Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

Front Page of the Day is a daily review of the news on the front page of one Chinese newspaper. Beijing newspapers are obtained from newsstands in the CBD; front pages from other cities are found on the web.

The top headline of today's The Beijing News announces a revised death toll estimate from the rescue headquarters of the State Council: possibly up to 50,000 dead. Meanwhile, some sources says that 19,509 people had been confirmed dead in Sichuan Province by 4 PM yesterday. This is the fourth earthquake supplement issue of The Beijing News and it includes new details and shocking photos from the front lines.

The front page picture shows PLA soldiers and paramedics transporting survivors. The caption reads "Racing Against Death."

Other front page headlines:

• CNN President Jim Walton has apologized for commentator Jack Cafferty's insulting remarks on China.

• According to a spokesman of the Beijing Seismological Bureau, there will be no destructive earthquakes in Beijing in the near future.

• A farm truck loaded with 42 people fell into a river while attempting to cross a bridge in Guiding, Guizhou Province. 29 people were killed and 13 injured in the accident.

In other papers, the Mirror answers a pressing question regarding Beijing's legions of Sichuanese establishments: will they be affected by the earthquake? The answer: restaurants are now sourcing raw materials from Chongqing instead of Chengdu, so you don't have to worry that your supply of kung-pao chicken will be interrupted.

Related to yesterday's post, MSN together with Toyota (Guangzhou) has launched a one-for-one donation campaign. For every MSN Messenger user that changes their screen-name to "(R) 彩虹连心 支援灾区" [trans (rough): Rainbow of United Hearts, Supporting & Assisting the Disaster Area], MSN will donate RMB 0.10 toward the effort to rebuild schools and the local education system in Sichuan / Wenchuan; Toyota matches MSN's donations.

Link here for details about the campaign. At the time of publishing, the campaign had already raised / donated RMB 160,047.60 [800,238 users x 0.20]. Digital corporate social responsibility, bravo!

CCTV footage showing PLA soldiers assembling pontoon bridges to give access to Wenchuan to transport relief workers and supplies.

A message from a friend:

My mother is somewhere near the epicenter and I have had no news from her. On may 12 at 12:30, she left Maoxian to go to Diexihaizi or possibly from Wenquan to Mao County. She was on a Sichuan Airport Tour Operator bus with the plate 川A14042 or 川U23367. There were 61 tourists on 2 buses, 4 tour guides and 2 drivers. The tour group included peniosners from Pinghu in Zhejiang.



Please contact quake@danwei.org if you have any news from Mao County

我妈妈在震中附近一直没消息 具体情况 十二日12点半在茂县去叠溪海子路上或从汶川到茂县路上 四川空港旅行社 车号川A14042
川U23367 车上61个游客四个导游两个司机 来自浙江平湖的老年旅行团 有茂县消息麻烦告诉我


 -quake@danwei.org

Front Page of the Day is a daily review of the news on the front page of one Chinese newspaper. Beijing newspapers are obtained from newsstands in the CBD; front pages from other cities are found on the web.

The headline of today's Beijing Times announces that the death toll has risen to 14,866, and the government has ordered more troops into disaster area to join the rescue effort. According to the article, more than 100,000 soldiers and People's Armed Ppolce officers have are searching and rescuing victims there. Although rescue workers have entered all affected counties, there are still a few isolated villages that they have not reached yet.

The front page picture shows paratroopers jumping out of the hatch near Mao County, Chongqing yesterday.

Other articles include:

• The Civil Affairs Ministry said more than 877 million yuan in earthquake relief donations had been received as of 4 pm, May 13.

• A spokesman of China Banking Regulatory Commission said yesterday that all remittance for the earthquake relief purposes will not be charged any transaction fees.

