China's Troubles: How to Help
BEIJING: It's only five months into the year and it has been a pretty difficult one already for the Chinese. Massive snowstorms caused havoc earlier this year, then there was the turmoil in Tibet and the aftermath following the Olympic torch relay around the world, lately this EV71 virus that has killed over 30 and sickened thousands -- and now this major earthquake. The updated news on the massive 7.8 earthquake yesterday in Sichuan near the city of Chengdu is that close to 10,000 have died in an area populated by ethnic Han Chinese, Chinese Tibetans and Hui Muslim Chinese. The number of deaths will likely surge throughout the day and heavy rains are starting to make rescue efforts difficult. Premier Wen Jiabao's words just a little while ago don't sound very promising.
Here in Beijing at about 2:30pm yesterday I suddenly felt sick, like a bad case of food poisoning, and wondered if it was something I'd eaten for lunch. My wife messaged me that she thought it was an earthquake, and growing up in Taiwan she's had a lot of experience with them. That's when I noticed all my coworkers looking around at each other trying to figure out what was going on. People started saying an earthquake had hit so we filed out of the building and stood outside for several minutes before coming back in. When I found out the quake was in Sichuan I knew it must have been pretty bad. Beijing is pretty far away for us to have felt that much of it.
Through the afternoon I followed the data on the USGS website. Some interesting maps over here and according to their tally, there have been 25 aftershocks after the main earthquake, the latest being only a couple of hours ago and registering 4.8. That's not big, but I worry that even these small ones could bring down buildings already damaged by the main quake. With heavy rains starting to hit the area, the threat of landslides will certainly be a problem.
Some coincidences? I'm not superstitious but some of my Chinese friends are. One sent me this photo of frogs massing on Sunday in Jiangsu province, a day before the quake. I later found out that there is an old Chinese earthquake device called the "dragon jar" which has frogs on the sides that catch a ball in their mouths which corresponds to the direction the earthquake came from. As for numbers, which mean a lot in China ... usually the number 8 is a lucky number, but not yesterday. According to the Chinese calendar it was the 8th day of the 4th month of the year and 88 days before the Olympics. Add in that it was Buddha's birthday and you have a perfect storm of superstition going on.
Thankfully the Three Gorges Dam is safe. The rescue effort is ongoing and will likely take a while. Offers for assistance from the rest of the world are coming in.
So the reason I meant to write this in the first place was to point you to a few places where you can donate and also follow what's going on in Sichuan. If you want to help, there's information on how to do so at China Crossroads and Shanghaiist.
The latter also has a good timeline of coverage from yesterday starting after the quake until early in the morning. Also check in at Global Voices, which has translations of bits of news from the area.
Early on, much of the news was coming across not through major media but via YouTube and Twitter. See coverage of this here, here and here.
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Well, I advise the Chinese to develop their government. Have you noticed they reactively call out the troops for everything, even to repair dams? I would like to see them put out a fire.
A lot of these comments are making me sick! I'm in China right now too, and may I remind you ideologues that it is populated by human beings that are less a reflection of their government than we Americans are of ours. Calling this China's problem and calling China a wealthy country is an ignorant typical comment coming from people who never leave the comfort of their own country. Many of the people here are desperately poor, and even the middle class is a far cry from ours.
As human beings we should always reach out to help others in need no matter where they are from.
Remember that the victims of Katrina also live in a "rich" country that is loathed by much of the world for its government, which was elected by its citizens.
China has jobs and the newest most modern factories. U.S. jobs and factories are gone. (Thanks to our CONgress) China has new roads, new bridges and a growing society. U.S infrastructure, on the other hand, is crumbling. Chinese are eating more meat and their standard of living is going up. People in U.S are starving, have no health care and are living in tents . China is improving and growing, and leaving the U.S. behind. So I'm Just sayin'....
There is no need to send any help to the Chinese, until they stop beating and torturing monks in Tibet.
The Burmese case is different. The generals there have also been imprisoning and torturing monks, but the general population has not been supporting that (unlike the Chinese public, which seems wholeheartedly behind the suppression of Tibet and its monks). The Burmese people deserve and badly need our help.
