December 7, 2024

China’s Social Media Fuel Citizen Quake Response

Never mind that the government had declared that the narrow mountain roads to Lushan were open only to authorized rescue vehicles. Two days after the April 20 earthquake, Mr. Wang was hitchhiking with 19 gear-laden strangers to this rubble-strewn town. While the military cleared roads and repaired electrical lines, the volunteers carried food, water and tents to ruined villages and comforted survivors of the temblor, which killed nearly 200 people and injured more than 13,000.

“The government is in charge of the big picture stuff, but we’re doing the work they can’t do,” Mr. Wang, 24, a former soldier, said recently, standing outside the group’s tent, which was cluttered with sleeping bags, work gloves and smartphones.

The rapid grass-roots response to the disaster reveals just how far China’s nascent civil society movement has come since 2008, when a 7.9-magnitude earthquake in Wenchuan, not far from Lushan, prompted a wave of volunteerism and philanthropy. That quake, which claimed about 90,000 lives, provoked criticism of the government for its ham-handed relief efforts. Outrage mounted in the months that followed over allegations of corruption and reports that the parents of dead children had been detained after protesting what many saw as a cover-up of shoddy school construction. Thousands of students died in school collapses during the quake.

Like the government, which honed its rescue and relief efforts after the Wenchuan earthquake, the volunteers and civil society groups that first appeared in 2008 gained valuable skills for working in disaster zones. Their ability to coordinate — and, in some instances, outsmart a government intent on keeping them away — were enhanced by Sina Weibo, the Twitter-like microblog that did not exist in 2008 but now has more than 500 million users.

“Civil society is much more capable today compared to 2008,” said Ran Yunfei, a prominent democracy activist and blogger, who describes Weibo as a revolutionary tool for social change. “It’s far easier now for volunteers to share information on what kind of help is needed.”

One of those transformed by the Wenchuan earthquake was Li Chengpeng, a sports commentator from Sichuan turned civic activist. When the Lushan earthquake hit, Mr. Li turned to his seven million Weibo followers and quickly organized a team of volunteers. They traveled to the disaster zone on motorcycles, by pedicab and on foot so as not to clog roads, soliciting donations via microblog along the way. What he found was a government-directed relief effort sometimes hampered by bureaucracy and geographic isolation.

Two days after the quake, Mr. Li’s team delivered 498 tents, 1,250 blankets and 100 tarps — all donated — to Wuxing, where government supplies had yet to arrive. The next day, they hiked to four other villages, handing out water, cooking oil and tents.

Although he acknowledges the government’s importance during such disasters, Mr. Li contends that grass-roots activism is just as vital. “You can’t ask an NGO to blow up half a mountain to clear roads and you can’t ask an army platoon to ask a middle-aged woman whether she needs sanitary napkins,” he wrote in a recent post.

The government, however, prefers to rely on state-backed aid groups to deliver supplies and raise money, largely through the Red Cross Society of China. But that organization is still reeling from a corruption scandal in 2011 that severely damaged its reputation and spurred greater support for nongovernmental charities, which are generally thought to be more transparent.

Faced with a groundswell of social activism it feared could turn into government opposition, the Communist Party has sought to turn the Lushan disaster into a rallying cry for political solidarity. “The more difficult the circumstance, the more we should unite under the banner of the party,” the state-run newspaper People’s Daily declared last month, praising the leadership’s response to the earthquake.

Still, the rise in online activism has forced the government to adapt. Recently, People’s Daily announced that three volunteers had been picked to supervise the Red Cross spending in the earthquake zone and to publish their findings on Weibo.

Mia Li contributed research.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/world/asia/quake-response.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Many Steps to Be Taken When ‘Sequester’ Is Law

At that moment, somewhere in the bowels of the Treasury Department, officials will take offline the computers that process payments for school construction and clean energy bonds to reprogram them for reduced rates. Payments will be delayed while they are made manually for the next six weeks.

Hours later, employees at the Environmental Protection Agency will open e-mails notifying them of the bad news: a forced furlough of up to 13 days in the weeks ahead.

And over at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, officials will spend the weekend mailing out letters to governors in all 50 states showing how much their grants will be reduced in the coming days and weeks.

Created by desperate politicians in Washington to force themselves to find a smarter way to cut government, the “sequester” will instead become the law of the land as a result of a failure of Mr. Obama and congressional Republicans to compromise.

But the law does not create an immediate spending crisis or government shutdown like the ones that have loomed over so many of the previous budget fights in Washington. On Friday, the immediate impact on most Americans will be exactly nothing.

Federally funded day care programs will continue to operate. National parks will stay open. Government employees will continue to report to work. Border patrol agents will do their best to prevent illegal crossings. Experts do not expect the stock market to flinch.

It will be, Mr. Obama said Wednesday night, more of a “tumble downward” than a quick descent into budgetary nightmare. “It’s conceivable that in the first week, the first two weeks, the first three weeks, the first month, a lot of people may not notice the full impact of the sequester,” Mr. Obama told a group of business officials.

That might not be entirely true, as Mr. Obama noted, for some pockets of American society: companies who do business directly with the Defense Department, families who live near military installations and parents who rely on federally funded child care will be affected. Federal workers may soon face effective cuts of 10 percent or more in their salaries this year.

But even there, officials conceded this week, the specific impacts are more fuzzy than the aggregate ones. Ask officials about which contracts will be cut or which services will be trimmed back, and there are long pauses and blank looks.

“The impacts of sequester are real,” Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said again and again to reporters on Thursday. “These are about real issues. These are about the concrete effects of policies on people’s lives.”

But who? Which agencies? What contracts?

Under the barrage of questions, Mr. Carney managed to come up with reduced funding for school children in Ohio.

But which children? Those who live in Columbus or Cincinnati? Officials at the White House, the Office of Management and Budget and the Education Department cannot answer with that kind of specificity.

White House officials become indignant with suggestions that Mr. Obama and his top lieutenants might have hyped the devastation wrought by the automatic cuts. At his briefing, Mr. Carney insisted that the administration had been transparent.

“You know, we’ve been very clear,” he said. “What the president said last night is that — you know, and I think what other people have said — is that this will be a rolling impact, an effect that will build and build and build.”

Strategists in the West Wing are betting that the growing impact of the budget cuts — including what they expect will be a hit to the nation’s already slow economic growth rate — will eventually bring Republicans to the table for a deal.

It may take some time. Even the most direct impact on federal workers — the forced furloughs — will not happen in most cases for 30 or 60 days, after government managers have concluded negotiations with the unions that represent workers.

A letter sent to employees at the Justice Department, for example, is filled with legalese. “This memorandum notifies you that the Department of Justice (DOJ) proposes to furlough you no earlier than 30 days from receipt of this notice,” it said.

More letters like that are coming once Mr. Obama signs the letter making sequestration official.

And when, exactly, will that happen?

“It has to be done by 11:59 p.m. tomorrow,” Mr. Carney told reporters, joking that it would be at “11:59 and 59 seconds, because he’s ever hopeful.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/01/us/politics/many-steps-to-be-taken-when-sequester-is-law.html?partner=rss&emc=rss