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Chinese campaign reports quake victims

Background: On May 12, 2008, an earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale shook China’s Sichuan province, killing at least 68,000 people. Among the stories of grief and outrage that emerged afterwards was the large number of schools destroyed by the earthquake and the children that died within them. Unlike surrounding buildings, many of which survived, the schools were particularly vulnerable because of shoddy workmanship. These “tofu-dregs schoolhouses,” a result of corruption that siphoned off construction money, meant that the buildings which should have been the more earthquake resistant were in fact the least. Despite outrage, there was little official response from the Chinese government.

Shortly after the quake, prominent Chinese artist and blogger Ai Weiwei visited the quake site and blogged about what he saw, particularly parents who had lost their child. As a result of these posts, readers of his blog volunteered to help him create a list of all the children who had died.

Tools: blogs, citizen journalists crowd-sourcing data collection offline

Crowd-sourcing + self-publishing : On December 15, 2008 Ai formally announced a campaign to collect the names of all children who had died in the quake before the one-year anniversary on in May 2009. Volunteers went out to the towns and villages affected and interviewed school officials and the parents of children who were killed. On his blog, Ai recorded both the results of the investigation and the stories of how it was carried out. In one poignant anecdote, a volunteer is stone-walled when seeking the names of deceased students from an elementary school principal. “We just are trying to find the truth!,” says the volunteer, frustrated. “The government has already announced the truth,” replies the principal. (This anecdote was translated by China Digital Times, an excellent resource for information about this campaign.)

Censored: In April and May, as the quake anniversary approached, the administrator of Ai’s blog began deleting his posts on the project. Two actions were taken to combat this censorship. First, the list was moved to a server outside of China. Also, according to Professor Xiao Qiang, other bloggers began to mirror the censored data on their own sites, in order to discourage the take-downs.

Result: The campaign succeeded in collecting and publishing the names of 7,605 students who had been killed. In addition, the Chinese government finally released its own list of 5,205 names shortly before the anniversary deadline, probably a result of pressure from Ai’s grassroots movement.

Implications: The most critical element of this campaign is the synergy between online and offline efforts. For every blog post or new name added to the list, there was the work of a volunteer (many of whom were detained) heading out into the towns of Sichuan with a camera and notepad. Without Ai’s blog, which acted as an alternative information channel, the names of the students could not have been published. But the digital element was only part of the campaign – the final step, in fact. Social media can simplify many of the tasks of activism (in the time it takes to call one person you can email thousands), but campaigns in which activists use the internet as an excuse to sit back in their armchairs are unlikely to succeed.

image source: wikimedia