As for the real earthquake in Sichuan, I’m in no position to add to the torrent of news, other than to laud the Guardian for it’s prescient coverage, not just of the tragedy that has befallen people near the epicenter, but also of the speed with which their grief has turned to rage at the real estate developers and government officials whose responsibility it is to make sure buildings have a certain resilience in such situations. To wit:

Twenty-four hours after the quake hit, they were losing hope and only rage was left. They blamed everyone: soldiers for coming too late, the builders for cutting corners, officials for – they claimed – siphoning off cash.

“The contractors can’t have been qualified. It’s a ‘tofu’ [soft and shoddy] building. Please, help us release this news,” the husband said.

“About 450 were inside, in nine classes and it collapsed completely from the top to the ground. It didn’t fall over; it was almost like an explosion.”

The distraught couple’s neighbour, still half-hoping for a sight of her daughter, burst out angrily: “Why isn’t there money to build a good school for our kids? Chinese officials are too corrupt and bad.

“These buildings outside have been here for 20 years and didn’t collapse – the school was only 10 years old. They took the money from investment, so they took the lives of hundreds of kids. They have money for prostitutes and second wives but they don’t have money for our children. This is not a natural disaster – this is done by humans.”

Sensationalism? Possibly. But I doubt it. “Toufu dregs”-style construction (豆腐渣工程) has long been a source of public anger in China, and a potent symbol of corruption at the local level. (Witness the fuming controversy over shoddy electric poles during this winter’s freak snow storms in the south.) And now it appears the widespread practice whereby officials and developers profit through architectural corner-cutting may have cost a few extra tens of thousands of lives.

Melinda Liu, Newsweek’s bureau chief in Beijing, and Richard Spencer, the Telegraph’s correspondent over here, both note that many Chinese saw the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 as an omen portending the death of Mao Zedong—the suggestion seeming to be that this earthquake could foreshadow something bad for the CCP. But if the Guardian’s report is at all reflective of the general mood, the appeal to superstition hardly feels necessary.

While it’s true Chinese people have been willing to give their central government the benefit of the doubt even in the worst of times, one has to wonder whether the death toll from this disaster—and in particular the role of corrupt officials in helping push it to such heights—doesn’t represent a serious threat to leaders in Beijing (and their dogged pursuit of social stability) beyond anything those protesting monks and flag-waving pro-Tibetsters could muster

[Image via Netease]

UPDATE [May 14, 6:40am, Beijing time]:

Tim Lesle, a former classmate of mine at the Berkeley journalism school who’s been working on a story about earthquakes in San Francisco, writes of the Sichuan disaster: “When an earthquake strikes, it’s not the earth that kills you. It’s everything else around you.”

As if in response, another colleague affiliated with China Digital Times (which is doing an heroic aggregating job with both English and Chinese reporting) just sent out a link to this wrenching video of an utterly collapsed school in Dujiangyan, broadcast recently on Dragon TV/东方卫视. According to the headline, the collapse buried 1200 students and killed at least 60:

Finally, Tim points to the fine reporting being done by the crew of NPR’s ‘All Things Considered,’ which was in Chengdu preparing a special week of broadcasts from Sichuan when the quake hit.