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God the Father, God the Son and God the Olympic Spirit

Next month in Beijing, hundreds of people on drugs will run around in circles and throw things. I’ve heard various people here, enthused with the passion of the sacred flame, saying that this is the most important thing that has ever happened in China - displaying either a disturbing lack of knowledge of Chinese history or a very strange interpretation of it.

On Tuesday, to mark the one-month countdown to the great event, the China Daily gave us “30 reasons to watch the Beijing Games.” These include having the highest number of foreign coaches, the most mascots, the creation of a “170-page Chinese Menu in English Version” and the fact that 4,104 unfortunate babies have been named Aoyun (Olympics).

The four billion people who are expected to watch the games obviously don’t need persuading. But as one of the two and a half billion people who are not expected to watch the games, I find the China Daily’s list somewhat unconvincing.

However, remembering that Bibles are not banned in Beijing, here’s a 31st reason:

Athletes, officials, spectators and tourists can pick up the Bible or just the New Testament for free during the Olympic Games next month.

Tens of thousands of copies of the Bible, the New Testament and booklets with just the four Gospels (according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) have been printed for the purpose, say officials of China’s Christian society.


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According to Reverend Xu Xiaohong, “this is the first time an Olympics logo will be used on a religious booklet.” As with the China Daily’s list, I’m not entirely convinced by Reverend Xu’s assessment that this is “especially significant.” However, it does cast a new light on the Beijing Running Man symbol. In this context, he could perhaps be Jesus nailed to a red door instead of a cross. Or, maybe, Jesus deciding he’s changed his mind and making a run for it.

Reverend Xu (and a few hundred million other people) probably wouldn’t agree with me on that. I should be less blasphemous, more respectful and remember that “the Olympic spirit and the spirit of living a ‘purpose-driven life’ that Christians believe in come together in the combination.”

My problem is that despite eight years of publicity, I still don’t know what the Olympic spirit really is. I became even more confused about this after the Olympic torch relay in Tibet when I read the following:

The Olympic motto of Citius, Altius, Fortius - faster, higher, stronger - may have been intended as an inspiration for athletes but for this year’s games hosts, China, it has also become a rallying call to suppress dissent in Tibet.

At an Olympic torch relay ceremony in Lhasa last week, the Tibetan capital’s most senior Communist party official cited the 84-year-old motto to exhort listeners to crack down on “splittist” supporters of the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader.

“Encouraged by the Olympic spirit of ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’, Lhasa people of all nationalities will . . . resolutely smash the Dalai clique’s scheme to destabilise Tibet, sabotage the Olympics and split the motherland,” said the Lhasa party secretary Qin Yizhi.

As with many statements from party and government officials in Tibet, my first thought was: surely he didn’t really say that! It must be a mistranslation. But, as always, it wasn’t. He really did say that. The Olympic spirit according to Cartman.

Then again, this isn’t as bad as many parts of the Bible that aren’t in the Olympic Gospels booklet - the bits that exhort us to slaughter every man, woman, child and beast in conquered territories, or require us to execute anyone who works on Saturdays.

Start a war, win a war, prevent a war

This blog is a disgrace. I haven’t posted a single thing since May. I was tired. Sorry! There may or may not be some sporadic posting this month, but I’m now on holiday so I might not do anything much at all. Normal (i.e. equally irregular) posting should resume in August.

But for today, a look back at one single statement made by Governor George W. Bush in October 2000.

Eight years ago I bet one mao that Gore would beat Bush. I lost my one mao. The same evening I argued, with little conviction, against a claim that it would make no difference who won the election. I may or may not have been wrong about that too.

Anyway, seven years into the war (without end?) in Afghanistan and five years into the war (without end?) in Iraq and x number of months before the possible war (without end?) with Iran - the one that could send oil prices up to $400 a barrel - let’s remember what Governor Bush said about war in his first debate against Vice President Gore:

MODERATOR: New question. How would you go about as president deciding when it was in the national interest to use U.S. force, generally?

BUSH: Well, if it’s in our vital national interest, and that means whether our territory is threatened or people could be harmed, whether or not the alliances are — our defense alliances are threatened, whether or not our friends in the Middle East are threatened. That would be a time to seriously consider the use of force. Secondly, whether or not the mission was clear. Whether or not it was a clear understanding as to what the mission would be. Thirdly, whether or not we were prepared and trained to win. Whether or not our forces were of high morale and high standing and well-equipped. And finally, whether or not there was an exit strategy. I would take the use of force very seriously. I would be guarded in my approach. I don’t think we can be all things to all people in the world. I think we’ve got to be very careful when we commit our troops. The vice president and I have a disagreement about the use of troops. He believes in nation building. I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders. I believe the role of the military is to fight and win war and therefore prevent war from happening in the first place. So I would take my responsibility seriously. And it starts with making sure we rebuild our military power. Morale in today’s military is too low. We’re having trouble meeting recruiting goals. We met the goals this year, but in the previous years we have not met recruiting goals. Some of our troops are not well-equipped. I believe we’re overextended in too many places. And therefore I want to rebuild the military power. It starts with a billion dollar pay raise for the men and women who wear the uniform. A billion dollars more than the president recently signed into law. It’s to make sure our troops are well-housed and well-equipped. Bonus plans to keep some of our high-skilled folks in the services and a commander in chief that sets the mission to fight and win war and prevent war from happening in the first place.

