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Earthquake gives Beijing a wobblyPosted by Jeremy Goldkorn on Tuesday, July 4, 2006 at 7:06 PM
Today at lunchtime, an earthquake gave the office workers of Beijing a little wobble, although apparently nobody at ground level noticed the ground moving beneath their feet. A few hours later, Xinhua released this report -- the English and Chinese versions came out simultaneously:
An earthquake measuring 5.1 degrees on the Richter scale jolted a county in north China's Hebei Province at 11:56 a.m. (Beijing Time) Tuesday, according to the State Seismological Bureau (SSB). Coming a few days after the proposal of a an absurd law that could result in fines for news media that report "sudden" news items without approval (see Danwei story: Draft bill: Breaking news stories to be illegal), this earthquake provoked a storm of mobile phone text messages and MSN conversations amongst Chinese media circles. The Big One would hit Beijing at 2pm, said one rumor, later revised to 5 pm, and then 7 pm, as the rumored Big One stubbornly refused to arrive. Which made clear a point about the recent proposed law that threatens to fine news media for reporting 'unauthorized' stories about breaking events: The function of news media during a time of emergency is to gather as many facts as possible and present a version of the truth that is better researched than casual text messages. Any law that hinders the process of sorting the facts from the rumors is a bad law. The image reproduced above is taken from Xujin's blog post: it's a map made from Google Earth that shows the distance from Beijing to the earthquake's epicenter. Links and Sources
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Comments on Earthquake gives Beijing a wobbly
All the authorities are trying to do is stopping damaging rumour going into print - I don't think they need to worry. I've had 5 readers at my blog today (apart from the 25 moderator visits, the 7 bored phone company call centre staff visits, the 25hrs a day 8 days a week intel monitoring and a vicious loon from N.Z. - nobody that matters has time for the goldfish tank of the internet..
So "news" only means "yesterday" after our approval?
Is that really news then?
Why would everyone only want to know yesterdays news?
That's China for you, but in Europe, their working on "tomorrows News Today"!
Yes, it's using a time machine, to forecast events. All this is top secret, classified and eyes only material.
So you see, either way, the only news common people get, is whatever their experience in the moment!