The Sichuan Earthquake: who's to blame?
May 21, 2008
FIRST THE superstitions, and now the conspiracy theories. China's leaders must have known about the earthquake, says the not entirely reliable anti-government news website, Boxun.com.
While some of the slack-jawed, salivating imbeciles who contribute to China's online bulletin boards even went as far as to suggest that the quake was caused by secret nuclear weapons tests in the region (they failed to explain why the tests weren't conducted, as they normally are, in remote and uninhabited regions of Gansu or Xinjiang), others seem to have plumped for the traditional idea that "they must have known", a reflex familiar to all those who have studied the parapolitical psychoses that lie behind Pearl Harbour and 9-11.
Boxun asks how else one could explain the alacrity with which Premier Wen Jiabao landed in the region to comfort survivors and rally the rescue teams. It claims that the local authorities and the People's Liberation Army rescue teams knew, some time in advance, what was about to come to pass. It cites unnamed officials with the Seismological Bureau who, at the risk of certain death, revealed (to the hysterical and viscerally anti-Communist Boxun, of all places) that they had forecast the quake weeks in advance only to be told to keep quiet on the grounds that it would derail the Olympic Games.
The idea - also evident in conspiracy theories relating to Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers - is that the people involved somehow had a motive to maximize the damage. Roosevelt, it was said, wanted a cast-iron pretext to enter the Second World War in the face of prevailing isolationist opinion in Congress, while George W. Bush sought to push his neo-con designs on the world and enrich his cronies while doing so. For China, however, one is hard-pressed to find any rational reason why the government would permit the senseless death of 50,000 people.
The conspiracy theorists seem to suggest that the government expected the damage to be much lower than it actually was, which doesn't quite chime with the claim that Premier Wen Jiabao and the PLA were already on stand-by.
You could go further by claiming that the leaders saw the catastrophe as a way of distracting attention away from Tibet, which had become the main focus in the run-up to the Olympics. A German newspaper was excoriated by Chinese netizens this week for suggesting that the the authorities have been exploiting the earthquake to their own advantage, but it was correct: Beijing, after all, is doing what any government would do. Before May 12, the story of the Olympics would probably have been the methods and gestures that foreign athletes might use to register their protest. By now, on the grounds of good taste alone, they are far more likely to express solidarity with the stricken victims of Sichuan. But is anyone really willing to suggest that the Chinese government - already precariously positioned on a precipice of economic instability and social change - would have taken such a massive risk for such minor propaganda gains?
Apart from satisfying a well-developed need to pin the blame on something, the conspiracy doesn't make much sense. Logically, one would have thought that Olympics or no Olympics, such precise seismic forewarnings would have resulted in a well-coordinated evacuation of the region by the People's Liberation Army. That would surely have given the government enough opportunity to burnish its reputation after being dragged through the mud during the Tibet riots, and at a much cheaper price.
Of course, had it done so, you can bet your life that the dingy, crepuscular minds of Boxun would have spun the theory that the government had somehow induced the earthquake in order to win sympathy and suck the media oxygen away from the Dalai Lama. How else could you explain the accuracy of the Seismological Bureau's predictions?
In any case, how easy is it to predict earthquakes? It has been done before in China, but it is hardly an exact science. Seismologists tend to work with probabilities, not certainties: they are pretty sure that another devastating quake will hit California sooner or later, but no one is sure when.
China's netizens have also been drawing attention to the mood swings and eccentricities displayed by frogs or cattle in the days leading up to the Sichuan earthquake. Ante hoc ergo propter hoc, as it were. In a country this big, and with so many people, it stands to reason that a relatively large number of strange and unexplained events took place in the hours that led up to the earthquake on Monday May 12. It also stands to reason that there will be a large number of people trying to make causal connections between them.
The problem is that although we are now aware of the causes of earthquakes - the blind tectonic pressures that have built up over centuries of continental drift - too many people still remain dissatisfied with scientific explanations. So, we look for something easier, something more human, something instantly observable and more amenable to everyday experience. We search for scapegoats and conspirators. We reach for theories of divine retribution or diabolic conspiracy. We scrutinize the rhythms of history and try to explain the link between moral turpitude and natural disaster.
As the dust thickens and the rubble piles up, the more rational among us accept that there is no logical reason to blame God, no evidence that secret nuclear tests had taken place and no reason to suggest the existence of an evil government conspiracy, but we still find the need to apportion blame.