Well, it all worked out very well didn’t it. Looking forward to the epilogue?

Could foreign rescue teams have saved more lives?

This has been a truly horrible two weeks. Like a lot of people, I’m still reeling from the shock of what happened, and is still happening, in Sichuan. This is the third time this year that I’ve found myself looking out the window in Beijing at complete normality, while not far away people’s lives have been turned upside down.

Compared with the overwhelming enormity of the events since May 12, the issue of whether foreign rescue teams seemed irrelevant to me, so I dismissed it as a waste of time. But it has been brought up to some extent in the media and it did generate a bit of argument in China. Some of that argument I can respect - the practical issue of whether foreign rescue teams would really save more lives. Some of it I can’t respect - paranoid claims by some that the foreigners might be spies.

One of the reasons I dismissed the issue was this article by Nick Cater, written after the Bam earthquake in 2003:

The British search and rescue teams arriving back from Iran have successfully proved that flying in people and dogs to scour the rubble and mud of foreign disaster zones for survivors with hi-tech gear or their bare hands is in almost all cases a waste of time, effort and money.

Information from the main charities involved suggests that the 68 search and rescue experts from five different UK groups and their four trained dogs failed to find a single person alive in Bam. The story was much the same in other recent disasters, such as the earthquakes in Algeria, Turkey and India, after which few people have been found alive by British teams.

This is hardly surprising. While the experts talk of the “golden hours” - usually just the first 24 - in which those trapped can expect to be found alive, it is local people who recover the vast majority of survivors, often based on knowing exactly where their families and friends were when the disaster struck.

If local people need help, it is from staff and trained volunteers who speak their language, know the area, require little or no external support and are integrated into the disaster preparedness and response systems of national and local government, specialised agencies and their country’s Red Cross or Red Crescent society.

International search and rescue teams today descend upon every sudden catastrophe from all over the world. Bam had around 34 groups from 28 countries. They even arrive without invitation or local partners, and their needs in terms of food, water, shelter, translators, transport and information put further strain on resources that are already scarce.

No doubt the British teams from Rapid UK, the International Rescue Corps, Canis, Bird and the fire services of Kent, Hampshire and Essex were better prepared than most and so totally self-sufficient that they could start work immediately and not be a burden on those they came to help.

But it was pointless for the Department for International Development under Hilary Benn to fly them to Iran when they could not arrive until well past those vital 24 hours, and more so when knowledge of the local construction techniques made it clear that few could have survived trapped. Earthquake-experienced Iran had it all under control.

Of course, Iran is happy to receive aid in terms of equipment, supplies and money, but early in the crisis its health minister, Ahmed Pezeshkian, was quoted - and presumably ignored - as saying that foreign volunteers were not really needed since large numbers of Iranians were already coming from all over the country.

It appears that in everything but ill-enforced building standards, the Iranians have done a superb job, mobilising many thousands of helpers, recovering tens of thousands of bodies and, within the limits of any crisis, efficiently organising evacuation of the injured and burial of the dead. Could any comparable British town have done as well?

The international volunteers are interviewed on TV after every natural disaster. Are these dogged - and doggy - heroes of search and rescue perhaps taking over from nurses in white as that popular, patronising media cliché, the angel of mercy? Or is it just that improved communications and transport have put more disasters within reach of the over-enthusiastic?

Either way, the best response to disaster is not to head for the airport, but to support local preparedness efforts with hard cash, and to consider how to help the recovery operation that will still be under way long after all those rescue dogs are released from quarantine.

AP put out one of the few articles in English devoted solely to China’s initial rejection of foreign rescue teams:

A team of British rescue specialists were rebuffed in their attempt to go to China to help hunt for earthquake survivors, a spokeswoman for the group said Sunday.

International Rescue Corps spokeswoman Julie Ryan said 10 volunteers flew to Hong Kong in the hope of joining the rescue effort. But the Chinese government denied them visas, saying it did not have the resources to manage their work.

[…]

“We have 27 years of earthquake rescue under our belt,” Ryan said. “We felt we could offer something quite unique to the Chinese government.” ….

