Quotes of the Day

The highway leading to Yingxiu, a small town near the epicenter of China's May 12 earthquake, is rent by fissures big enough to swallow a child and is choked with smashed trucks and enormous rocks. Near the town's outskirts, just past a compact car that has been crushed by a boulder, a landslide cuts off the road entirely. A mother, who walked into the mountains beyond to bring out her 12-year-old son, says he has been scarred by what he has seen. The landscape they are leaving behind is hellish, she says: rows of wrecked houses, collapsed schools and putrefying bodies lining the road. But the news doesn't faze the two friends who have trekked there by train, car and now, finally, on foot to help victims of the Wenchuan earthquake. Dressed in white T shirts reading "I [heart] China," the men are determined to reach the core of the devastation. "After we saw the news of the disaster, we decided we had to help," says Wu Guanglei, a 36-year-old high school physics teacher from Zigong, a town located 190 miles (300 km) to the south. "We Chinese people are growing closer and closer together," adds Wu Xiangping, 28, who took leave from his job at a Beijing advertising firm to join the relief effort. "And because of that the country's morality is rising too."

These simple observations, stated with a tinge of hope and pride, crystallize much of what China as a nation has learned about itself over the past several weeks. The 8.0-magnitude quake, the country's worst natural disaster in more than 30 years, has probably killed at least 50,000 and has left more than 5 million homeless, according to official sources. Horrific videos from the disaster zone — the twisted bodies of children layered like fossils in the sediment of a pancaked concrete schoolhouse, the desperate decision to amputate the legs of a dying girl pinned in rubble — forced the Chinese people to look into the abyss. And reflected back was the image of a more compassionate and stronger nation than many had perhaps expected, a place where tens of millions of Chinese lined up for hours to make sure their donations of cash or food or clothes were accepted and where tens of thousands of others like the Wus left their jobs and families and rushed to aid their compatriots. So many clothes were contributed that they were piled in mounds six feet high in some devastated towns. Contributions from the country's infamously tightfisted companies hit $1 billion within days.

The outpouring of support has been a revelation. For years, China's citizens couldn't watch the evening news without being reminded of their darker sides, of the grasping, reckless self-interest that has characterized China's headlong rush to become wealthy and powerful: stories of slave labor and child-kidnapping rings, rampant government corruption, counterfeit products, tainted food, dangerous toys and, lately, a crackdown on dissent in Tibet. But from a monstrous humanitarian crisis has come a new self-awareness, a recognition of the Chinese people's sympathy and generosity of spirit. The earthquake has been a "shock of consciousness" as scholar Jiang Wenran puts it, a collective epiphany when the nation was suddenly confronted with how much it had changed in two decades of booming growth — and liked what it saw.

When the national emergency abates, much of China will revert to its familiar ways, of course. But something is fundamentally different. There is a new confidence in the ability, even duty, of ordinary Chinese to contribute to building a more virtuous society and a willingness to press the government for the right to continue. Most of the volunteers were doing so for the first time, for example, and many said they were eager to do more community work in the future. Says Jiang: "It's a major leap forward in the formation of China's civil society, which is vital for China's future democratization process." That doesn't mean the Wenchuan earthquake will lead to elections in the next few years, but the complex and shifting relationship between the Communist Party and increasingly vociferous citizens could evolve into some form of compromise between absolute autocratic control and Western-style democracy.

It's not just China's self-image that has changed. The quake has altered, at least temporarily, the world's perception of China, whose growing economic and military might is viewed with suspicion and fear in many quarters. China's relationship with the West has been particularly strained after March's bloody demonstrations in Tibet and the chaotic protests that dogged the Olympic Torch relay. But the quake, coming just 10 days after Cyclone Nargis ripped into Burma, has cast the Chinese government in a different light. By blocking foreign aid, Burma's paranoid military junta demonstrated just how impotent and callous to the suffering of its citizens a repressive autocracy can be. But even Beijing's critics expressed admiration for China's swift response to the quake. Some 120,000 soldiers and paramilitary troops were deployed along with thousands of vehicles and aircraft, and China gracefully accepted foreign aid, including rescue teams from Taiwan, Singapore and even old rival Japan. Some of China's most xenophobic bloggers expressed astonishment at the sympathy shown for their country by the rest of the world, the donations of cash and goods and personnel. The outpouring of international goodwill "has changed everything," says a Western diplomat based in Beijing — even rekindling the guttering Olympic torch. "The Olympics seemed destined for disaster and that would have been a major setback for China's emergence onto the world stage," says the diplomat. "Now many people will be cheering for the Chinese and hoping they pull off a good show. That will be pivotal for China self-confidence and its perception of its place in the world."

A Nation's Agony
If the crisis had a defining moment, it came on May 19 at 2:28 p.m., exactly a week after the Wenchuan quake, named for the county at the epicenter. That was when the entire country paused for three minutes to remember the dead. Traffic came to a halt, flags were lowered to half staff and Chinese everywhere stood in oft tearful silence. Drivers honked car horns and factories blared their sirens in mass keening. The ritual marked the start of three days of national mourning during which Internet activities such as online gaming were halted and all TV channels except those broadcasting news were blacked out.

This cathartic outpouring of national grief helped put paid to the notion that China lacks civic spirit. Academics have long argued that Confucian ideals, which emphasize duty to family, have mutated over the millenniums into a mentality that viewed contributions to non-relatives as a waste of precious personal resources. This trait was exaggerated by the beggar-thy-neighbor capitalism that has been Chinese society's driving force for the past two decades. Charitable donations from individuals and businesses in China amount to around 0.09% of GDP, compared with 2% in the U.S.