MSN China has initiated an MSN Messenger campaign allowing Chinese netizens to express their "prayers and blessings" toward the "Sichuan / Wenchuan earthquake disaster area" by changing their MSN signatures to display a rainbow (see photo below). This campaign follows in the footsteps of the recent "(L) China" MSN / QQ IM campaign, covered in detail by Shanghaiist.

According to MSN, the rainbow represents hope and a good things to come: "We [MSN] believe that there is always a rainbow after the wind and rain."

Participation in the campaign only requires adding an "(R)" before your MSN Messenger screen-name. For detailed instructions and the text from which the above quotes are translated, link here (in Chinese).

The earthquake in Sichuan has displaced the Burmese cyclone disaster from the news and invites grim death toll comparisons. Unfortunately, the Burmese government is showing no ability to cope with the disaster on their own, nor are they allowing much outside help in.

In this post, we publish two eye witness accounts of the cyclone disaster sent to Danwei by a Burmese citizen and by an American in Rangoon / Yangon. Both must remain anonymous for obvious reasons.

The second article by the American describes the storm and goes into some detail about the aftermath, including the author's attempts to distribute aid in the countryside outside of Rangoon.

Below is an extract about one such aid mission from the American's account; it explains the photograph reproduced above (taken by the author):

We passed one village en route that had a small red cross flag in a shack with many people waiting outside. Our convoy stopped and we found out they were distributing a very small amount of rice and milk to the villagers. This was a good place to donate some of our goods. As soon as we stopped a crowd of several hundred came around us and we began to fear a riot. In the chaos, we tried to organize the distribution.

In the midst of all this we suddenly found a soldier and perhaps military informant filming us. One had a video camera and the other was taking stills. This was more harassment to prevent aid from getting through, and at first sight of them (we had later realized they'd been tailing us for some time on motorbike), half our party stayed in the cars for fear of having their faces picked up and sent to who knows where else. The image of the authorities doing nothing to help starving and homeless people but instead pushing them aside to film us was burned into my mind.

Thanks for worrying about me and people from Burma. No one thought that this would happen in Burma. It was the first time in Burma at least within 70 years.

My mom said that was the first time in her life that she had seen the wind like this.

It was about 00:10 and we all were asleep though one of my friends had told me that a cyclone could come to Rangoon. We thought that it would be only like 50-70 mph as the weather report from the government-run media. Then, we heard the sound of wind.
Taking the roofs one by one. The palm trees were about to fall down and all of the mangoes from the tree falling down. We had been thinking that it would go away and get weaker within a couple of hours.

By 3:30 in the morning, the roof of my neighbors and the satellite dish were falling down. I was asleep when I heard the sound of "Buunnggg" from my roof. I could see outside from the window of my bedroom. The sky was like someone dropped red ink on it. It was light like dawn though it was only 3:30 in the morning. I got message from my friend that a big storm was in Irrawaddy Division with a speed of over 100 mph. We knew that people from that area would be crushed away.

About 5:30 in the morning, one of my neighbor's roof was totally gone and there were trees and leaves on the road. We all were praying to stop the storm. But our prayers weren't heard by the heaven. About 6:30 I heard my mom crying for us to come and shut the windows. I heard my sisters shouting to get some cloth to mop up water. The wind was blowing U-turn. From 00:10 to 05:30, the wind was blowing east to west and at 06:30 the wind was west to east. All the trees were falling down and there was heavy rain with the wind. Some families were soaked in their houses and there was nothing they could do.

Your correspondent has just received the below SMS (translation):

"Send the number "1" or the number "2" to 1069999301 to donate 1 or 2 RMB, respectively, to the Chinese Red Cross earthquake relief effort fund."

I have not confirmed that this as a legitimate donation method. Lively debate about it can be found here (in Chinese) with opinions going both ways. If anyone has the official word on this, please share.

Front Page of the Day is a daily review of the news on the front page of one Chinese newspaper. Beijing newspapers are obtained from newsstands in the CBD; front pages from other cities are found on the web.