Nick Cater’s article in 2003 convinced me enough that I didn’t really think very much more about the issue. But this earthquake in Sichuan was the first time such a catastrophe has happened in the country where I live. So it’s the first earthquake that has made me want to find out if things are true or not true.

How many people could the International Rescue Corps have saved if it had been allowed into China? The IRC’s website lists 13 earthquakes it has responded to. Unlike most search and rescue teams, it also provides mission reports for six of them. Here’s the number of people actually saved:

    (1995) Japan: 0
    (1999) Turkey: 1
    (2001) India: 2
    (2003) Algeria: 0
    (2003) Iran: 0
    (2005) Pakistan: 3

It’s not so easy to find the records of other international SAR teams because most don’t make their success rate so public. Since the IRC’s best result was in Pakistan, I tried to find out how many people other foreign teams saved there. The British government says the total number was 24, in a footnote here:

UK Search and Rescue teams - 84 experts with 4 dogs – who rescued 13 of the total 24 survivors pulled from the rubble;

A dozen or so countries sent search and rescue teams to Pakistan, but virtually none of them seem to have actually found anyone. The Turkish teams saved nine. The Chinese saved three. That means the British government was wrong by at least one person. At least 25 people were saved by foreign rescue teams. I tried to find more, but I gave up.

How does that compare with the number of people saved by locals? I can’t put a figure to that. But according to the South China Morning Post (subscription) by last Wednesday, 6,375 people had been saved in China. By the time foreign teams arrived in Sichuan, there was virtually no chance of finding more than a handful of survivors. The Russians found one. If foreign teams had been allowed in sooner, they would have found more, but the number would still have been tiny.

In angry debates I’ve read in Chinese forums, people have countered this argument by saying “If you could ask the people who are buried under the rubble, what do you think they’d want?” I can’t answer that, and suddenly this whole numbers thing seems utterly heartless. A life is a life. Twenty lives are twenty lives. The three children that the International Rescue Corps saved in Pakistan are alive, not dead.

But… The International Rescue Corps says it spent 30,000 pounds sterling getting to Hong Kong. How many lives could have been saved if that money had been spent differently? I don’t know. One single building in Sichuan built to higher standards would have saved more lives than several hundred foreign search and rescue workers.

Beijing’s blood bank is full

China is usually short of genuinely free blood donations, creating a market for illegal blood selling. But Tiger Temple reports that on Sunday the blood collecting buses in Beijing had temporarily stopped accepting donations because so much has been given since the earthquake. Commenters report the same in other cities around the country.

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The notice thanks all the donors for showing so much care for the earthquake victims. It says the blood has been sent to the disaster zone and Beijing’s blood bank is full. To avoid wasting precious blood, collection has been temporarily halted but people can still register to be donors.

The day before the earthquake in Beichuan

The last entry on a blog called TGP1963 was posted at 7:49am on May 12. According to Hecaitou the blogger is a science teacher at Beichuan Middle School called Tang Guoping. On May 11, teachers and final year students held a sports fun event. Here are some of the pictures taken that afternoon.

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The next day, 80% of the buildings in Beichuan county were destroyed. A thousand children were buried in the middle school. Tang Guoping (the man in the first photograph) is said to have been among the survivors.

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Donating for the earthquake survivors

Danwei and especially Shanghaiist continue to post updates and links on the Sichuan earthquake. ESWN has a huge collection of photographs giving some idea of the dreadful extent of the damage and suffering there. Most importantly, CN Reviews has a big and expanding list of ways to donate.

Sichuan earthquake

The rumors

I haven’t seen any real newspapers taking the rumors about the earthquake seriously. I’ve only found one paper that has - the notoriously unreliable Epoch Times, here and here.

The first rumor is reasonable - to a degree. Word quickly spread on the Internet on Monday that the Sichuan government website had posted an article about quashing rumors of an impending earthquake. I’ll borrow the Epoch Times’ translation:

At 8 p.m. on May 3, the Earthquake Preparedness and Disaster Reduction of the Seismological Bureau of Ahazhou received calls to inquire whether “Suomo Town, Maerkong County was going to have a major earthquake that village officials advised villagers to stay outdoors” was true.

After receiving the calls, the Bureau immediately asked the Earthquake Preparedness and Disaster Reduction of the Seismological Bureau of Maerkong County to investigate the source of the rumor, to dispel it, to widely explain the actual situation, and to prevent the rumor from spreading further. Upon receiving the notification, the Maerkong Seismological Bureau of immediately contacted Suomo Town People’s government and notified them of the situation.

The County government investigated the source speedily and found that in a televised phone conversation of Maerkong County regarding the transmission of provincial geology disaster prevention and control, the village officials mistakenly took the ‘geological disaster’ as ‘earthquake disaster.’

