The Politics of Compassion

The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China

Bin Xu

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781503603400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The 2008 Sichuan earthquake killed 87, 000 people and left 5 million homeless. In response to the devastation, an unprecedented wave of volunteers and civic associations streamed into Sichuan to offer help. The Politics of Compassion examines how civically engaged citizens acted on the ground, how they understood the meaning of their actions, and how the political climate shaped their actions and understandings.

Using extensive data from interviews, observations, and textual materials, Bin Xu shows that the large-scale civic engagement was not just a natural outpouring of compassion, but also a complex social process, both enabled and constrained by the authoritarian political context. While volunteers expressed their sympathy toward the affected people's suffering, many avoided explicitly talking about the causes of the suffering—particularly in the case of the collapse of thousands of schools. Xu shows that this silence and apathy is explained by a general inability to discuss politically sensitive issues while living in a repressive state. This book is a powerful account of how the widespread death and suffering caused by the earthquake illuminates the moral-political dilemma faced by Chinese citizens and provides a window into the world of civic engagement in contemporary China.

CHAPTER 1

Consensus Crisis

In the wake of the Sichuan earthquake, Luqiong, an employee of an NGO in Shanghai, immediately called her parents in Sichuan, who fortunately were safe and sound. Saddened by the tragedy that had befallen other Sichuanese, she incessantly checked the news and rising death toll. The next day, she decided to do something more than just whimpering in front of a computer screen. She called her colleagues in other NGOs in Shanghai, and after a quick meeting, they decided to form a coalition to collect donations and deliver supplies. They named their network New Operation Hump, after the Chinese and American air forces’ supply transportation route over the Himalayas during World War II. Their achievements surprised even themselves. Within two weeks, they had collected so many supplies that they had to borrow a warehouse to store them and later managed to find an airline, which generously gave them space in a cargo plane to deliver their materials, free of charge. Rumor had it that “they got an airplane to deliver their stuff!” Modestly, Luqiong attributed their achievements to the donators’ “goodness” (shanyi) instead of her own efforts.

Many coalitions like New Operation Hump emerged after the earthquake, gathering together civic associations and volunteers who worked enthusiastically in the disaster relief. Collectively, these associations and coalitions constituted a vast network that served as a hub for volunteering. They demonstrated an ability to mobilize resources and to respond quickly, creatively, and enthusiastically. In the first months after the earthquake, everywhere in the quake zone one could easily bump into groups of people who introduced themselves as zhiyuanzhe (“volunteers”) from a gongyi zuzhi (“public-welfare organization”), both terms that used to be neologisms but now sounded familiar to the local people. With sanitization masks, backpacks, sneakers, and T-shirts emblazoned with uplifting messages like “I ♥ China” or “Xiongqi (Be strong!) Sichuan,” the volunteers assisted responders and the affected people alike. The volunteers were also everywhere in cities outside of Sichuan. At train stations, with mountains of backpacks and baggage, they waited for trains bound for Sichuan. They stood on street corners and sidewalks, with boxes and little red hats, calling for donations. Years later, this large-scale volunteering remained an emblematic image of the Sichuan earthquake.

The government demonstrated an unusually receptive attitude toward this large-scale public participation. Luqiong said: “I have been interacting with the government since I started my career, but this was the first time that officials didn’t repeatedly ask me, ‘Who are you? Why are you doing this?’ For the first time, they didn’t trap me in a maze of telephone calls to make me lose my patience and hope.”¹ Before they found the generous airline that provided them with cargo space, the New Operation Hump mustered up the courage to ask the Civil Affairs Bureau in Shanghai for help. To their surprise, instead of interrogating them about their qualifications and registration status, the officials tried to provide them with the best available solutions. Although Civil Affairs did not solve the issue, Luqiong and her colleagues were impressed by their cooperative attitude. Their interactions with various local governments in Sichuan were also unusually smooth. Other NGOs and small groups reported that officials’ attitudes were “warm,” “reasonable,” or at least “not hostile.” Press reports and scholarly studies corroborated my interviewees’ stories. In the very first weeks, the earthquake prompted local governments, provincial and national government bureaus, and GONGOs to cooperate with NGOs and informal groups, often for the first time. A few well-known NGOs with strained relations with the state, such as Friends of Nature (Ziranzhiyou), undertook some reconstruction programs with local governments in the quake zone (Zhu, Wang, and Hu 2009, 226). Even B-log, a blog that attracted “liberal intellectuals” interested in criticizing the government, worked with local governments to distribute the materials they collected. Given the often strained relations between the Chinese state and civic associations, such cooperation was unusual. This experience made Luqiong “feel more confident in this world I live in, my career, and China’s future,” because, using a Buddhist image, it “opened my eyes to many things as beautiful and pure as a lotus.”

