Chinese earthquake rescue: China is continuing a massive rescue operation in Sichuan province, with thousands of workers, after a powerful

earthquake on Saturday. 22 April 2013

Rescue teams had already reached the remote villages in mountainous Baoxing County on

foot, but landslides were blocking access to aid trucks and preventing some of

the casualties from being brought out.

Now state media is reporting that a path has been cleared, although, in heavy fog, and with

regular aftershocks, the going is slow.

Even in the more accessible areas of neighbouring Lushan county the aid effort has

been hampered by congestion on the single road in, and some of those who’ve been made

homeless are complaining that they’ve not yet received food or water.

Although on the same fault line, this earthquake was much less powerful than the one that

struck Sichuan Province in 2008, and the death toll is not expected to rise significantly.

Once again though it is the poor who have borne the brunt of the disaster, with the biggest

killer not the earthquake itself, but poorly constructed houses.

 

Monitoring microblogs: If you write something politically sensitive on China’s microblogs, or Weibo, how quickly might it be deleted? Researchers

in the United States have been looking into the issue and found some surprising results. 11 March 2013

With more than half a billion Chinese online, and many of them avid microbloggers, the

speed of censorship uncovered on Sina Weibo is astonishing. The

researchersmined data on microblog comments removed by administrators, and found

that nearly a third of the deleted posts were taken down in the first 30 minutes.

Unsurprisingly, criticism of the government, local scandals and complaints about China’s

one-child policy were blocked most quickly. But the team worked out that if none of the

process was automated, Sina Weibo would need to employ more than 4,000 speed-

reading censors a day, just to keep up.

The researchers uncovered a range of devices aimed at bringing bloggers into line.

They included: hiding posts from other users, flagging repeat offenders for

closer scrutiny, and tracking backwards to delete sensitive topics everywhere they arose.

With China’s media so strictly controlled, the study has raised questions about why

microblogs allow people to post before censorship at all. One of the researchers,

Professor Dan Wallach, told the BBC that Sina Weibo had to satisfy government

censorship requirements without seeming heavy-handed to its bloggers. He said it had to

walk a fine line.