Down To Earth
China is many things to many pundits.
An ancient civilization. A huge population. A powerhouse. A communist state. A rising superpower. A faltering basketcase. A construction boom. An insatiable market. A military threat. A vision of the future. A major polluter. An opportunity. A development model. A theory. An idea. Sometimes, deep in the scrum of geopolitical debate, economic analysis and media generalizations, it is all too easy to forget that China is also, to so many, quite simply a home.
And in Sichuan, millions of people have seen their homes and livelihoods collapse into rubble, many loved ones lost beneath it. At the outset, Western media channels tried to funnel the story through the usual China coverage paradigms: will this cause social instability? Will people’s anger turn towards their (un)elected officials? How was the cherished economy affected? Was a certain infamous dam to blame? But as the scale of the disaster emerged, it became apparent that no repressive government or global economic forces could really be held responsible, as shoddy as building standards might have been (perhaps the worst kept secret in modern China). The people of Sichuan had been betrayed by the very ground beneath their feet.
With this realization all the posturing, back-and-forth propaganda and righteousness that have been such staples of discourse on China seemingly dissolved. Bickering over Olympic torch movements went from being ‘a defining moment of our time’ to nonsense of the most intense triviality, a category in which it should have landed to begin with. The rigid, media-shy mandarins in Beijing let the mask fall enough to reveal a genuine concern for the devastation wreaked on its people. Chinese people mobilized in a truly endearing way. Those who had not too long ago supported a punitive Olympics boycott were now thinking of ways to donate or help. Tragedies have a way of shocking people out of their usual preconceptions, of reminding many of us that underneath all the squabbling and petty games lies a common humanity.
This is a humanity which, despite all our hubris and infrastructure and habitat management, still exists at the mercy of an environment we don’t really understand. The indifferent shifting of tectonic plates, a mundane blip in the geological grand scheme of things, is enough to wipe out swathes of our built environment and ruin many thousands, if not millions, of hard-earned lives. This is as humbling as it is horrifying, and perhaps unites us all in the fear that sometimes these things happen for no particular reason to people who don’t deserve them.
It is tempting to try and blame someone, to pretend that human agency one way or another has control over planetary destiny. But the truth is that the human condition is still hostage to the weather and the mountains, no matter how much our industrialized selves try to pretend otherwise. But it is heartening to see, as in the response to the Sichuan earthquake, that the human condition also contains compassion deeper than the imaginary lines we draw between ourselves on maps. It is unfortunate that it invariably takes the brute force of nature to highlight this aspect of ourselves.
May 27th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
I like your comment about the human condition containing compassion deeper than the imaginary lines we draw between ourselves on maps. My girlfrinds aunt and uncle live in Mianyang and miraculously they survived the earthquake by sitting in a toilet in a PLA army barracks (dont ask me what they were doing there in the first place). They got rescued eventually. For many months they have not talked to my girlfriend, because she has a foreign boyfriend. Now, they have started talking to her again. My girlfriends father has also started talking to her again. I think that some things are more important than pride and belief in this life, and it is a shame that it takes an earthquake to make us realise this.