BEIJING — China yesterday mobilized tens of thousands of soldiers in response to the devastating earthquake that has killed more than 12,000 people in Sichuan province, prompting international praise that contrasts with the criticism of Burma’s tardy reaction to last week’s cyclone.
The response was been matched with an unusually open handling of the disaster in a country that is often criticized for maintaining secrecy in times of crisis.
State-controlled media have issued round-the-clock reports showing the full horror of China’s worst natural disaster in a generation, in which thousands of people remain missing, most trapped in the rubble of collapsed buildings.
Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, a geologist, was on a plane heading south just two hours after the 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck, poring over maps of the worst-hit areas before delivering reassurances on camera. State television has screened pictures of Mr. Wen joining the frantic relief operation and shouting to those barely visible underneath heaps of rubble that help was on its way.
“We feel the Chinese government responded incredibly swiftly and in an efficient and determined way to this massive disaster,” said Francis Marcus, with the International Federation of Red Cross in Beijing.
The Dalai Lama’s spokesman said the Tibetan government in exile “admired the Chinese government’s quick response,” and British Foreign Secretary David Miliband said China should be “commended.”
China is not a regular recipient of such lofty plaudits. The specter of the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) epidemic, of which China’s leaders attempted a cover-up in 2003, still serves as a reminder of the public panic that can ensue if information is suppressed.
This winter, the government was criticized for its apparent uncertainty in tackling the snowstorms that crippled the country’s south.
This time, nursing an international reputation bruised by its handling of recent protests in Tibet, the central government has responded in a manner that could turn global opinion in its favor before the Olympics in less than 90 days.
By contrast, the Burmese junta was lambasted by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon for its “unacceptably slow response” in providing aid to 1.5 million people suffering from the effects of Cyclone Nargis.
China’s Ministry of Finance has allocated $123 million in aid for quake-hit areas.
The Communist Party’s disciplinary watchdog ordered its local officials to increase monitoring of disaster-relief work to ensure financial aid is not embezzled.
China has had plenty of experience in dealing with natural disasters over the years but only recently has it become savvied to the importance of communication.
“After SARS and all kinds of crises in recent years, the Chinese government and state media have accepted the idea of crisis communication,” said Anbin Shi, professor of media studies at Tsinghua University.
“By coincidence, I trained the officials and spokespersons of the state and provincial seismological bureaus in this concept just last week.
“I think Xinhua has fulfilled the principle of crisis communication: Tell it truthfully, tell it fast and tell it first. This is the first time that Xinhua has accomplished this,” the professor said.
One Xinhua reporter, who declined to be named, said the agency’s “fluent” reporting of the earthquake disaster took him by surprise and that the government learned valuable lessons about the need for transparency from the Tibet crisis.
“The amount of information coming in from the local bureau in Sichuan is quite amazing given the telecommunication problems.
“A couple of years ago, interviews with local officials — particularly those at county level — were hard to get. They were reluctant to say something because they didn’t want to destroy their careers. Now they are much more open,” the reporter said. “Xinhua has done much better than I expected but there is still a long way to go, still plenty of room for improvement.”
Mr. Shi said the swift response can be attributed in part to the implementation of new “publicity codes” that came into effect at the beginning of the month. They require government departments to release press statements immediately in the event of a disaster.
He also said the increasing role of the Internet and mobile phones in the news-gathering process — thus spreading knowledge among the Chinese people — has pressured Chinese state media to deliver timely, accurate news.
While reverberations were still being felt from the initial earthquake, real-time reports were being submitted by mobile phones to messaging services such as Twitter and video clips of the tremors were being uploaded by students onto Web sites such as tudou.com, the Chinese equivalent of YouTube.
But the reporting of the earthquake aftermath is unlikely to escape some form of political censure.
Reports are emerging of residents’ anger at local officials for failing to ensure that buildings such as Xinjian elementary school in the town of Dujiangyan, which was flattened by the quake, met adequate safety standards. Most of the 450 children inside the school when it collapsed have not been rescued.
Xinhua has not reported parents’ accusations, and sources inside Chinese media said media organizations were told yesterday at a conference chaired by Li Changchun, a member of the powerful Politburo, to “focus on reporting positive matters.”
Roger Musson, a seismologist at the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, said questions must be asked.
“From the pictures I have seen, isolated buildings that have been totally pancaked are surrounded by buildings pretty much untouched. You have to ask: Why did these buildings collapse when the others didn’t?” he said.
“China has a perfectly good building code. But it’s one thing to have a code and another thing to follow it.”
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