Many are surprised by the Chinese government’s open response to the quake disaster. They laud the government for having what seems to be an almost miraculous reversal of policy compared to other natural disasters—in 1976, the Chinese tried to suppress news of the Tangshan earthquake that killed 240,000 people. It covered up the Yellow River floods of the last decade, the SARS epidemic of several years ago, and the railway crash of this year. With nonstop news broadcasts, unlimited access (so far) for journalists both foreign and domestic, this seems like the herald of a new age of news freedom and the first step in greater openness and accountability. You couldn’t be more wrong.

Leaving out the Tangshan earthquake (four generations of Chinese leaders ago), the Chinese government had solid reasons for attempting to cover up the disasters of the past decade. Yellow River flood control was one of the biggest programs of the Chinese government; the building of thousands of dams and higher and higher levees worth billions of dollars were meant to tame and control the Yellow River, often called “China’s Sorrow.” The floods represented a catastrophic failure of one of the cornerstones of China’s domestic improvement policies. The SARS epidemic sparked a panic, flooding China’s already overcrowded hospitals with patients with complaints both real and imagined, as well as keeping frightened people with the disease at home where they could infect others rather than seeking medical treatment. While the Chinese government can be criticized for slow action, it is hard to imagine otherwise in a country with an overtaxed health system and no centralized computer information sharing. In any case, the reasons for suppression were twofold—to keep a panic from developing and to conceal China’s slow response. The train crash represents another dramatic failure which could be laid at the hands of Chinese government. China’s rail network carries hundreds of millions of people every year—a record 170 million during the week of Spring Festival alone. A disaster like that might erode public trust in the Chinese railway transportation system, which could have a very negative effect on confidence in the government. If the government stands to lose face from an incident, it will be covered up as they are best able.

The key question in all of these previous examples is: “Could the government have been more prepared, and prevented this from becoming a disaster?” The answer is, “most likely, yes.” Better land management or flood control on the Yellow River, faster action and treatment of SARS, and a better information network for the train, are all possible answers. It poses a challenge to the legitimacy of the government. Apply that rubric now to the earthquake. The Chinese government could have done absolutely nothing to mitigate the effects of the earthquake. This is one kind of natural disaster that no one can be expected to be able to prevent. While there have been unprecedented levels of openness and access so far, this will soon change. The Chinese government has a long history of allowing open access at the beginning and then suddenly reining in coverage. Already, in between the when the first draft of this article was written and when it will be published, you see the beginnings of that reversal.

Many Chinese will point to the fact that China often shows its poorer face on the news these days. Stricken farmers with piteous situations are often featured in the nightly news, struggling to make a living when there is no water to irrigate their plants with. In this case, disaster victims huddling in the streets, afraid to enter their homes. The key difference is that the blame is on Nature, not the government. The government is not being expected to solve or prevent the problem—merely to mitigate its effects. That is the key difference with the media response to the earthquake. People of any country unite around common disasters, and this represents a golden opportunity to solidify support for the Chinese government by showing off that it is doing everything it can. Put a picture of a woman crying over the dead body of her child next to a picture of a grave Wen Jiabao standing amidst rubble, and you have a propagandist’s dream: a win-win situation for the government. Now that many are perishing before they can be rescued from the rubble, and now that exposure is beginning to take its toll on the survivors, the openness is being reconsidered.

This is not to say that the Chinese government should not be praised for its quick response—it deserves to be lauded. It is outdoing itself in its response to this disaster. Many pundits, however, seem to be surprised by the media openness that is being seen to this disaster, and speculate if it represents a new trend in Chinese thinking. To the contrary, this is merely the continuation of basic principles of news broadcast propaganda that have been followed for years: stir up the people’s emotions against an outsider (be it America, Japan, or Mother Nature) and show them how the government is doing well against them. That is what happened in 1999 for the Belgrade bombing—initial open news coverage was then suddenly throttled—and it is what will happen now with this earthquake.