[apingsence:这里是两篇来自经济学家的报导，经济学家杂志主动的把中国大地震和缅甸风暴联系起来相比较，来显示两国政府对待自然灾害的不同态度。]
[apingsence:不能单单从文章的字面意思来解读所发生的现象，这和不同国家的处境，文化，经济水平等很多因素有关系。同时我们应该注意到这是美国的一个经济学杂志，我们应该同时把中缅对美国经济，外交，政 治的影响计算在内。] 评论：apingsence@理解计算
China's earthquake
Days of disaster
May 15th 2008 | BEIJING AND DUJIANGYAN
Two natural disasters; two very different responses. We look first at the government's response to the earthquake in China, then at poor Myanmar.
“DON'T cry, don't cry. It's a disaster, and you've survived,” China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, told weeping orphans in a town almost flattened by the country's worst natural disaster in more than 30 years. Mr Wen's awkward words may have done little to calm the bereaved children. But amid the huge destruction caused by the earthquake of May 12th, China's leaders thus far have scored some unusual public-relations successes.
Hampered by poor weather (at least for the first day or two) and the blocking of mountain roads by landslides, Chinese troops have been struggling to rescue thousands of people buried in rubble and to bring aid to stricken communities across a wide area of the southwest on the edge of the Tibetan plateau. Three days after the disaster, officials put the number of dead at around 20,000, most of them in Sichuan Province north of the provincial capital, Chengdu. With many trapped, the toll could reach 50,000, the government said.
In contrast with neighbouring Myanmar's lethargic and secretive handling of its cyclone ten days earlier, China responded to the earthquake rapidly and with uncharacteristic openness. Within hours Mr Wen was on a plane, President Hu Jintao was chairing an emergency meeting of the Politburo's Standing Committee and thousands of soldiers and police were being dispatched. After an initial deployment of 5,000 troops the number was ramped up to 100,000 within three days. The official media, often reticent about reporting bad news, rapidly updated casualty numbers. State-owned television provided non-stop coverage.
During China's second-deadliest natural disaster of recent years, flooding along the Yangzi River that killed thousands in 1998, officials barred foreign journalists from some affected areas and failed to update casualty figures for two weeks, before providing suspiciously low numbers. Even this year the government was slow to respond to a snow disaster that affected much of south and central China in January. It expelled foreign journalists from Tibetan-inhabited areas (including the part of Sichuan now worst affected by the earthquake) after an outbreak of anti-Chinese unrest in March.
Of course, covering up was not an option. China measured the earthquake at a magnitude of 7.8, a force so powerful that it sent panicky office workers running into streets as far away as Beijing, 1,500km (930 miles) to the north. But China's leaders are anxious to repair the public-relations damage they have suffered internationally as a result of the Tibet crisis. And they are keen to avoid the kind of criticism directed at Myanmar.
Foreign reporters have been allowed into affected areas without hindrance by officials. China welcomed foreign aid in the form of material and cash. Japan said it was sending an earthquake team. President Hu discussed the disaster in a telephone conversation with George Bush and thanked him for American offers of help. Amid nationwide shock at the scale of the disaster, a recent upsurge of anti-Western sentiment triggered by events in Tibet appears to be abating.
Since March no Politburo member has publicly visited Tibet. Comforting earthquake victims, however, presents few political risks.
Mr Wen has remained at the scene to direct relief operations. Chinese television showed residents muttering “Thank you, prime minister, thank you,” after he declared to one group that thousands of troops and police had been deployed. Some victims are angry, but their resentment is directed at local officials rather than the central authorities.
In Dujiangyan, a large town about 50km from the epicentre, a woman in her 50s complains that while some buildings collapsed, the government and party headquarters remained intact. “Corruption and supervision of construction work is a problem, a very big problem,” says another resident. “I hope they learn a lesson from this.” Even the state-owned media have said shoddy construction may have exacerbated the impact. Casualties at schools have been high, partly because many were in classrooms when the earthquake struck in the early afternoon, but partly too, parents suspect, because they were badly built.
Hundreds of children were buried at Dujiangyan's Xinjian Elementary School, where a four-storey building collapsed like a pack of cards. One young woman, whose son had been killed at the school, was frantically trying to find out where his body had been taken. At one point she stood in front of an ambulance, sobbing and demanding information. Police came and took her gently aside and told her they would try to find the name of the morgue. Several ambulances plied to and from the site, but the official media have reported the rescue of only 50 or so children. Mr Wen watched two of them being pulled from the rubble and wept at the sight, said one Chinese report.
The victims' torch song
Officials are worried about damage to dams upriver from Dujiangyan, closer to the epicentre. Xinhua, a government-controlled news agency, has said Dujiangyan would be “swamped” if the nearby Zipingpu dam were to suffer major problems. Cracks have appeared on the dam's surface and workshops at the site have collapsed. The dam was completed less than two years ago despite concerns raised at the time about building it so close to a seismic fault line.
