NATURAL DISASTERS are often social catastrophes as well. So it is in China after the Sichuan earthquake, the worst to hit the country since 1976. Up to 70,000 people may have died and five million are homeless as a result, as yesterday's moving ceremonies in China and throughout the world recalled.
Alongside the heroism shown by individual searchers, survivors and emergency rescue teams of troops, and the highly focused activism and concern of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao and his government, there is the awful grief of relatives and parents. The authorities have much to worry about as and when grief turns to anger over the starkly different impact of the disaster on poorer people compared to certain elites.
This reality has been most forcibly brought home in the estimated 7,000 classrooms which have collapsed, killing probably tens of thousands of children. A report in today's newspaper portrays the scene at Fuxing no 2 primary school, now a pile of rubble surrounded by intact office buildings. "Look at this! A natural disaster I could understand, I could live with. But this was negligence. It's only dust holding this building together. The offices are still standing, but the school collapsed", said one grieving father whose only son perished. Another pointed out that, all too typically, the school had no steel beams and was built of inferior brick, unlike the adjacent administrative offices.
It matters little in the wake of this disaster that the schools were built and functioned effectively to cater for millions of children whose families hoped to see them escape from rural poverty - if only as migrant wage slaves in the country's newly industrialising eastern provinces. What will be remembered is how so many only children died when they could have survived in better built schools in a known earthquake zone. China's single child policy bears directly on the tragedy because such parents have lost not only their loved ones but their future security in a society that still relies so much on inter-generational family solidarity. Corruption, penny-pinching, discrimination and oversights by party officials, builders and architects will be highlighted as never before in a much more active Chinese media which has been less willing to accept censorship.
The earthquake disaster is therefore likely to stimulate the gradual but definite emergence of real politics in China. This can be seen in the immediate response of its top communist party leadership, who have mobilised the massive and impressive rescue operation, especially from the armed forces. Media coverage has been more open and free-ranging, despite official efforts to play down criticisms and protests in favour of (quite justifiable) stories about heroic rescues and individual tragedies. The ruling party's wellsprings of political legitimacy will be replenished by this patriotic activism; but that will rapidly require that they are also seen to deal with the endemic injustices and inequalities exposed by the tragedy. The rule of law, due administrative process and prompt action against abuses will be demanded more and more and will command increasing popular support.