My Sadness - An Injustice of Olympic Proportions

I have lived in Shanghai now since the turn of the century and during that time I have learned to love China..well at least Shanghai. I have been a staunch defender of a central government because I have seen how democracy is fundamentally flawed. I have watched the Bush Administration democratically elected twice, deceive their voters, rig the election and plunge the country into another pointless war. I thought to myself that there must be a better way and I thought, at least for a while, that China was getting it right.

When I compared the Sichuan Quake to Hurricane Katrina, I saw the huge difference between a government that worked and one that didn't but since then, one thing has undone much of the trust I placed in China. It's not the Olympics and they way they are handling security. It's not Tibet, and it's not even the fact that folk here don't have a vote. It is the way that grieving parents of children lost in the school collapses have been brushed aside.

For a moment, I thought they were on track. Premier Wen was at ground zero in less than a day to provide direction and comfort. The PLA were airdropped in to provided rescue teams in isolated locations. They managed to divert rivers and ease damaged dams that had the potential to wash entire communities a way. As I watched this unfold I thought to myself, this is how you bring a nation together. The country banded together and billions of yuan were collected to provide relief and to aid in the reconstruction. Foreign media were given access and foreign aid was gratefully recieved. They even announced that they would investigate why so many schools collapsed when neighbouring buildings did not crumble.

I recall in one account, an entire class was trapped under the rubble. You could hear them crying and to keep their spirits up the class began to sing. After two days the singing stopped. When a read that report I cried. Now just writing about it, my eyes are already welling with tears.

So I waited. I waited for the investigation. I waited for parents to be told that someone along the line had messed up. Maybe it was corruption or maybe it was just error in judgment but I waited for the government I had learned to trust, the government that had given me hope that there was something better than anarchy would step forward and say "here is the evidence, and here are our findings and here is the reason why an entire generation of children in Sichuan are gone."

Instead I read this, this and this.

I remember when Sydney got the Olympics I was in my final year of Uni and when in 2000 they held the Sydney Games I was already in Shanghai. It was truly a happy affair. I could feel Australia's pride from half way around the world.

In 14 days the Beijing Olympics should have also been a proud moment for my ancestral country. China should have been able to say that they pulled together in a time of crisis and and matured as a nation and celebrated the Beijing Games with their heads held high.

Instead, I will remember 2008 as the year China put a sporting event ahead of justice. I will remember this year as the year that some bureaucrat profited from the death of tens of thousands of school children and got away with it. At the beginning of August, the rubble from the collapsed schools will be cleared away. I hope and pray that the evidence that is needed to bring justice has already been collected.

As a final note (and I know the good folk at the GFW are reading this) I understand that this is a time when the world is watching China and it is not the time to air dirty laundry. I don't believe that you are evil, and deep down in the most primeval depth of my heart I hope that an investigation did take place, the criminals found and quietly dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. I know this is something you are capable of and if ever there was a time to exercise this power, now is the time.

Chinese Whispers

I like to think of myself as someone in touch with technology but in reality I am just someone who likes to watch. I like to watch what people buy. I like to watch what people are tweeting and I like to think that I am part of that community of people who talk about internet startups, widgets, web 2.0 and social media, but in reality I am a just a voyeur with a keyboard.

Yesterday I started to watch the discussion on the earthquake in Sichuan. My interest came from my Ayi who has still not been able to contact her parents and her brother in Beichuan. What she knows is that her village was flattened and that the roads are too bad to reach her village and that it is unlikely that her parents survived the quake. To me, this struck a little too close to home. Here is the person whom I employ to look after my child, potentially losing her family. Luckily she was able to get a message from her own daughter and sister via sms and they are okay.

So this twitter phenomenon kind of happened because I wanted to collect as much news as possible so that when I got home I could hopefully bring her some news. Rather than cutting and pasting the links I read, I started retweeting posts from people who had found articles, images or eyewitness accounts so that I could just feed my twitter feed into Google Reader and have all those links in one place.

What I found was that as I was retweeting, people were noticing and then retweeting what I was retweeting. Some people referred to me as live blogging from China and more people started following. I found that strange but then I realised that this was a game of Chinese Whispers where those who heard me and pass on what they heard, so I kept on retweeting people kept on following.

Kaiser who blogs at http://digitalwatch.ogilvy.com.cn/en/ mentioned that there is some discussion about twitter breaking the earthquake story and Robert Scoble also wrote something in his blog about twitter but in reality I was following 3 maybe 4 people actually in Chengdu who were tweeting in English and others who were just scanning the various news sources that actually had journalist at the scene.

I got an email from someone from Aljazeera asking to speak to me about the situation in China and I thought to myself that what I was doing in China today, I could have done in Sydney or San Francisco or from my PDA on a beach in Phuket.

So at the end of the day, It was nice to be noticed for a day but all I really did was emulate what Google Reader already does and that was to aggregate what I was reading and then posting it on another feed. As for twitter, I love what it is, and what it is is just a broadcast sms service delivered over the internet where people share what they are doing, and as a watcher or voyeur, what I have seen is that most people spend a lot of their time just surfing the internet and then letting people know what they have read.

It was an interesting, emotional and thought provoking day today. I'll see you all tomorrow and I will be watching.