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Foreign Desk; SECTA
Superstitions About Quake Meet the Web, Irritating the Chinese Authorities
By ANDREW JACOBS; Ma Yi contributed research from Beijing.
1059 words
16 May 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
11
English
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved.
CHENGDU, China -- Can earthquakes be predicted, their destructive impact forewarned?
Most scientists would say no. But if some insistent Chinese bloggers are to be believed, nature provided enough warning to have saved many of those who perished Monday.
In the days before the deadly earthquake shook much of mountainous Sichuan Province, their stories go, ponds inexplicably drained, cows flung themselves against their enclosures and swarms of toads invaded the streets of a town that was later decimated by the quake. ''Why did the government ignore the signs?'' asked a writer in one chat room. ''Did they not care?''
Some bloggers have lobbed more pointed accusations, saying that alerts by a local seismology bureau were brushed off by provincial officials. The claim has been largely debunked, but that has not stopped the spread of rumors and tall tales, some of which are proving nettlesome to the ruling Communist Party as it grapples with China's most calamitous disaster in a generation.
At a government news conference on Tuesday, carried live on state television, a reporter asked about the rumors. The broadcast quickly switched to stock film of rescue efforts. When it returned to the news conference, the questions had become benign.
Later that day, officials announced the arrest of four people for spreading quake-related rumors on the Web and said they would be punished, although the officials did not describe the punishment or nature of the rumors.
Lest any doubters remain, Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, ran an article on Wednesday featuring Zhang Xiaodong, a scientist at the China Earthquake Networks center, who said seismologists, contrary to popular belief, could not accurately predict natural disasters. ''We haven't passed the test of earthquake forecasting,'' he said.
Here in China, the belief in omens and portents, often rooted in ancient cosmology, is widely held, even by the worldly and well educated. This is a culture, after all, that cherishes lucky numbers, eschews sounds that can be misconstrued as the word for death and places great value in feng shui, the practice of arranging furniture and buildings just so, to bring happiness and good health. Some of the traditions are newer than others: It is the rare taxi driver in China who does not keep an image of Chairman Mao dangling from the rear-view mirror as a talisman against danger.
Even the Communist Party, which ostensibly swept away the opiate of the masses with its 1949 revolution, decided to inflect the Beijing Olympics with as many lucky eights as possible: starting them on Aug. 8, or 8-08-2008, with a start time of 8:08 p.m.
While there is no way to know for sure, the current leadership may have one eye on Chinese history, which has long linked political power to the divine, a concept known as the mandate of heaven. Emperors served with the blessing of the heavens, according to such thinking, and those who turned corrupt or insensitive to the needs of the people were drummed out of power after a spate of natural catastrophes. Whether the calamities signaled the end of a government or helped embolden its usurpers is open to interpretation.
Most Chinese can provide an earful about the ''curse of 1976,'' the year of the deaths of Mao, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and Gen. Zhu De, the head of the Red Army. It was also the year an earthquake struck the northeastern city of Tangshan, killing at least 240,000 people in one of the deadliest natural disasters in modern history.
Neil Schmid, a professor of Chinese religion at North Carolina State University who is a visiting scholar at Zhejiang University, said it was worth noting that the seismometer was invented by the Chinese in A.D. 132 as a way to detect tremors that might spell the end of a ruler's reign. Successive dynasties employed a master of esoterica who would record and interpret floods, famines and other disasters.
''Reading and understanding these aberrations in the natural world has always been a central aspect of Chinese culture,'' he said. ''Cosmic order and state legitimacy were inextricably linked.''
For China, 2008, while thanks to its eight is ostensibly a lucky year, has already brought a spate of unfortunate events. It began with a huge winter storm that stalled the nation's rail system, stranding millions before the Chinese New Year. Then came the rioting in Tibet. The crackdown that followed has prompted a torrent of protest and international ill will that has fouled what was meant to be a ''harmonious'' Olympics period. In recent weeks, the authorities in Beijing have been struggling with other calamities: an intestinal virus epidemic that started in central China and has killed 42 children, and a train collision that killed 72 passengers in eastern China.
Yiyan Wang, a professor of Chinese studies at the University of Sydney in Australia, said that even if the Communist Party leadership did not subscribe to superstitions, it was aware that many citizens did.The voyage of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to the disaster zone hours after the quake could be interpreted as sound public relations or, perhaps, an acknowledgment of age-old fears. ''The government knows many Chinese will see the quake as a sign that things are out of balance,'' she said.
It is the story of the invading toads that seems to have gained the most traction, at least on the Internet. It did indeed occur, in some form, in Mianzhu two days before the quake, and many residents reacted with terror, believing it to be a harbinger of bad things. In an interview on Sichuan television just before the quake, the director of Mianzhu's forestry bureau tried to calm residents by saying the mass migration was a normal part of the toad breeding season. The interview, posted on the Internet, has been provoking a torrent of angry remarks. At least 3,000 people have died in Mianzhu, and officials say another 4,500 are missing.
''Those seismological scientists are wasting taxpayer money,'' said one blogger, who suggested that all the bureau's employees resign. ''Raising some toads would be better than spending money on those seismological scientists.''
Ma Yi contributed research from Beijing.
