I just donated US$500 to help Chinese earthquake victims. I plan to give more if you also help out.
I've got a bunch of information sources going simultaneously: I switch between the BBC and CNN International, I watch my Google Reader aggregator to see what all my subscribed news sites are reporting and what the bloggers I know In China are saying. QQ is aggregating citizen video reports from the quake zone. The Global Voices China team have been linking to a lot of blogs inside and outside of China who are aggregating quake information. And I've also been keeping an eye on Twitter. There is an extremely active community of people on Twitter trading links in Chinese and English from blogs, mainstream media, official sources, secondhand information from friends and colleagues, first-hand eyewitness experiences etc. etc. Quite a number of journalists seem to be lurking there and using Twitter to find English-speaking eyewitness sources who live in Sichuan. I agree with Kaiser Kuo, Twitter doesn't replace the excellent journalism being done by Chinese journalists, citizens, and international reporters who are on the scene in Sichuan; but it is providing a valuable platform for rapid group discussion and information-trading on the quake - amplified by uber-blogger-twitterers like Robert Scoble. If the Olympic torch protests divided East and West, this disaster is bringing people together again.
Meanwhile, for serious China-wonks out there here's an interesting factoid: Wang Zhenyao, who currently heads disaster relief for China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, used to be in charge of village elections in the Chinese countryside during the 1990s. (See this Washington Post article from 10 years ago: "A Quiet Bureaucrat, Promoting The Vote One Village at a Time")
(And yes.. I'm back online... still recovering from something called an abdominal myomectomy: a pretty major operation to remove a bunch of tumors that had caused so much blood loss and anemia that by late March I was not very functional. I'm still pretty weak, have dizzy/nauseous spells, and get completely exhausted after walking for an hour and can't lift anything heavy, and my doctor wants me to take a full 6 weeks off from work, but I've started working from home and will probably make forays into the office soon.)
Welcome back!
Posted by: Clarke | May 14, 2008 at 03:46 AM
m not agree with those tibetan who pray for quake victims.is there few any few chinese pray for us while we tibetan having such problems?we don't need a real judge coz there is a real judge n its god haha..
"On (*) March, around one hundred soldiers entered my house, broke down five doors, checked everything and threw it all on the floor and hit everyone present there. It was like a robbery or burglary. There were a lot of firearms and they were very rough with us. I was arrested. They took me with them, with my thumbs tied behind my back, very tightly, resulting in the whole area being numb for the last two or three months [all of his left thumb]. They treated us very harshly. Talking to each other, they said, "This is our chance", and they beat us. At first I thought that they were going to kill me, they hit my head a lot, and skull can be broken easily. It is not like the rest of the body. They took me to prison. For four days they didn't ask me anything, they just threw me in. They gave us half a steamed bun a day. That's very small. Everyone were very thirsty and a lot of people drank their urine [the detainees were not provided with water]. We had no clothes, no blankets, nothing to lie down on, nothing [just cement floors] and it was very cold. For four days nobody spoke to us, they just left us there."
"During the day it's quiet, there's nothing in Lhasa during the day. Between 11:00 at night and 5-6:00 [in the morning] they arrest thousands of people. In that room, after four or five days, they gave us two steamed buns with hot water. We were (*) people in that room. Very bad. We heard a lot of things. Many people had their arms or legs broken or gunshot wounds but they weren't taken to hospital. They were there with us. It was really terrible. I can't believe that we are in the 21st century. For instance, one boy who was shot four times, one from here to there [the bullet entered from the left side of his back and exited from the left side of his chest, near his heart], one from here to here [from inner left elbow to inner left wrist], and one here [a horizontal wound on his upper right arm]. Some people had their ribs broken. One man was punched in his [right] eye, and it was all swollen and black and blue, very bad. People had their teeth broken, these are just examples. A lot of terrible things were done."
"One of the problems is that people have no food, they are very hungry, they are just falling over. One boy fell into the toilet, all in the same room, and he was cut right across his face [under his chin along the jaw]. For instance, a lot of people have psychological problems, and they're the first to collapse. A boy from Tse-Tang , he has a problem of the "heart", a psychological problem, and he was very thin. At first he fell two or three times every day but they didn't care."