FIGURE 3. A volunteer plays with children in An County. June 2, 2008. Reuters/Jason Lee.

Sorrow and compassion drive people to volunteer to offer help. Volunteering had happened in previous major disasters in the history of the People’s Republic of China, for example in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake. The official political culture also prized bursts of altruistic behavior in disasters, in the form of donations, assistance from around the country to the affected place, and mutual help among the victims. This altruism was encapsulated in a slogan widely used in official discourses about disaster: “As people in one place are experiencing adversity, people from other places come to help” (yifang younan, bafang zhiyuan).

Nevertheless, although we cannot deny the enthusiasm and compassion of volunteers in the Mao years, their post-disaster volunteering was mobilized, organized, and controlled by the state, through a top-down fabric of work units (danwei) and party-state organizations like the Youth League. This state-mobilization model still existed to some extent in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake: for example, a significant number of volunteers were organized by state organizations like the Red Cross, and members of the Communist Party were required to pay “special party membership fees,” a form of mandatory donation.

What was new after the Sichuan earthquake, however, was that numerous civic associations—from formal NGOs like the one Luqiong worked for to small, hobby groups—rather than state organizations mobilized volunteers and collected incalculable amounts of donations. Most scholars recognize this important phenomenon of grassroots civic engagement and attribute it to the long-term development of Chinese civic associations. Shieh and Deng, for example, suggest that “the widespread participation of volunteers and associations in earthquake relief shows that civil society in China has made significant progress in recent years” (Shieh and Deng 2011, 181). Empirical evidence substantiates this argument. The Sichuan earthquake did not create volunteering overnight. However, it served as a catalyst for realizing the power and ideas accumulated in the rapid development of Chinese civic associations in recent decades. It was a moment when various civic associations and actors stepped onto the national and even international stage to demonstrate their capacity.

Nevertheless, this undoubtedly correct explanation does not tell us much about the catalyst itself, the earthquake. It indicates only a necessary but not sufficient condition. It constructs a direct causal relation between the structural conditions of civil society and civic engagement. A reasonable deduction from this causation is that civic engagement would have occurred in other large-scale events at the same historical moment since the structural features of state-society relations were the same as those in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake. The year 2008 provided two natural comparative cases: the snowstorm in January and February and the Beijing Olympics in August, both of which needed services from civil society. There was no large-scale volunteering after the snowstorm. Many volunteers worked for the Beijing Olympics, but they were strictly organized and trained by the Youth League and other state organizations.

Why was it the Sichuan earthquake, instead of other events at the same historical moment, with the same structural conditions, that made civil society participation possible? Why did large-scale grassroots volunteering not occur after previous disasters? Why did the Chinese state cooperate with civic associations, given its usual caution and restrictions on civil society? In other words, we need to know more about the contextual conditions that enabled this unusual level of volunteering.

We also want to know how the participants actually worked in this larger political context. How did they interact with local governments, the Youth League, the Red Cross, and various state bureaus? What resources did they mobilize? How did they gain trust when reaching out beyond their own group? How did they deal with the issues that emerged from their interactions with the state? Moreover, we must listen to how they articulated the meanings of their civic engagement. Volunteering is a meaning-loaded action. Distant volunteering like that in Sichuan could be tedious, costly, and even dangerous. People have legitimate reasons not to volunteer—job, family, budget, time, etc. Thus, they need meaningful ideas and emotions to sustain their commitment. How did they interpret their actions? What did they feel? How did their meaning-making reflect broader cultural changes in Chinese society?

