What a Shame! The Portrait of an Unprecise "Olympic Host" -- Chinese
Quake Toll, 69,172, Is Just a Guess / NY Times

The New York Times

June 18, 2008

Chinese Quake Toll, 69,172, Is Just a Guess
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI ― For weeks after the devastating earthquake that struck
Sichuan Province last month, the public grew accustomed to a grim daily
ritual as the Chinese government provided precise daily updates on the
rising numbers of dead and missing.

In the past few days, the updates have all but stopped, frozen for now
with grim precision at the figure 69,172. Behind this seeming clarity,
however, lies a far messier reality.

Officials involved in the data collection quietly acknowledge that the
publicly available death toll is little more than a rough guess of the
number of people killed in the May 12 earthquake.

In some ways, China’s response to the disaster was a break with past
practices of secrecy and tight government control. Chinese journalists
reported from the scene with unaccustomed freedom in the early days
after the quake, and volunteer workers and donations poured into Sichuan
Province from all over the country, as well as from abroad,
demonstrating a kind of civic activism new to China.

In other respects, though, the crisis has revealed a country ill
prepared for a major emergency, with an emergency response system unused
to satisfying the public’s hunger for information.

Few matters highlighted these shortcomings more than the process of
accounting for the dead and the missing. Methods of tallying the two
categories varied widely from place to place. In some localities, the
toll was ascertained through body counts, other direct physical evidence
or witness accounts. In other areas, mostly guesswork prevailed.

“On the one hand, we count bodies, and on the other hand, we look at the
numbers of people one would expect to find somewhere in normal times,
like at a school for example,” said Song Ming, Communist Party secretary
of Beichuan County, one of the hardest-hit areas. “We deduct from the
usual number of people the number of bodies found, and the rest are
counted as missing people. It’s easy to count a school, but very
difficult to count residents.”

Ms. Song said the county’s death toll stood at 15,600 people, of whom
the identities of only 9,000 had been confirmed.

In nearby Wenchuan County, the story was similar.

“Over 15,000 people died here, but only a few thousand identities could
be confirmed,” said Wang Wen, who is in charge of the tally.

Speaking of the dead, he added: “Nobody knows who they were, how old
they were, or where they came from. Many of the dead were construction
workers, beekeepers or people who were foraging for herbs in the
mountains because the wildflowers had just started to bloom.”

Related to questions about the numbers has been the issue of
identification of the dead. Although some individuals, companies and
local governments created Web pages that served as places to seek or
post information about the missing, there is no central clearinghouse of
information about the dead, and there have been no published lists.

Officials in some localities say they have compiled lists but are unsure
about whether they have the authority to publish them.

Wang Zhenyao, director of disaster relief at the Ministry of Civil
Affairs, insisted that the failure to publish names was “an issue of
management, and not a question of secrecy.”

Some have criticized this as a failure of both public policy and
openness, however.

“If you are promoting the idea of putting people first, you need to
publish a list with the names of the confirmed dead,” said Zhou
Xiaozheng, a sociology professor at Renmin University. “This is basic
information, and it should be made open, as a matter of right.”

Most of the earthquake zone consisted of rural areas whose working-age
residents often migrate to distant cities in search of work. For those
separated from family members, the dearth of information has been
excruciating. Many have taken out advertisements or placed notices on
Internet bulletin boards seeking information about the disappeared, and
have felt deep frustration.

One migrant, Huang Qingsong, returned to Sichuan after the earthquake to
help his family search for his 17-year-old cousin. The cousin’s name has
appeared on privately compiled lists on the Internet as one of the dead,
but the local government in Beichuan, where her school collapsed, still
lists her as missing. Mr. Huang said the family had visited every
hospital in the area.

“The government simply doesn’t know,” he said.

Remarkably, officials and Chinese experts in relief operations say the
idea of creating a hot line or information clearinghouse had occurred to
virtually no one at the height of the emergency response phase, and even
now has not been done.

“This is something the state should have done, and it’s very simple to
do,” said Wang Angsheng of the National Disaster Relief Center at the
Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Fan Wenxin and Shi Jing contributed reporting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/18/world/asia/18toll.html