But in the space of two weeks, China has shown that not only do its people know how to grieve, they know how to give. Bullog, a prominent Beijing blog website, launched a donation campaign soon after the quake; so did Chinese digital-media giant Tom.com, garnering around $240,000 by May 21. Nine days after the quake, contributions from Chinese and foreign donors totaled some $1.5 billion, according to the government. Much of those funds are coming from people making enormous sacrifices. Waiting patiently in line at the Red Cross Society of China office in Beijing on May 19 was Liang Baoying, a 63-year-old retired teacher. Clutching an envelope containing $287 — the equivalent of her monthly pension — Liang tearfully said she could no longer watch news of the quake on TV because it is too sad. "I believe in this national tragedy, so we have no choice [but to give]. I'm sure the Red Cross will use the donation properly."

The masses are doing even more. The China Youth Daily newspaper reported that some 200,000 people from all over China have descended on the quake zone, providing food, shelter and medical treatment, their convoys of vehicles sometimes causing traffic jams on the narrow mountain roads of Sichuan province. Private aid takes many forms: beef trucked in from Inner Mongolia, sleeping bags shipped from Shenzhen, building materials from Chongqing, millions of bottles of water and packets of instant noodles. Volunteers are working in areas overlooked by government relief efforts. In the village of Yongan, south of the devastated city of Beichuan, quake victims, from the very young to the very old, line the road waiting for the citizen cavalry to arrive. "We're counting on volunteers to bring us food," says Wang Shaoqing, 82. As he speaks children run up to the cars of volunteers who stop and hand them food and water bottles through car windows.

Spreading the News
The volunteers' dedication has been covered in the state media with almost the same enthusiasm as the performance of People's Liberation Army rescue crews. The normally muzzled Chinese press has been freed by the information ministry to saturate the airwaves with quake coverage. The leash was also loosened for the unruly Internet. Popular blogs were relatively uncensored; commentators posting to mainstream discussion forums were even allowed to criticize the government's handling of some aspects of relief operations — the failure to use helicopters during the first three days after the quake, for example. As surprising as the freedom is the sophistication of the coverage: it's on television and radio around the clock, and newspapers have put out special editions. One news anchor even dressed down a reporter on air for broadcasting from the comfort of her hotel room rather than venturing into the field. "Three to five years ago both the state media and the online world simply wouldn't have had the energy, experience or skill to do coverage on this scale," says Xiao Qiang, a Chinese media expert at the University of California, Berkeley. "It's going to progress just as much in the next three to five years, too. It's not going to be total media freedom but it is a big step in the empowerment of China's civil society."

Unlikely Hero, Familiar Villains
One of the most widely praised aspects of the relief operation was the speed and scale with which the government responded. And to both Chinese and foreigners the man primarily responsible for that was the country's Premier, 66-year-old Wen Jiabao. Within two hours of the earthquake, Wen was on a plane to the disaster area and for the next four days, Chinese TV was flooded with images of the increasingly exhausted-looking leader as he rallied the relief forces, offered succor to survivors and even choked up himself.

Few doubted Wen's sincerity or sympathy for the victims. He has long been the human face of the country's Communist Party. But there was also little doubt that Wen was acutely aware that the survival of the regime may depend on its handling of crises. Having discarded its Marxist-Leninist ideology, the government is increasingly reliant on public approval for its legitimacy. Netizens responded rapturously to Wen's TV appearances: "I couldn't help crying when I saw the pictures of Premier Wen in the stricken region," wrote one poster in a typical online comment. "I feel very safe to have a wonderful leader like this."

Wen's star turn notwithstanding, the real danger to the party comes from its rotten base: the county and township officials whose corruption and venality has had the greatest impact on the lives of hundreds of millions. There's sure to be backlash over the number of children killed by the quake, buried in their classrooms as shoddily built schools collapsed around them. In one structure alone — the three-story Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan — at least 600 students died. "It was built out of tofu," says Hu Yuefu, 44, of the building that toppled and killed his 15-year-old daughter. He holds local government officials and building contractors responsible. "I hope there is an investigation," Hu says. "Otherwise, there are a thousand parents who would beat them to death."

Corruption has proved an inflammatory issue in the past — it added fuel to the Tiananmen protest in 1989 — and mixed with student deaths it could be explosive. Beijing's first instinct will be to sweep the schools scandal under the rug. Much of the online anger over the collapsed schools has been deleted and all discussion of the topic has been banned. But Jiang of the University of Alberta says that, as China's civil society develops, leaders know they must adapt. "It will be extremely tempting for the control types and ideologues to use [the earthquake] to glorify the party and to direct this new openness toward reporting only good news. But that will be one step backward out of two steps forward, no more."

After the disaster, it will be harder to stifle the civic impulses of people like Chen Gang, the president of a Chengdu knife-manufacturing company who scrambled to help with relief efforts. The country was focused on material things, Chen says, but the earthquake forced people to remember their fellow citizens. "The whole country suddenly united. It was really miraculous," says Chen, 49. "For the nation historically, when you come back later it will be [considered] a good thing. I'm not talking about the party, I'm talking about this land." The Wenchuan earthquake has exposed how much China has changed and offered a fleeting glimpse of what might be. The political and cultural aftershocks will roll on for years after the ground has ceased to tremble.

• Simon Elegant