Asia

As I write, it is almost exactly two weeks since the Sichuan earthquake (it happened at 14.28 Beijing time). Now that the anguish punctuated by occasional joy of a miraculous recovery is passing, attention is inevitably focusing more on other issues such as how the five million or so left homeless will be fed, housed, treated, educated …

Our piece on China’s look into the abyss here.

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The photo on the right is from the Nanhe Sports Center in Mianyang, where thousands of people left homeless by the May 12 earthquake are living. I like it because it has smiling kids, something that’s been in short supply. Lin, photographer Ian Teh and I went to the stadium to find …

The aftershock everyone feared last night didn’t happen. There was a small one of magnitude 5.2 just before 2 a.m., but I haven’t heard any reports of significant damage.

I’ve posted some more video above of our trip to Yingxiu. This shows what’s left of a raised section of highway leading into the town. It has fallen twisted to …

We went to the town of Yingxiu today, (see clip above) where thousands died in the May 12 earthquake. There we spent the one week anniversary of the disaster with a man named Wu Jiang, who had walked into town and was searching through the apartment building where his mother was killed. The rescue vehicles in the nearby military …

Commenter Canchi objects strongly to the last sentence of my previous post. Here’s why:

…as a legitimate blogger, for Simon to have said what he said at this time, for this occasion, is blow below the belt …. After such tragedy, for such a solemn occasion, when Chinese people all feel the pain, for him to make political fodder of

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As I write, (14.28) it is exactly a week since the earthquake. China’s State Council has mandated a three minute silence in honor of the victims. They also ordered the sounding of all horns, air raid sirens etc during the period. You’ll see this on TV so I won’t put up video but it was eerie. All traffic on the usually jammed second ring …

This video is of the rubble that was once Juyuan Middle School, where at least 600 students died. The destruction of so many schools is one of the most depressing parts of this disaster. There is clearly a lot of anger from parents who lost their children, and it seems inevitable that there will be serious repercussions for the …

My colleague Jodi Xu writes about the Chinese blogsphere and the Olympic Torch relay:

The day after a devastating earthquake shook China’s mid-western Sichuan Province, the Chinese government announced changes in the torch relay aimed at honoring those who died in the quake including the observation of a minute’s silence before the

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Obviously, the earthquake in Sichuan has dominated news coverage and the blogosphere since it happened Monday. A couple of events shouldn’t pass without being noted. Inflation hit 8.5 per cent last month, the government announced. This is bad and only going to get worse and is a very serious challenge for Beijing, as we’ve written …

There’s been some discussion in the comments about the relatively paltry contribution made by the U.S. government and wondering about donations by companies and individuals. The ever-insightful Tim Johnson of McClatchy Newspapers has a list for anyone interested on his blog, China Rises (proxy needed in China) of the substantial amounts …

Yesterday we traveled to several more Sichuan towns that were hit hard by Monday’s earthquake. Here’s the story we put together and also a photo essay.

Just a brief follow-up to my previous post on Dujiangyan. Xinhua News Agency is now reporting that serious cracks have been found in a dam upstream of the earthquake ravaged city. It’s hard to imagine a place less capable of sustaining floodwaters right now.