard-hit town of Dujiangyan, and drain water from the reservoir.

Experts outside China say many of the threatened dams and reservoirs were built along the well-recognized Longmenshan fault, and that the dams might have sustained damage that could make them fail weeks later.

Officials said Saturday that the death toll had risen to 28,881. Earlier in the week, they said it could reach 50,000. Officials said Saturday that 12.5 million homes had been damaged, and 3.1 million had collapsed.

President Hu Jintao has urged rescuers to continue searching for survivors. Some were pulled out on Saturday, but medical experts say the chances of people living in rubble decrease significantly after the first 72 hours.

The Ministry of Health said Saturday that it had found no epidemics in the disaster areas, Xinhua reported. Hospitals in Sichuan had received more than 116,000 patients, 14 percent of whom were severely injured, the ministry added. More than 34,000 medical workers and disease control staff members are in Sichuan, and they are being given pamphlets that tell them how to disinfect food and drinking water and how to handle bodies.

Zhang Jing contributed research.

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Few Survivors Found in China Quake

 

 

 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/world/asia/18china.html?ref=asia