I gotta agree with others. China isn't a poor country by any means, They are downright wealthy. THAT they have chosen to spend most of their wealth on weapons is nothing to be looked away from but by the same token they should be all set up to handle these emergencies.
We have enough problems of our own and China isn't the poor underdeveloped country it once was and you can thank China for helping to push the price of gas to 4 bucks a gallon too.
Let them take care of their own unless they need specialty teams for search and rescue, but they don't need our money AT ALL. And they don't need our food and blankets.
How can we blame this on Bush and Cheyne?
Not very difficult.
BUSH, CHENEY, and Clinton before have all acquiested in China's seizure of manufacturing capacity thus abetting that country's dominance in global markets...
And that caused the quake! I Knew it!!!!
I perhaps understand Michael’s enthusiasm in calling for readers of the Huffington Post to donate help to those stricken by the earthquake. When you are living in China, it is all too easy to get caught up in the zeitgeist, and part of that is a dependency culture (perhaps unwittingly fostered by our very own development agencies). Burma, however, is free of that record of development, and, as noted in other posts here, perhaps more deserving of the aid. Aid has a political function too, however, and resources coming from, say, India or the U.S. would perhaps constructively raise a few eyebrows in the current Chinese groundswell of xenophobia over the Olympics. Aid to Burma need not come with force; that may be a false dichotomy. Some of the ways of accommodating the government may be distasteful, but the situation suggests accommodation could be reached (and having the Burmese Military Government befriended by non-Chinese foreigners upsets China’s notions of suzerainty, in itself a good thing).
In Sri Lanka it is commonly believed that much of the aid offered following the Tsunami went amiss, and this was with the encouragement of all of the oversight on offer. Whatever corruption the Burmese government has in mind, it will probably end up being on par with those nations whose leadership had a chance to see the aid workers coming. Christian mercy, as well as common sense, dictates that the aid be given without strings; if nothing else, as witness.
These incidents are none of our business and we ought to let Myanmar and China handle the fallout themselves. China has more than enough money and resources to take care of its own people. Why should we help prop up an economic enemy? Let them deal with their own mess. How many Chinese rescuers were here after Katrina.
Actually China did offer assistance to America after Katrina. We no longer live in a secular society. Todays world is a global society where the problems of everyone on the planet affect us all. If we go to war over intangible issues but refuse to assist the underpriveledged when the necessity arises then we are percieved as nothing more than global bullies by the rest of the world who we must co-exist with. Demographics change as do governments. What we do today will directly affect our kids and their future as well as the kids and futures of these places. We are always at our best as Americans when we reach out to help others in time of need.
a. Secular means non-religious in nature.
b. We need to stop acting as if we can solve the world's problems. Let the UN deal with
this issue. Our constant intervention makes us appear to be a bully (see Somalia).
c. China is the greatest threat to our way of life. Their authoritarian government seeks to undermine our economic stability at every turn. We need to see them as the threat they are and to deal with them as we dealt with the Soviets.
There is no justification under the UN charter for intervening to topple the Burmese military regime. That task would rightly be opposed by other powers in the region and must one day be performed by the Burmese themselves. But aid drops over the Irrawaddy delta are nothing to do with that case. The outside world has waited a week, and protested to no effect.
Either way some enforced intervention must surely be planned. The British aid minister, Douglas Alexander, said last week it would be "incendiary". He did not explain why a "dump-and-run" of emergency supplies in the delta would be incendiary - compared, for instance, to his antics in Afghanistan.
The option of sending in relief supplies by air may well face logistical objections. Ships and heavy-lift equipment must be in position, with air cover to ensure the safety of the operation from possible retaliation by the Burmese. There must be some sense of order on the ground to ensure that drops are other than random, though at some point a starving and dying population would presumably welcome any help rather than none.
It may be the case that diplomatic pressure on the regime might soon force it to reverse its negligence - though at present this is unlikely. Indeed the west's policy of merely hurling abuse at it looks counter-productive. A regime that turns away the Red Cross, will not take calls from the UN or even listen to its friendly super-power China seems immune to pressure.