The Sichuan earthquake made the front page of virtually every newspaper in China today, leaving editors with the difficult task of coming up with visually distinctive yet tasteful layouts using the same Xinhua photos that all other newspapers had access to.

Some highlights:

- The Chinese Business View went with an all-black front page.

- Life Daily ran a full-page photo of a victim waiting to be extracted from the rubble, with the headline "Resolute China."

- And pictured here is the front-page of today's Shenyang Evening News, which features Premier Wen Jiabao visiting an injured child in Mianyang, Sichuan. The headline takes the slogan shouted during sports events and the Olympic torch relay, "Go China!" (加油中国) and turns it into a rallying cry for the rescue effort.

Compare this design to the that of today's People's Daily, which took a similar photo of Wen Jiabao visiting some children and inserted it into a layout that's particularly uninspired, even for that newspaper. Even the Overseas Edition, which used the same photo as Shenyang Evening News, is much, much better.

Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).

State TV on Speed: On the Newsweek blog, Jonathan Ansfield writes about the pressure on CCTV to keep up with their colleagues in other Chinese media organizations and the unprecedented transparency of the government's handling of media during this earthquake crisis.

CCTV International brings new lows in top priorities: CCTV International still follows protocol in its nightly news-cast, leading with a bizarre phone call between Hu Jintao and US President Bush, reports Hugh Jorgen at the Zhongnanhai blog.

• This BBC story has comprehensive coverage of the latest information coming from the earthquake affected areas in Sichuan.

• A team from America's National Public Radio happened to be in Chengdu when the quake occurred, and they are keeping a blog here. You can also listen to a radio segment called Producer Andrea Hsu on a changed reporting trip. It includes recordings of a rather cool and collected Melissa Block who was conducting an interview in a church when the earthquake struck, and other reportage from the immediate aftermath of the Sichuan quake.

• Shanghaiist is keeping tabs on most English and some Chinese language sources of information on this page. They have also published a guide to donating money to the Chinese Red Cross for relief for the victims, and a list of dates and places where people in Shanghai can give blood for use in Sichuan.

The Bookworm English bookstores in Beijing, Suzhou and Chengdu are also collecting donations of cash, clothing, tents and emergency blankets; take your donations there on or before this Saturday.

• ESWN has a massive gallery of of photos of the after effects and victims of the quake.

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CCTV segment showing Wen Jiabao with a loudhailer encouraging victims of the earthquake in Sichuan (Chinese only).

In the wake of the Sichuan earthquake tragedy, your correspondent has received a flurry of emails from concerned colleagues and friends in China about earthquake survival. The below is taken from two such emails. (Your correspondent is by no means an expert on earthquake survival, please heed the advice at your own risk.)

- Yesterday evening, an email arrived containing a bilingual listing of earthquake survival tips from an article originally written in 2004 by Doug Copp, the Rescue Chief and Disaster Manager of the American Rescue Team International, titled "Triangle of Life'. Click here for the full bilingual text.

- This afternoon, I received a Chinese language email titled 'Where should you hide during an earthquake? Not where you were taught!' with these labeled photos attached:

The above photo illustrates what one should during an earthquake if caught in a bedroom, suggesting that lying between the bookshelf and the bed, or between the bed and the sofa (or between any two reasonably elevated objects) is safest, as opposed to lying underneath the bed or crouching inside the clothing cabinet / closet.

The photo above suggests that space is created / preserved between "sturdy furniture" and "ceiling beams" when ceilings collapses.

Danwei Picks is a daily digest of the "From the Web" links found on the Danwei homepage. A feed for the links as they are posted throughout the day is available at Feedsky (in China) or Feedburner (outside China).

Chinese diving star pregnant, out of Olympics: From China Sports Today:

In a bombshell for the Chinese diving team, one of China's biggest sports stars, two-time gold medal-winning diver Guo Jingjing, is pregnant and leaving the national team.

