Earthquake gives Beijing a wobbly

Google Earth map of quake epicenter by blogger Xujin

Today at lunchtime, an earthquake gave the office workers of Beijing a little wobble, although apparently nobody at ground level noticed the ground moving beneath their feet. A few hours later, Xinhua released this report — the English and Chinese versions came out simultaneously:

An earthquake measuring 5.1 degrees on the Richter scale jolted a county in north China’s Hebei Province at 11:56 a.m. (Beijing Time) Tuesday, according to the State Seismological Bureau (SSB).

No casualties are reported at press time, according to the bureau.

The earthquake was a shallow-focus one, with its epicenter being around 110 kilometers from Beijing and about 80 kilometers from Tianjin. So the quake was clearly felt in the two cities, said Zhang Hongwei, a spokesman for the bureau.

But the tremor would not cause any damage to Beijing, Zhang said.

Coming a few days after the proposal of a an absurd law that could result in fines for news media that report “sudden” news items without approval (see Danwei story: Draft bill: Breaking news stories to be illegal), this earthquake provoked a storm of mobile phone text messages and MSN conversations amongst Chinese media circles.

The Big One would hit Beijing at 2pm, said one rumor, later revised to 5 pm, and then 7 pm, as the rumored Big One stubbornly refused to arrive.

Which made clear a point about the recent proposed law that threatens to fine news media for reporting ‘unauthorized’ stories about breaking events: The function of news media during a time of emergency is to gather as many facts as possible and present a version of the truth that is better researched than casual text messages. Any law that hinders the process of sorting the facts from the rumors is a bad law.

The law is a lost cause anyway. The information floodgates are already open. Here for example is a blog post from Xujin that links to handfuls of first person accounts of the earthquake on a bunch of blogs hosted on Hexun, which is affiliated with Caijing magazine: North China earthquake: Hexun blog special focus (华北发生地震　和讯博客聚焦).

The image reproduced above is taken from Xujin’s blog post: it’s a map made from Google Earth that shows the distance from Beijing to the earthquake’s epicenter.