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-- Earthquake pays off politically for Chinese government
Earthquake pays off politically for Chinese government
I don't think we'll be seeing anymore protesters anymore will we?
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| China's Earthquake Candor Contrasts With Tibet Media Clampdown By Dune Lawrence More Photos/Details May 14 (Bloomberg) -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao boarded a plane within two hours to head earthquake relief in Sichuan, sobbing and calling out ``this is Grandpa Wen'' to children buried in the rubble of a primary school he toured the next day. That image, footage of victims trapped under buildings and news that 86 giant pandas were safe, have been captured in minute-by-minute updates by government-owned media. China Daily, the biggest English-Language newspaper, confronted a vice minister over school collapses, and got a straight answer. Such candor and access contrasts with the media lockdown during Tibetan riots two months ago, when the leadership stayed at home and sealed off the region. Wen's rapid response also signals a determination to avoid missteps that followed January's deadly snow storms and the 2003 SARS outbreak and shore up support for the ruling Communist Party. ``There's very little effort to control information,'' said Huang Jing, a visiting senior fellow at the National University of Singapore East Asian Institute. ``Compared with the Tibet crisis, it looks almost like two governments.'' After the 7.9-magnitude quake hit Sichuan Province at 2:28 p.m. local time on May 12, Wen scrambled to head relief efforts and the state-run Xinhua News Agency filed his comments from the plane. Sina.com, China's biggest Web portal, established a special Web site for coverage; between 9:00 and 9:05 a.m. today in Beijing, 18 separate stories popped up. Tibet Coverage The quake, which has killed more than 12,000 people, shifts international attention away Tibet, which has roiled China's relations with Western countries for the last two months. When riots broke out in the provincial capital of Lhasa in March and protests spread to surrounding regions, the government clamped down on both foreign and domestic news reports. A handful of selected overseas journalists were shepherded around the areas two weeks later and the death toll is still disputed. ``Certainly this will dilute various criticisms against China in relation to the Tibet riots,'' said Joseph Cheng, a politics professor at City University of Hong Kong. ``This is also a very important opportunity to demonstrate national solidarity.'' Four Xinhua reporters arrived with soldiers at one of the worst hit areas today, while international media have been allowed free access to the quake region. Government officials held a press briefing in Beijing yesterday as the death toll climbed toward 12,000, many of them children. ``Schools weren't the only buildings that collapsed, but of course we care most about the schools,'' Luo Pingfei, Vice Minister of Civil Affairs told journalists, after a China Daily reporter asked why so many education institutions were destroyed while few government offices had collapsed. Government Test The quake is testing the government's emergency response four months after the worst snow storms in 50 years killed 129, leveled 485,000 houses and caused 151.7 billion yuan ($21.7 billion) in economic losses. The central government at first reacted slowly, and Wen didn't visit the blizzard areas until more than two weeks after the storms began. China in 2003 drew international criticism for delays in reporting cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. The disease infected more than 8,000 people between 2002 and 2003, killing almost 800 worldwide. China's response is also far more effective than in Myanmar, where the military junta is still hampering international aid efforts almost two weeks after a cyclone killed as many as 100,000 people, according to United Nations estimates. Withholding Food The U.S., Britain and the UN today pressed Myanmar to allow relief workers into the country amid reports that the regime was seizing food and withholding it from the country's 1.5 million cyclone victims. The two leaderships have different requirements for regime survival, according to Steve Tsang, a fellow in modern Chinese studies at St. Antony's College, the University of Oxford, in the U.K. China is showcasing the government's capabilities while Myanmar would be acknowledging its failings by opening up to the outside world, he said. Wen and President Hu Jintao have based the party's legitimacy on a promise of ``harmonious society,'' including better governance and a steadily improving standard of living. The country's deadliest disaster since the Tangshan quake in 1976 tests their ability to deliver on those promises. Events in Sichuan and Tibet touch the same political nerve of how to maintain one-party communist rule, according to Tsang. The earthquake, if not dealt with quickly and effectively, threatens the government's legitimacy, while the unrest in Tibet threatened its control. ``They need to be seen to deliver relief when there is a natural disaster,'' Tsang said. ``It's all about regime survival.'' |
the earthquake was an inside job!
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| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN the earthquake was an inside job! |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN the earthquake was an inside job! |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN the earthquake was an inside job! |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN the earthquake was an inside job! |
| quote: |
| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN the earthquake was an inside job! |
Is amazingly handy for them though. 70,000 people dead, or 10x 911.
If the real gravity of that hit anyone I doubt they would be able to live normally again.
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| Sharon Stone blames China's earthquake on karma Hollywood actress Sharon Stone has suggested that the Chinese earthquake which claimed tens of thousands of lives may be "karma". The Basic Instinct star believes the disaster may be payback for China's policy towards the Tibetans. She made her comments during a red carpet interview in Cannes last week, a video of which has just surfaced on YouTube. Asked if she had heard about the situation in China, Stone replied: "Of course. You know, it was very interesting because at first I am not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans, because I don't think anyone should be unkind to anyone else, and so I have been very concerned about how to think and what to do about that because I don't like that. "Then I have been concerned about, oh, how shall we deal with the Olympics? Because they are not being nice to the Dalai Lama, who is a good friend of mine. "And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened and I thought, 'Is that karma, when you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?'" Stone, 50, said her attitude softened after she received a letter from a Tibetan charity which planned to launch a relief programme for victims of the earthquake. "They wanted to go and be helpful, and that made me cry," she said. "It was a big lesson to me that sometimes you have to learn to put your head down and be of service even to people who aren't nice to you." Outraged Chinese citizens have already begun posting their responses on YouTube and calling for Stone to apologise. One young man says: "Why can't we put the debate about the Chinese government away and just think that people died? When I watched her video I was very upset about her opinion. She is a good lady, she is beautiful and she works for the world, for everybody who needs help. But this time I can't accept her opinion. Sharon Stone should say sorry to the people who died in the earthquake. I just want to get everybody's attention and let her know her opinion is wrong." This is not the first time that Stone has offered her opinion on world affairs. Earlier this year, the star of Catwoman spoke out about the war in Iraq. "I feel at great pain when the spotlight is on the death of 4,000 American soldiers, while 600,000 Iraqi deaths are ignored," she told an Arab newspaper. "War is not a movie, it is a tragedy of dead bodies, victims, the disabled, orphans, widows and the displaced." In 2006, she embarked on a peace mission to Israel. At a press conference with Shimon Peres, the former Israeli Prime Minister, she announced: "I would kiss just about anybody for peace in the Middle East," before discussing her nude scenes in Basic Instinct 2. |
I wouldn't be surprised if a few convenient disidents were "caught up" in the earth quake, in much the same way that I'd be a large number were "caught" in the cyclone in Burma.
I found the release of expected fatalities to be really odd. It seemed to hover around 5,000 for a while, then all of a sudden it jumped to 30-40,000, now 70,000. That's some bad estimating off the start.
PS. Remeber when Sharon Stone was hot.
Handy for what, sympathy? Like the holocaust? I don't think it did anything for China as far as sympathy goes. It's like the 3M dead in Congo, America doesn't care as it doesn't have anything to gain from it.
Darfur on the other hand... sitting on top of oil.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKEPkjXbUgs
You Americans have no sarcasm detector.
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| Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN the earthquake was an inside job! |
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I felt the need to quote this as nobody picked up on it
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| Originally posted by Dervish You Americans have no sarcasm detector. |
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