This chapter is devoted to an examination of the structural and situational conditions that enabled the grassroots volunteering, the volunteer groups’ and associations’ actual actions, and the meanings they attached to those actions. To fully understand the complexity and variation of the interactions, I unpack both the state and civil society. I examine not only different levels of the state (central to local) and different state sectors (disaster management agencies, propaganda departments, state organizations, and the Communist Party) but also different types of civic associations and groups, from formal NGOs to small groups. I also go beyond the macro- and meso-levels of analysis, on which most civil society studies focus, and explore how individual participants understood their actions at a significant historical moment.

CONTEXT

The most important feature of the context in which the Sichuan earthquake volunteering took place was a “consensus crisis,” a type of crisis in which different parties are motivated by a common goal to undertake practical tasks instead of confronting each other. Compared to “contentious crises” like riots and ethnic conflicts, disasters create community-wide problems and a consensus on what needs to be done—usually saving lives and relieving suffering. This consensus reduces the possibility of conflicts and leads to an upsurge in mutual helping during the emergency (Dynes and Quarantelli 1971). The concept of a consensus crisis is tied to one of the most verified findings in the sociology of disaster. Although it has been challenged by some empirical cases of violence and conflicts occurring after disasters, its core insights are still useful: situational opportunities and incentives mediate the structure’s influence on action.

The consensus crisis in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake had four features: challenges to the state’s administrative capacity; the need for civil society’s services; the moral politics involved in disaster response; and a consensus about goals and priorities. Those features weakened some structural factors and strengthened others and finally led to a favorable context for civic engagement.

Challenges to the State’s Administrative Capacity

As discussed at the beginning of the Introduction, the Sichuan earthquake posed many administrative challenges to the Chinese state’s disaster management system because of its unparalleled scale. Other challenges were less sensational but equally important. For example, the earthquake seriously compromised and damaged local state apparatuses in the quake-stricken area. Many local officials died, lost their families, or were injured. CNN reported on a township official named Zhao Haiqing in Chenjiaba, Beichuan, who, despite having lost his son and parents, still worked around the clock to organize the town’s response work. Zhao was just one of the many local officials who lost their immediate relatives but continued to work under tremendous emotional and administrative stress. In Beichuan, where he worked, for example, about 23 percent of local officials died, 200 were injured, and many more lost family members (Deng 2009, 30). When Jing Dazhong, the Beichuan county magistrate, assembled the surviving county officials above ke (subcounty) rank and called the roll, most officials were not there because they had either died—including one of the seven vice-magistrates—or were severely injured. Even the surviving officials in understaffed townships were overwhelmed by the daunting tasks ahead. A volunteer who went down to the quake zone said the township officials he encountered apparently worked around the clock. Consequently, they lost their voices, and their faces turned “blackish-red like pig livers.”²

The local governments’ compromised capacity also exacerbated a problem in China’s disaster management system: lack of a well-established, community-based response system. The Chinese government did not put emergency management on its major policy agenda until the 2003 SARS crisis revealed the potential political risk of a public health incident (Kleinman and Watson 2006).³ As the SARS epidemic subsided, the State Council redesigned a comprehensive emergency response plan in 2005, and the National People’s Congress passed the Emergency Response Law in 2007. In 2006, the State Council set up the China National Commission for Disaster Reduction to coordinate response efforts at the central and local levels. In theory, China’s disaster management system runs on the “local management principle” (shudi guanli yuanze): the local government is responsible for initiating the response plan and managing the emergency as it unfolds, and has the authority to command government bureaus and even local armed forces. In reality, however, if a disaster is defined as a “particularly massive emergency” (Category I in the Comprehensive Response Plan), the central government will organize a special task force, directed by state leaders at the vice-premier level, to go to the site to lead the response. Consequently, local governments’ power is significantly restricted. Some scholars and policy-makers in China view this “whole-country system” (juguo tizhi) as an advantage because it enables the central government to bypass institutional barriers and gather resources from throughout the country to manage emergencies in a speedy manner (Gao 2010; Shan 2011).

