The PEN Report: Creativity and Constraint in Today’s China
2011, killing 40 people and injuring nearly 200, the tragedy played out from beginning to end on the weibos. Just before the crash, a young girl looking out her window was alarmed to see one of the high-speed trains inching over a viaduct after a powerful storm. “I hope nothing happens to it,” she posted on her Sina Weibo account. Moments later, a second train rammed it from behind. Almost immediately, messages began to emanate from inside the trains. A passenger posted a message reporting a blackout on the train and “two strong collisions”; minutes later, another passenger sent out the first call for help. That message was reportedly reposted 100,000 times.55 Chinese authorities responded to the accident by falling back on old habits, literally trying to bury cars from one of the stricken trains and control press coverage. China’s Central Propaganda Department issued a directive ordering journalists not to question or elaborate on official accounts or to investigate the cause of the accident. Instead, journalists were to focus on the special interest side of the story: “The major theme for the Wenzhou bullet train case from now on,” the directive said, “will be known as ‘great love in the face of great tragedy.’”56 The propaganda effort could not withstand the groundswell of weibo revelations and accusations. Users posted photos of the clumsy effort to bury the wreckage and alleged a cover-up; authorities backpedaled and excavated the train. When weibo posts revealed that local bureaucrats had warned lawyers not to take the cases of families of victims without permission from the government, authorities were forced to reverse course again.57 Such successes reverberated through traditional and new media. As major Chinese Internet portals removed links to news reports and videos, and newspapers censored reporters’ articles, people took to the weibos to criticise the press: A blogger from Hubei Province wrote “I just watched the news on the train crash in Wenzhou, but I feel like I still don’t even know what happened. Nothing is reliable anymore. I feel like I can’t even believe the weather forecast. Is there anything that we can still trust?”58 Traditional media grew bolder, with several leading newspapers launching their own investigations and exposés, and members
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One journalist, angry that his investigative story was being pulled, posted on his Sina Weibo account “I’d rather leave the page blank with one word -‘speechless.’”
of the official press joining the fray on the microblogs to decry the censorship. One journalist, angry that his investigative story was being pulled, posted on his Sina Weibo account “I’d rather leave the page blank with one word—‘speechless.’” 59 Corrupt contracting and construction practices, flawed technology that was rushed to the market to meet arbitrary party deadlines, official censorship, governmental indifference to the suffering of individual citizens—the Wenzhou train crash sparked wave after wave of revelations and recriminations. Censors struggled to halt or slow the tide, but postings spread too fast and too far to have much effect. In the five days following the Wenzhou crash, users posted 26 million messages to Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo.60 Finally, under intense pressure from its citizens and an increasingly restive press, the government announced that there would be a thorough investigation into the cause of the crash. When the official report on the investigation was finally released at the end of December 2011, it placed the blame on top officials at the Ministry of Railways, who had already been fired, as well as the bidding process for the signaling equipment, which, it concluded, was seriously flawed. The errors and misconduct were compounded by the attempted censorship, investigators found, concluding that officials “did not disclose information and did not respond to the concerns of the public in time,” which “caused a negative impact in the society.”61