However, this CCTV report quotes a National Diving Team spokesperson who denies the rumors.

The transparent China translator: At Paper Republic, Bruce Humes interviews Li Jihong, the mainland translator of Kite Runner:

[O]n the whole, Li Ji-Hong tends to avoid the approach used by Hosseini when he wrote "Kite Runner." Rather than citing the foreign term using English letters or transliterating it into Chinese, the translator uses easily grasped - even run-of-the-mill spoken Chinese - to convey quintessentially Afghan traits and customs. At times, the result is so mundane that one wonders if the reader might not get the impression that Afghan life, or at least the speech of its inhabitants, is rather similar to "ours," i.e., we Chinese.

Front Page of the Day is a daily review of the news on the front page of one Chinese newspaper. Beijing newspapers are obtained from newsstands in the CBD; front pages from other cities are found on the web.

Today's Southern Metropolis Daily ran a special edition about the Sichuan earthquake. A few changes were made on the front page design to cope with this special occasion.

On the top, the usually garish red-and-yellow-colored masthead "Southern Metropolis Daily" gave way to the headline reading "Shock China" (震撼中国) printed in big, bold, black type. The masthead has retreated to the top right corner and was printed in a size much smaller than usual.

The big photo in the middle shows a father trying to identify his child from a line of dead bodies. The news is about a middle school in Dujiangyan, Sichuan Province where students were buried by the ruins of a collapsed school building. There were more than four hundred students in class when the earthquake happened; over 50 of them have already been confirmed dead. A detailed account in English can be found here.

At the top of the photo, the number of the death toll: 9,219 screams for attention in a stark white color against the dark background.

Down at the bottom, an area usually reserved for clients who pay top rates for a page-one advertisement, still contains an advertisement, but it has been craftily tempered to look less distasteful and more appropriate for the solemn aura of the whole page:

The ad reads: "Feel for the victims. Rebuild homes. Baoli Real Estate holding hands with South Metropolis launching a big emergency earthquake relief action."

On May 5, the Chutian Metropolis Daily, newspaper based in Hubei Province, reported about a pond that suddenly "disappeared."

On the morning of April 26, water in a big pond in Enshi, a city about 400 km away from the provincial capital Wuhan, suddenly whirled downward, accompanied by a loud noise. Within four hours, about 80 thousand tons of water drained away.

The picture above shows the dried-up pond. A second photo shows a farmer holding a big fish that he caught from the drained pond.

According to local document records, the phenomenon has occurred several times over the past decades. The pond drained in 1949, when the People's Republic of China was established, in 1976, the year when the Tangshan Earthquake caused over a quarter of a million deaths, the Cultural Revolution ended, and Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong both passed away, and again in 1989, the year of the Tian'anmen student demonstrations.

On May 10, the West China Metropolis Daily, a Sichuan-based newspaper, reported that masses of toads were migrating from their usual habitats in Mianyang, Sichuan Province. Lots of them were run over by passing vehicles as they attempted to cross the streets. The newspaper cited the director of the local Forestry Department, who said that the phenomena was entirely normal and in fact indicated that the local environment was improving.

The toads shown in the photo here are from Jiangsu, where their appearance is not normal at all. They're reportedly looking for a more habitable environment because their former living quarters are short of oxygen.

To predict an earthquake is still extremely tricky for modern science, even more so when social consequences have to be considered. But after every disaster, in hindsight there seems to have been signs that passed unheeded.

Are they total coincidences, or warnings from nature?

Graham Earnshaw was the Daily Telegraph correspondent in Beijing from 1980 to 1984, and he's been looking through his clippings, which seem to prove both that China has changed completely and also that China has stayed exactly the same. This spring and summer, Danwei will be publishing a series of these reports from the past. This is today's resurrected item:

The survivors of the Tangshan earthquake in northeast China in 1976 which killed a quarter of a million people are still living in terror of a repetition of the disaster.

