Buzz

Everyone knows about the earthquake. Both in China and abroad news of the wreckage, the dead and the injured is everywhere. It has been 2 weeks and one cannot turn on a TV here and find news on anything else. It is shown on buses, in restaurants, even at the gym. The coverage of the disaster in China is reminiscent of the coverage of the September 11th attacks in the US in 2001; the images of the injured, the rubble, the brave young heros risking their lives to find signs of life in the destruction are replayed constantly, everywhere.

Broken buildings, broken bodies, broken families and hearts.

The western media has on the whole praised the Chinese government for its quick response and for the relative freedom it has allowed the press in communicating the disaster and its figures to the public. Yet what no-one is really talking about is the heightened tension in the air, this electric buzz that can be heard throughout the country right now.

The Chinese people are talking. The voices are small and the channels narrow, but there is a subversive voice coming out in hushed whispers between college students, bloggers and the parents of children who have died due to the use of substandard building materials in the construction of schools. Protests that are not being aired. Images that are not being broadcast.

In ancient China the advent of a large earthquake was taken as a sign from God of changing political times and a turnover of the rulers of the country. I even learnt the other day that the first rudimentary instruments used to detect quakes were developed in ancient China and used by sages to predict the collapse of dynasties. Although these are old superstitions, I did ask some of my young Chinese friends about them and all of them knew what I was talking about. So while the young people in cities don't tend to believe such things anymore, they still persist in the background of folk wisdom and knowledge. No doubt the government is aware of this.

There are also a myriad of stories circulating online that are not being broadcast on national television. A town invaded by thousands of frogs just a day or so before the quake turned to the local government and asked whether a quake was expected. They were told no and went back to their homes, only to be crushed as buildings collapsed in the quake the next day. The government withheld information. The government lied. The government allowed people to die. People in isolated areas are literally killing each other over scarce resources such as food and water. Soldiers of the PLA are fighting the homeless victims over provisions. Whether or not these stories are true is not up to me to determine, and they are very likely exaggerated. At least some must be told by opportunists or attention seekers -- disasters like this tend to create these kinds of conspiracy theories. Yet it is the fact that this is happening that fascinates me. There is a certain nervousness to it all, like watching an R-rated movie in your living room while your parents are out of the house. And everywhere people are talking about it in hushed whispers, when they're sure nobody's watching.

The tension is exacerbated by the build-up to the fast-approaching Olympic Games and the clamp-down on all sorts of social unrest that has been going on all over China. I noticed more police cars on the streets of provincial Changsha, and extended patrols. One police car has taken to coming into my closed off living community every evening and it unnerved me the first couple of times I saw it -- policemen looking out of the vehicles' windows and shining flashlights, as if looking for some fugitive. But it's been happening every night for a while now and has just become a part of the routine.

I myself, along with all the other foreign teachers who had at some point this year left the country, were called into the local Public Security Bureau this afternoon. They wanted to confirm our addresses, see our passports and visas. One of the other teachers told me that in her 5 years of teaching here she had never been there -- I have been there 3 times already having arrived last September. The importance of registering with the PSB within 24 hours of returning to the country after a trip was drilled into me yet again. They're keeping tabs.