"The worst thing – this is Gondzhe [the name of the prison], in Lhasa there are nineteen prisons, the biggest is Drapchi and there is one in Chushul [Ch: Qushu County], they are empty, they showed the visitors that nobody is in prison, it's just for show. Usually there is no prison at the train station, but they rented a very big building and they put people there and in Du-Long [Toelung Dechen County] and at the train station, and in Gondzhe; they put people in these three places. At night they bring a big bus, and many soldiers come, and one hundred to one hundred and fifteen go to Du-Long. They say it's time to go home, "You haven't done anything wrong, you're going home," but they put them in a huge bus to Du-Long or to the train station. They've mixed up the people and transferred people from here to there [from prison to prison]. I didn't see this myself, but friends told me what they saw at Du-Long. Some monks had sacks put over their heads and they were taken away and didn't come back, so maybe they were killed."
"I met an old man, 65 years old, who had two ribs broken and he was all bent over [demonstrates a bent man], and he couldn't stand up straight, he was dying, so the police took him to People's Hospital, where one or two people die every day [due to police violence]. The people who are taken to hospital are usually people who have been shot or beaten, and they usually die there. A brother and sister from (*), the brother was younger, were sleeping in the same room and all of a sudden soldiers came and threw them out of the window from a high floor to the ground, the brother was killed on the spot. Yes, right outside the building. The sister didn't die, but she can't lie down, she has to remain in a sitting position all the time. They took the body away and told her that she is forbidden to tell anyone. I met the sister, we were in prison together. These are just a few examples. There are many problems like this."
"Many questions were asked of people who were not guilty of anything. They are just [guilty of being] Tibetans. There are many counties in Tibet, they call the police from each county, and the people from the counties aren't in Lhasa so they show them that the prisons are empty, but they were taken to all kinds of places, because in Lhasa there are so many people watching so they keep everyone away. Now the monks from (*)monastery, friends and relatives, we don't know where they are."
"You know that they say that there are no soldiers in Lhasa, but they're in civilian dress and they check identity papers."
"I want to talk and that people should know what's happening in Tibet. If they beat me that's okay [he means that his family may be hurt as well], I didn't do anything bad in Lhasa. "
"Many young people in Lhasa, for example, if we were together on the 14th [of March], I was beaten, so I was "sold" and then you're with me [with the prison warden doing the beating]. But I have friends in (*) monastery, I would rather die than give them away. I saw a lot of things that they did in prison. A guy from Dhadezhe [possibly Dartsedo County] had a new jacket, so they beat him and he died, because of the jacket, because it was very new, so they said he stole it, so because of his new coat he was killed."
"There are a lot of high school students from Sauko . A seventeen-year-old who had not participated in the events of the 14th [of March], all his clothes were taken away, they tied his hands and they pushed a wagon at him until he fell, there are all kinds of torture methods. This kid was very young and he didn't even do anything. Afterwards he said that he'd done all kinds of things, that happens to a lot of people, they pressure people to admit things they never did. I didn't see the dead people, but in prison people called out to the police or soldiers, "Someone's dead!", every day people shout that. At Gondzhe there are nine buildings, and each building has eleven rooms and in each room there are twenty or thirty people. And one day, a Chinese man was asked some questions, someone called and asked how many people had been arrested and he said less than ten thousand, and that doesn't include Drepung, Sera, Ramoche, Jokhang. After they let us out they arrested the monks. When I got out [of prison] I heard that many were arrested at Drepung Monastery. I was released on (*) April ."
"I met a monk from Ramoche before I was released. I am very worried about the monks. The soldiers regard the monks as something very different, because a monk from Dezhe [possibly Derge County], his finger was bent over [shows a completely bent finger] and he'd been blinded in one eye, he couldn't see out of it at all, he was beaten more than us but luckily … Really I can't understand why they do terrible things to monks, very, very painful."
"I met a boy from (*) [County] in the same prison, and he had two friends in Lhasa who lived near Ramoche and they were shot, and his two friends, one, there's a hospital near Anichenko , he was taken to a nunnery and he died there, 21 years old, I've forgotten his name; the other was 20 years old, he was shot and he's in hospital, maybe he'll die too. He was shot on Gangsu Street."
"A boy named (*), aged (*), from Anishim near Lhasa, is in prison, and two of his friends were shot to death. He and his 18 year-old brother were from Phenpo. In the prison at Gondzhe there are a lot of people from Phenpo."
Posted by: sonam | May 19, 2008 at 02:06 AM
hello, found your web page when I googled about china. Im very ignorant of the issues there. Saw a tv programme in australia about injured people from the earthquake and wondered if you knew an organisation where I could send money to assist.
regards.
Posted by: angie | January 06, 2009 at 07:37 PM