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【社会人文】中国精神
He had company. A busload of volunteers in matching red hats was bumping along the village’s rutted dirt road. Employees from a private company in Chengdu were cleaning up a town around the bend. Other volunteers from around China had already delivered food, water and sympathy.
“I haven’t done this before,” said Mr. Hao, 36, as he straddled his mountain bike on Saturday evening. “Ordinary people now understand how to take action on their own.”
From the moment the earthquake struck on May 12, the Chinese government dispatched soldiers, police officers and rescue workers in the type of mass mobilization expected of the ruling Communist Party. But an unexpected mobilization, prompted partly by unusually vigorous and dramatic coverage of the disaster in the state-run news media, has come from outside official channels. Thousands of Chinese have streamed into the quake region or donated record sums of money in a striking and unscripted public response.
Beijing is instinctively wary of public activism and has long maintained tight restrictions on private charities and religious, social and environmental groups that operate outside government control. The public outpouring is so overwhelming that analysts are debating whether it will create political aftershocks and place pressure on China’s authoritarian state to allow more space for civil society.
When the quake struck, party officials initially assigned oversight of private relief efforts to the Communist Youth League, the political base of President Hu Jintao. But many individuals, corporations and nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, simply rushed into action to supplement what they say is an overburdened Chinese Red Cross or to help with the rescue, according to representatives of some private citizens’ groups.
Faced with the potential for a grave humanitarian crisis, officials loosened their grip. They have since begun warning volunteers to stay out of the earthquake zone, citing safety concerns. But thousands are already there.
In Chengdu, relief volunteers have formed a command structure called the NGO Relief Action Group to coordinate 30 organizations. They have collected donations of instant noodles, biscuits, rice, medicine, clothes and bedding.
“We realized that this is such an unprecedented crisis that we must join together to make some substantial contribution,” said Xing Mo, 39, a veteran organizer of nongovernmental organizations and president of the Yunnan Institute of Development, a school that trains volunteers.
Most volunteers say they approve of the way the government has handled rescue and relief efforts so far. Some experts believe that party leaders could channel that enthusiasm to bolster their authority, just as they helped stoke nationalist anger after the outbreak of ethnic Tibetan unrest and foreign protests against the Olympic torch this spring.
Even so, Chinese leaders generally treat unscripted public involvement in civil affairs as a threat to stability. The reaction to the quake in Sichuan Province shows how rising wealth, cellphones, text messaging and mass transportation now make it much harder for the authorities to control popular reaction to a major event.
The public’s spontaneous rush to volunteer is a piece of the same defiance in which media outlets collectively defied an initial ban by the party’s Propaganda Department on firsthand coverage of the quake.
“This is a significant turning point for China,” said Bao Shuming, a senior research coordinator for the China Data Center at the University of Michigan. “This is going to dissolve some boundaries between the government and the common people. People are becoming more educated and organized, and society is becoming more open.”
For many Chinese, the public reaction is simply a natural outpouring of grief and a desire to help, reflective of a society where more people are now rich enough to give back. Even as traditionalists deplore modern China’s moral drift and embrace of materialism, a catastrophe projected to claim 50,000 lives, including thousands of children, has struck a deep chord.
“We grew up reciting Confucius saying that all men are born kind, but it takes a disaster like this to bring out the innate kindness of everyday human beings,” said Alan Qiu, 41, an investor in Shanghai. “People are touched by the scenes of children and also the value of life. We grew up in a society where people tend to believe that Chinese lives are of less value than foreign lives.”
Outside the earthquake zone in Sichuan, the public response has grown exponentially. Exact figures change daily, but donations from Chinese citizens and companies have already surpassed the $500 million allocated by the government, according to state media. Some donations have been big, with Run Run Shaw, a Hong Kong millionaire, giving $14 million, while schoolchildren have donated the equivalent of pennies.
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作者:admin@医学,生命科学 2010-11-11 17:11
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