Imagethief

During the official mourning period declared a week after last month's Wenchuan earthquake, I put up a post remarking on the government message that replaced the foreign entertainment channels on my building satellite TV system. This got me zapped by a commenter who felt I was displaying ignorance of Chinese mourning rituals. While I disagreed with the commenter, it did say something of the how important ritual and custom can be in times like these.

Fortunately for anyone interested in the topic, Don Sutton, an author and academic who specializes in such things, has posted a comprehensive article at the China Beat addressing the issue of quake mourning. It gets into several aspects of the issue, including the Internet, and is well worth a read:

Yet another longstanding obligation is to express one’s bereavement with sincerity, in the case of women, vocally. Bereaved women have been photographed wailing at quake sites displaying photographs of their loved ones. Some have called angrily for investigation into shoddy building practices at some of the schools where a total of 9,000 children and teachers died. Such demonstrations are usually proscribed, but given the moral resonance of mourning, the police have been hard put to stop them. Whether the calls for legal remedy will outweigh the need to protect local party officials, who are part of the leadership’s base, is yet to be known. But the obligation to condole sincerely is equally Chinese. While official ceremonies favor speeches and dirges, Premier Wen and other officials, realizing this obligation, have displayed arduous commitment and genuine emotion. A Chinese journalist’s account of “Grandpa Wen” refusing to treat his abrasions when he slipped in the rubble is strongly reminiscent of imperial officials who fasted and braved the elements during drought and other emergencies in order to share their people’s suffering. 

By the way, the China Beat has expanded from modest beginnings to become a really excellent resource and one of the most essential China blogs, with a dynamite list of contributors.

Related to the issue of quake mourning, one of the most amazing images to come from the quake was not of broken bodies or collapsed schools, but of the Mianzhu Communist Party secretary on his knees in front of grieving parents holding photographs of their dead children:

This incident merited prominent mention in both the New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Roland Soong, of EastSouthWestNorth, has translated and posted an interview with the Party Secretary, Jiang Guohua, from Modern Express Daily. It includes this interesting Q&A on the incident above:

Q: Why did you kneel down in front of the parents?
A: I made a mistake in my initial judgment.  In the past, people seek out the leaders when they have a problem.  Once the leader shows up, the matter calms down in deference to the party secretary or mayor.  But what happened that day deviated from custom.  The parents were bounded together by the bitterness and sorrow of losing their children.  Overnight they refused to recognize me.  Wufu is not the heaviest hit town in the earthquake.  But the classroom building of the Fuxin Number Two Primary School collapsed with 129 schoolchildren dead.  The parents thought that the classroom building had collapsed as the result of a natural disaster as well as human faults.  I promised to make a thorough investigation of the building, but I needed time.  The parents did not think so.  I was worried.  I knelt down to express a certain degree of sincerity, not to put on a show.  I don't remember how many times I knelt down.  Afterwards, someone said that I knelt four times.  I have never thought about kneeling down in the past over any issue.  But in the face of this catastrophe, I can put aside all personal concerns and misgivings.

There you have it. It was an error of judgment, and, one must assume, should not be read as an expression of contrition on behalf of the party.

In fact, the "Earthquake Spring", in which both foreign and Chinese reporting was relatively unfettered and there was a great deal of tolerance for open discussion of the quake, rather seems to have come to an end as me move into the sweaty, Olympic summer. A pity.