The centralization, however, overburdens the national agency, which has to take care of many trivial tasks in addition to coordinating more than thirty national bureaus and ministries, as well as all the provincial agencies. By contrast, as experts and even Civil Affairs officials point out (Chen 2012; Li, Yang, and Yuan 2005, 13–40), local governments do not have adequate incentives to invest in disaster management, especially as economic growth has become the most important criterion for evaluating local officials’ performance. Therefore, the local disaster response system, particularly below the city/regional level and in rural areas, lacks basic personnel and equipment. The trained professionals and supply warehouses are mostly based in larger cities, and, as the Sichuan earthquake shows, it takes time for supplies and personnel to reach the disaster zone. This delay was even more critical when the famously rugged “Sichuan roads” were damaged. As an Asian Development Bank (ADB) report on the technical aspect of the Sichuan earthquake response points out, “there were, therefore, significant difficulties in gathering a sufficiently large rescue force to meet the rescue needs presented by the earthquake, even by tapping the entire rescue resources of the country. This led to some major shortfalls in the delivery of rescue services, particularly in rural and mountain areas” (Asian Development Bank 2008, 130). Even professional responder teams at the provincial and central levels were understaffed and underequipped. The China International Search & Rescue Team (CISRT) was one of the few highly trained and professionally equipped response teams in the country, but it had only 214 members (in 2008), all based in Beijing. The level of equipment and training of the provincial response teams varied greatly. For example, in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake, the Sichuan provincial team had to borrow an emergency communications vehicle from the relatively better-equipped Yunnan team (Teng 2008). Overall, as an expert from the CISRT admitted, China’s professional response teams very much lagged behind those in developed countries. For instance, in Germany, there are 2.14 professional responders for every 10,000 people. This number is 1.73 in France and 0.15 in the United States, while in China, it is 0.011, less than one-tenth of that in the United States, less than 1 percent of the number in France, and less than 0.5 percent the number in Germany (Shan 2011, 136).

In a real-world disaster response, the Chinese army, the Armed Police, and firefighters undertake major tasks. In the wake of the Sichuan earthquake, the Chinese state demonstrated its impressive mobilizing capability by gathering and dispatching more than 100,000 soldiers and firefighters to the quake zone. Nevertheless, without firsthand data it is hard to evaluate their efficiency. Reports and TV footage show that the soldiers sometimes had to rely on simple tools like shovels and pickaxes to dig through the rubble. The Chinese air force’s helicopters also had difficulty landing in places with complex geographic features and weather conditions. The most efficient response, according to technical reports like that by the ADB, was the medical assistance. There were no large-scale epidemics after the Sichuan earthquake. This can be explained by what other responders lacked: the doctors and nurses were highly trained, fully equipped professionals.

In addition to rescues, there was an endless list of small but urgent tasks that had to be undertaken immediately: moving and processing corpses and rubble; sanitizing places with heavy casualties; identifying victims; nursing and caring for senior, young, disabled, and injured people; delivering supplies to remote villages lacking big roads to the outside; transporting the injured to medical facilities; and providing psychological counseling and therapy for traumatized survivors. Many of these tasks fell outside the scope of the official response plan, or were included in it but inadequately executed because of an insufficient number of personnel and lack of attention to the details.

Need for Civil Society’s Services

The disaster’s administrative challenges compelled the state to mobilize every possible resource to carry out the response tasks. Consequently, public services provided by civil society were needed. What was involved was not a top-down process, however, but a back-and-forth interaction between the state and society at different levels. The overwhelmed local governments in Sichuan immediately sent an unambiguous call for help from society. Several hours after the earthquake, local radio anchors in Chengdu called for blood donations. This led to the widel...