It is odd to find that I am here, in China, as a witness (and very small-scale participant) in a historical event. What will they call it, ten or fifty years down the line? The Chinese earthquake of 2008? The Sichuan Quake? The media here was first calling it the Wenchuan earthquake, after the more exact location, but now seems to be using the Sichuan earthquake.

I spent some time watching television news while I was traveling in Yunnan (easy to do in airports and hotel rooms). Each news station has their own animated logo for the event — different versions of an outline of Sichuan province, which shakes, and then circles radiate outwards and words appear. Sometimes it is yellow, sometimes green, sometimes the radiating circles are a variation on the color of the province, sometimes they are red. In the Kunming airport, the ‘Air Media’ (which I presume to be produced especially for and displayed only in airports) followed the animated outward spread of quake effects with the characters for the name of the event – I recognized the ones for ‘earthquake’ – on a black screen. The characters were silver, and shot through with red cracks.

The China Daily, the English language paper which they provide at our ‘serviced residence’ has been full almost entirely of quake reports. The heroic schoolboy who stood for an hour holding an iv drip for a trapped school mate. (They refer to him as ‘Drip Boy’.) The promises of investigation and punishment regarding the high rate of collapse of school buildings. The arrival (and now departure) of foreign aid workers. There’s also a box on the front page which lists a couple numbers chosen from the most recently released. Yesterday’s paper features the following data: 68,516 killed, 19,350 missing, 365,399 injured, 15.15 million displaced, $5.33 billion in donations.

On May 21, in Kunming, I caught the second half of a televised press conference. Because there were international journalists present, each question and answer was translated into English if in Chinese, or vice versa. Near the end, the officials released the latest numbers, a long list. I noted down some of them:

• 42,000 dead
• 396,811 rescued in area
  • 4,652 rescued alive from debris

• 162 aftershocks over 4.0
  • 26 over 5.0
  • 4 over 6.0

• 12.867 billion yuan gov’t spending on disaster
  • 9.339 billion yuan from central budget

• 17,176 tons oil sent to area in 24 hour period
• 28,829 km of road damaged
  • about 19,000 km repaired (didn’t catch the exact figure)
  • about 3,000 bridges destroyed (didn’t catch the exact figure)

• Aftershocks have knocked out power in areas it had been restored to
• 14 Taiwanese tourists all returned safely to Taiwan
• Taiwanese indicated willingness to donate 750 million yuan

I didn’t write it down, but they also released the number of meters of bridge which had been repaired. Truly, this is a country quite obsessed with numbers.

Further in yesterday’s paper, I can learn that Tangjiashan lake, one of 34 formed by landslides blocking rivers after the quake, has been rising up to 2 m a day, but “troops have dug a 50-m-wide channel running 300 m long” to control, or at least direct water when the landslide-dam bursts. 28 of the lakes are expected to burst. Another article tells me that “Hospitals have treated 87,391 people, of whom 56,580 were discharged.” 619,400 tents have been sent to provide shelter for the 15.15 million people who have been relocated.

Some of the statistics read like mathematical story problems. On Thursday, “98.2 percent of banks in the quake-hit areas resumed services, with 238 branches still shut.” How many bank branch offices are in the quake-hit area? I think it comes to 29,750. If the death toll is 68,516, then each branch has lost an average of 2.3 customers.

Of course, while the print media is filling space with numbers and tales of brave survivors and rescue workers (133,000 troops and armed police have been sent in, with 45,000 reservists being mobilized.), the visual media is full of images that go straight to emotions. I watched an amount of that the day before the press conference, May 20…

The coverage of the earthquake dominates the TV. Yesterday was a week. Alex told me there was to be two minutes of silence at 2:28, the time of the quake. I was on the plane, so I didn’t observe it.

Last night, wandering around Kunming, we did see a gather of people and candles around a big fountain in the city center.

This morning, when I turned on the televisision, in hopes of a weather report, CCTV1 was show shots of different groups observing the moment of silence — groups of office workers, or policemen, line up together with their heads bowed. After a while I figured out one part of the series was the staff of Chinese consulates around the world.

Now we’re back to footage from Sichuan — soldiers moving rubble to extract survivors, people living under tarps, food distribution in refugee camps.

…..

I’m looking for weather on the tv, and it more images from the moment of silence, factory workers, railway crews, men in suits. A line of military men remove their hats in unison. Many people they show are crying. Traffic is stopped. Air raid sirens are going. Car horns are stick on. School children bow their heads. Soldiers hold their helmets on scene in Sichuan, silent and unmoving, but a butterfly flits across the screen in front of them. Some have their hands on their hears. People crying in the subway. Flags at half-mast. A nation showing its open bleeding heart, mourning together. Now its back to the consulate footage — they’re recycling the footage I saw before. It makes me start to cry anyway.

Of course, the moments of silence (I think it was actually 3 minutes long) were not universally observed. They did not delay my flight so we could sit quietly on the runway. The tragedy hasn’t touched the entire country deeply, reports Stupid Pig’s China Blog, not everyone is crying about it. We met a German guy in Lijiang who works for BMW, which is collaborating with a Chinese company to make motorcycle engines. We asked about the quake affects in his city (I forget which city, though) and he said nothing major — only five or six people died, and it is hard to tell if it was due to the earthquake, or to “normal” lax Chinese safety standards.

The oddest story I’ve seen though, from my perspective — and this ties directly into the theme of official numbers — is the statement that the government will issue certificates to families whose children died in the quake, officially permitting them to have another child.