Earthquakes

I get a bit teary watching the earthquake news. There's a lot to think about. In Australia when there is a big natural disaster it gets a lot of coverage, sort of, but obviously not like here. Something like 45 channels are devoted to it. True a lot of them are showing the same footage, but you could watch it 24 hours a day. Some people probably are. And the really frothy entertainment channels, especially form the out of town satellite distributors, are closed down. And no karaoke - in Guangzhou, I don't know about elsewhere - for three days. That's like closing every pub in Melbourne in say, 1965, when there wasn't really an alternative social venue. The cinemas are closed too.

It's pretty grim. The Stuart Diver story isn't going to come, I don't think. The logistics of the exercise are incredible, the terrain is awesome. Moving the massive machinery through these mountains is an achievement by itself, and that's the least of repairing thousands of dams, embankments, power stations, whatever else. And imagine how horrendously frustrating it must be to have to work in slow motion for days and days in an emergency, because working quickly is even more dangerous. I'd much rather be on the rebuild/repair teams than the rescue teams.

Up to 40,000 people dead now. Tweed Heads has 45,000. Queanbeyan has 30-odd.

I wonder if it's possible to quantify the effect of this kind of even in a developing country. To be honest, compared to say Bangladesh, China is rich (I suppose. I never read any statistics). But while China might be rich, a lot of people in it aren't, which includes pretty much all of these. I bet rich people are under-represented in earthquake death statistics. Anyway, the point is that lots of people here live in massively complex networks of people. Are these resilient enough to deal with the losses, and remake themselves, or are they so fragile that the death of one person is going to overwhelm all the others in the same network? In general, families are smaller now. On the other hand, I guess more generations are alive, which might offset the smaller size of each individual generation. A lot of rural families here are relying on income from a labourer in a city. One of the workers dormitories that collapsed here probably destroyed the major income source of a few hundred families.

It's very interesting the way the cities have responded. It's part of an argument for the necessity of nationalism - historically an accident in one part of China would have very little interest for the rest of the country. Not so this time around. Half of Guangzhou appears to be handing money over to the other half who appear to be collecting it. People proudly tell you how much time they have spent on the collection tables. (They also ask you how much money you have donated, and you how much they have donated. I find that a bit intimidating really - it's obviously not at all Anglo-Saxon. Anyway, I appear to have donated enough not to get disapproving looks) During the first 3 minute silence, on Monday at 2:28, every horn, alarm, siren, klaxon, bell in the city was going off for 3 minutes (a human silence), I couldn't help thinking that this is probably happening all over the country. That's 1.3 billion people, a quarter of the world's population, mourning their dead, together. Maybe one day we can turn these natural disasters into world-stopping moments.