It went on to say that the rumor had been successfully dispelled and normal life had resumed. Then, the earthquake happened. By Monday evening, the original article had been deleted (but the Google cache is still available), as had copies of it on Sohu, Tianya and other sites leading some to believe in a cover-up. The problem with this as a conspiracy theory is that earthquakes cannot be predicted. They might be in the future, but we haven’t reached that point yet. And that makes the Sichuan government’s explanation far more believable than the alleged conspiracy. The word “coincidence” exists because coincidences happen and this would seem to be one - a desperately tragic one.

It is just possible that I’m wrong about that allegation. But not about the second. On May 7, a “geological worker” in Wuhan is supposed to have posted the following prediction (translation again borrowed from the Epoch Times):

“I predict China will have an earthquake on May 12, 2008!

I am a geological worker. According to information I have in hand, and exchange that I have had with some foreign colleagues, I predict China will have an earthquake on May 12, 2008. The approximate location will be in the middle of Sichuan and Hubei, though all China may feel the tremors.

My prediction cannot be announced publicly because there is no real proof and it may cause panic. I am from Wuhan (City); according to my prediction, the earthquake should not be far from Wuhan. I hope my fellow Wuhan residents will tell their families and friends in time to be prepared.”

The post included a detailed chart in English listing the precise location, depth and time of the quake. It’s been definitively debunked here, along with a screenshot of the “prediction” (h/t ProState in Flames). A Google search on Monday showed that the claimed prediction had actually been posted three hours earlier and not five days before the quake. And the chart actually came from the US Geological Survey website, posted after the quake took place.

Chang Ping argues that people innocently communicating information that may be wrong should not be punished. I agree with him. The law against spreading rumors is a dangerous one, open to serious abuse by the state. But I really wonder how sick someone has to be to start the second rumor quoted above.

The earthquake

I have no words for this. Shanghaist has been posting regular updates. Give money and blood.

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Being Chinese

From the readers’ letters section in Southern Weekly - an exchange between father and daughter. Fashion designer Guo Caijun writes from Shanghai to her father:

People nearly hit me yesterday!

During the May Day holiday, when I was in the waiting room at Qingdao airport, I saw an old lady taking up four seats while many people had nowhere to sit. So I got out my camera and took a snap. A woman immediately jumped in front of me and started cursing, asking me why I wanted to photograph the old lady. Before long, there was a crowd gathered round. A man pushed me with his hand, interrogating me with the same question. Even more people started cursing. I said I had no bad intentions, but no one listened to my explanations. Someone nearby said: “Then why don’t you take pictures of some happy children? What kind of person are you? What do you think you’re doing taking bad pictures like that? You’re not Chinese! How can you be so shameless!” I immediately understood - they thought I was CNN (Chinese negative news) and were afraid the picture of the old lady would end up with CNN.

Then airport staff advised me to delete the photograph and the crowd calmed down a bit. At this point the old lady got up and started cursing me. People crowded round again and started cursing again. “What race are you exactly? Why do you want to ruin China’s image? Why don’t you go and report good things? Are you jealous of our Olympics!? Piss off! Apologize!”

I said sorry. They told me I didn’t say it loud enough and started poking my arm and pulling my bag. I saw the old lady’s furious eyes again and said “I-AM-SORRY” then scrambled through the crowd and survived.

I remember answering many times, “I’m Chinese!”

Her father, the writer Guo Guanying (Kuo Kuan-ying) in Taipei, replies:

You’re right. It’s wrong to sleep on the seats. Since it is wrong, this is not an issue of washing dirty linen in public. The purpose of reporting something bad is so that it can be put right and this has nothing to do with being “ant-China” or “ruining China’s image.” These people were even more wrong, because no one stood out and said “she’s right.” They make it so that, just for being Chinese you need to make a great sacrifice and convince yourself of how much China has suffered in the past, instead of being a happy Chinese. A nation that does not have the courage to defend the truth cannot really defend itself.

I’m sorry that I want you to be Chinese.

(I found it extraordinarily difficult to be absolutely sure of Kuo Kuan-ying’s meaning, so feel free to openly disagree with my translation.)

The president’s bodyguards and the torch

(2008年7月10日,今天突然不少人来看这篇帖子。请注意:这些帅哥不是中南海保镖。他们是在香港保护明星的保镖。)

How seriously did they take security when the Olympic torch relay passed through the streets of Hong Kong on May 2? This seriously:

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A poster at the Tianya Forum (today I can only open that page via a proxy. It’s opening fine now) spotted the remarkable similarity between one of the flame attendants in Hong Kong and one of the bodyguards Hu Jintao took with him to the same city for the 10-year anniversary celebrations last summer. Was the Tianya poster right? (Continued)