Yet where today are the brave rattlers of sabres against the Iraqis, the Afghans and the Iranians? The American ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad, says he is "outraged by the slowness of the response" of the Burmese authorities. His outrage will bring scant comfort to those dying in the delta.
On Friday the British and French foreign ministers, David Miliband and Bernard Kouchner, announced that "we look to the regime" to lift restrictions on aid distribution. Nobody "looked to" Milosevic to stop slaughtering Kosovans or the rebels to stop the killing in Sierra Leone. We intervened.
The Foreign Office remarked last week that there was "no excuse" for delay and then thought of one. The British chairman of the UN security council, John Sawyer, claimed that the 2006 resolution referred only to "acts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity rather than government responses to natural disasters.
He cannot hold to the thesis that Burma is not ripe for "liberal intervention" because the loss of life is the result of a natural disaster rather than political or military oppression. What is this fine distinction between a massacre and what the military are now inflicting on the Burmese people? A corpse is a corpse.
This catastrophe is not past but ongoing. A western world adept at intervening elsewhere on a humanitarian pretext is suddenly inert. Why? I suspect the reason is that it has too much intervention on its plate already. The Burmese must die because we are too busy pretending to save Afghans and Iraqis. To such cynicism has liberal intervention sunk. "
In Burma, the airlifting of supplies from offshore vessels to stricken areas would indeed be an offence against the sovereignty of Burma. But the intervention would not constitute an attack on a government or occupy its territory. Indeed it would be occasioned strictly because of the lack of government in a particular territory. It would be to save the lives of people abandoned to their deaths by their rulers.
These interventions were not ideological, whether "liberal" or "neo-con". They were to save lives from being lost by the thousand. They were covered by international law (possibly not Kosovo) because the UN charter's respect for territorial integrity also stipulates that it "shall not prejudice the application of enforcement measures" to avert a humanitarian crisis.
This was reinforced when the Security Council in 2005 and 2006 imposed a responsibility on the international community to protect people whose governments failed to do so. It castigated in particular the "intentional denial of humanitarian assistance". Such an extension of the concept of military intervention was advocated by Tony Blair in his Chicago speech of 1998, when it was dismissed by the Americans (pre-9/11) as irresponsible. Today it is widely regarded as legitimate, even by those opposed to much of the belligerent militancy that ensued under Blair and George Bush.
It is hard to think of a more glaring application of the humanitarian principle than today's Burma. In none of the above interventions was anything like the same number of lives at risk as the 2m now threatened in the Irrawaddy delta. This is eight times the 230,000 reckoned to have died in the 2004 tsunami.
"...it involved the 900 children trapped in a school, ... whose fates were unknown. As a father of four children"
I totally agree with you that it made my heart stumble. But at the same time I just can't stop to feel even more resentment against both the Myanmar (Burmese) Junta as well as towards the Chinese Communist party who rejected the call from the world to help put pressure on said Burmese Junta.
or if I can quote a snippet from HuffPost contributor Hanna Ingber Win's article:
"Cyclone Nargis wiped out entire villages along the Irrawaddy delta and left Rangoon in shambles, but the ruling junta has prevented relief efforts from barely making a dent in the recovery process."
We are talking about 40 something children in the valley where the cyclone hit who are still without water and shelter. HOW come the UN, the USA and them Brits that have been so macho for interventions now are acting like little chickens scared of some sort of ghostly Fox? Because the fox is none other then the nowadays so economically mighty China.
China will moblize their arm forces to help her people just like the national guards here. Like India they have reserves and emergency funds to face disasters such as this which is not new to them. I believe they are capable of handling the situation themselves otherwise they will request for international assistance. I believe they will appreciate the help offered, still my condolence to all people affected by the recent onslaught of natural fury in the US, China and Burma.
Suffering surpass all religions, race and political boubdaries.
May they all have a speedy recovery.
If you are looking for a way to donate to Burma, this organization, the Buddhist Relief Mission, has a novel approach: Send it with the pilgrims who come to Bodhgaya. On their return, they take the money directly to those in need, without bothering the government and without being bothered by the government. You can learn more about them at: http://www
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