Before the quake hit on that hot summer's night in July 1976, Tangshan had been just another Chinese coal mining town with a population of about one million.

But in a few seconds, the power of the earthquake, measuring 7.8 on the Richter scale, destroyed over 90 per cent of the city's buildings and left 248,000 people dead and dying.

It was by far the biggest natural disaster this century, and the horror of it for those who experienced it first hand will never be wiped off their memories.

Tangshan was closed to foreigners for seven years following the disaster, and foreign journalists have only just been allowed to visit the city to find out what really happened.

Mr Yao Guangqing, a city official now involved in reconstruction work, gave a vivid description of his experience during the quake:

"The weather was very hot and close for a few days before the earthquake, and dogs and chickens refused to go inside buildings.

"There was no forecast, no sign that this was going to happen, but there was a noticeable change in people's behaviour.

"The evening before the quake, there was an outdoor film show, and it took more than four hours to run the entire movie. people were very restless, and the film had to be stopped many times due to fights breaking out amongst the audience.

"As I walked home, I passed a fish pond and noticed the fish jumping up out of the water, indicating that the ground temperature had risen very high.

"That night, I couldn't sleep, and I lay in bed, just dozing. suddenly I was woken by a bright flash in the sky and the room was brilliantly lit as if by lightning. there was a roaring sound like a very big wind except that the air was still, and intermittent sounds of explosions. Then a great shaking motion began, up and down.

"I was shocked awake by the light, shook my wife awake and spent a long time looking for my slippers. it is my custom to put my slippers on when i get out of bed.

"By the time i reached the door, the up-and-down rolling motion had begun, and the building was rocking so much, i couldn't get the door open. I went back and clung to the bed. Outside the window, the trees were swinging back and forwards crazily.

"When the rolling motion finished less than a minute later, I opened the door and ran into the courtyard and found that all the buildings around had collapsed."

The Tangshan coal mines, once owned and run by a British company, are amongst the biggest in China, and 2,200 miners were underground when the quake struck.

A total of 1,951 miners died, but ironically, every single one of those underground made it the surface alive. most miners died in their beds at home, a few died when buildings at the mine collapsed on them.

As more news of destruction caused by yesterday's earthquake emerges, Xinhua says the death toll has reached nearly 10,000.

The figure may climb as more remote parts of mountainous western Sichuan are reached by rescue teams. President Hu Jintao has declared emergency relief of affected areas a national priority, the People's Liberation Army is being mobilized, and Premier Wen Jiabao is on the scene again rallying the citizens.

Xinhua has a special page updated with earthquake news here.

Today's Life News, a Yunnan newspaper, reported on its front page about a Yunnan lawyer who has launched a lawsuit against CNN and its commentator Jack Cafferty. This is latest of a string of similar legal actions both in China and abroad.

The lawyer, Wu Kaiguo, filed a lawsuit with the Kunming Intermediate Court demanding a public apology by CNN on the “international mainstream media”, and one yuan in damages. In an interview with the newspaper, the lawyer denied that self-promotion played any part in his motivation.

Beijing Youth Daily today ran an article about a lawyer who sued CNN in the US with similar complaints. He announced that he would drop the lawsuit and end his representation of the plaintiffs on May 10. No reason was given in the article for the lawyer's withdrawal.

On April 24, the lawyer filed a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit in Manhattan on behalf of his two clients: a retired Beijing elementary school teacher Li Lilan and a Chinese American beautician Lydia Leung.

In response to the lawsuit, CNN issued an statement on May 6 but people disagree on whether the statement qualifies as an apology.

According to the article, one of the two plaintiffs, Ms. Leung, hadn't been notified by the lawyer of the withdrawal, but she pledged that she would carry out the lawsuit. A man named Huang Keqiang, who is a leader in the Chinese American community, said he would also join the suit.

Note: The photo of the woman that takes up most of the front page is about a successful sex change operation, headlined "He becomes she".