The Chinese media note that the government's decision to allow prompt coverage follows the implementation on May 1st of new rules on “government information transparency”. Under these rules, the authorities are supposed to make public any information involving the “vital interests of citizens”. But political calculations are likely to have played a bigger role than the regulations themselves, which still allow information to be withheld if it relates to “state secrets”—a term applied sweepingly in China.
The Olympic games are a powerful incentive. The authorities rapidly decided to bow to public opinion and scale down the razzmatazz surrounding the parade of the Olympic torch through China in order to reflect the tragedy. Having at first suggested the torch ceremonies would continue as planned (they include a relay close to the disaster area next month), officials now say they will be “simplified” and combined with fund-raising for earthquake relief. A ritual that last month served as a red flag to China's critics may now be turned to much better use.
Myanmar's cyclone
The regime is satisfied
May 15th 2008 | JAKARTA AND YANGON
The junta lets a bit more aid in—but less than cyclone victims need
STARVING, homeless and vulnerable to infectious disease, the inhabitants of Myanmar's Irrawaddy delta must feel that things could hardly get worse. Almost a fortnight after cyclone Nargis struck, killing perhaps 130,000, the country's ruling military junta had not yet let in more than a trickle of humanitarian aid and was still barring most of the foreign aid workers and equipment needed to distribute it. Supplies were being delivered—or not delivered—at the whim of the army officer in charge of each district.
But unfortunately for the 2.5m or so survivors, things could indeed get worse. By midweek, heavy rains were hampering the meagre aid operations in the delta. And the outside world's attention and compassion was being diverted to the earthquake in China. A Russian rescue team quit Myanmar to offer its services in China, where they were welcomed.
Friends of the Burmese regime—China itself, India, Bangladesh and Thailand—were belatedly allowed to send a limited number of aid workers. Its arch-foe, America, was allowed to land military cargo planes in Yangon, the main city, this week. But the World Food Programme, the largest emergency-relief supplier, was managing to deliver less than one-fifth of the 375 tonnes of food a day that it reckons is needed on the ground.
The regime's leader, General Than Shwe, rebuffed repeated attempts by the United Nations' secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, to speak to him by telephone. Admiral Timothy Keating, the head of America's Pacific Command, and Thailand's prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, both visited Yangon to try to persuade the regime to let in a big international rescue mission like the one assembled after the 2004 tsunami. Neither succeeded.
Myanmar's state news media made a big fuss about the dribbles of aid the regime did provide—and even some that it did not: the army was caught sticking labels with the names of top generals on aid that had been provided by Thailand. The UN said it was worried about aid supplies being diverted by the regime, though it had no hard evidence of this. Demonstrating its priorities, the generals sent enough armed troops to man checkpoints to keep foreigners out of the delta. Some Burmese drove out in their cars from Yangon to try to offer whatever help they could to their compatriots.
On May 10th the junta went ahead, in areas unaffected by the disaster, with a sham referendum on a new constitution designed to entrench its rule. It hailed a triumphant turnout, though its widespread intimidation of voters, to make them vote “yes” and stop them from urging a “no” vote, will render the result—93% in favour—widely disbelieved. Even more absurdly, it is still talking of holding a vote on May 24th in the cyclone-hit areas.
Diplomats with access to the junta say it appears to be split between hardliners, led by General Than Shwe, who believe that the presence of foreigners will threaten their grip on power, and relative moderates—the most senior of whom is the junta's number three, Thura Shwe Mann—who recognise the gravity of the crisis and the need for international help.
European Union countries, meeting in Brussels, talked of getting aid to Myanmar by whatever means necessary. But they stopped short of backing an idea floated by France's foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, of invoking a UN principle of the “responsibility to protect”, which evolved in the 1990s and was adopted by the UN in 2005. This says that national sovereignty may be overridden in extreme circumstances (see article). Britain and Germany were said to support the idea but any proposal would probably be blocked by China at the UN Security Council. Oxfam, a British aid charity, expressed doubts over suggestions this week that aid could be parachuted into the delta without the regime's permission: its spokeswoman argued that in the past such air-drops proved hugely costly and often failed to reach the most vulnerable.
Mr Samak's efforts notwithstanding, the response from Myanmar's neighbours in the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has so far been feeble. ASEAN admitted Myanmar in 1997, telling the West that sanctions against the regime were not working and that “constructive engagement” would achieve more. To judge from the cyclone, it has not.
ASEAN is planning to discuss Myanmar's emergency on May 19th and is promising to form a “coalition of mercy” to aid the country. But whatever, if anything, it decides, will be too little and too late.
The region's leaders, like the Chinese, are afraid that any intervention would set a precedent for outside meddling in their own affairs. Some are also loth to risk their considerable business interests in Myanmar. The $200m that the UN has appealed for, to finance aid to Myanmar, is a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars of foreign-exchange reserves the ASEAN members have stacked up. If ASEAN's leaders had quickly and publicly pledged substantial aid, even if it had not immediately been accepted, it might have shamed the regime into moving a bit further than it has. One of the many aid workers stuck in Bangkok this week, pleading with the Burmese embassy to grant him a visa, argued that by leaving so many people to die unattended, the regime was committing a crime against humanity. If so, that makes the country's self-interested neighbours accessories after the fact.
