The disaster that finally shook up China's media

The Sichuan earthquake, which left 70,000 dead in China last month, produced at least one positive aftershock; a wave of journalistic outrage was sent rippling across the country, calling the authorities to account.

Suddenly, Chinese reporters are asking tough questions about possible government corruption, journalists have been ignoring state-issued orders in order to get to the scene of the disaster, and footage of broken bodies and futile rescue efforts was shown live on TV. This is a startling change in a country often depicted by foreign media and governments as an authoritarian, press-belittling monolith.

The foreign media have also been given unprecedented access to government officials, occasionally even to China's tearful premier "Grandpa" Wen Jiabao, who has dominated the press as Beijing's benevolent presence amidst corrupt local officials. Jiabao has been given an honourary Facebook profile with almost 50,000 supporters.

In the lead up to the Olympic Games in Beijing this August, the central government is introducing new laws that permit greater press freedoms for foreigners, while simultaneously cracking down on human rights activists to present a unified front to the world. Nevertheless, with immense daring, the domestic media have broken free of their reputation as dour purveyors of Communist Party propaganda in China's earthquake-ravaged Sichuan province.

Although the central government still quashes discussion on the cardinal taboos, most notably with the recent protests in Tibet, the earthquake has showcased the ongoing liberalisation of China's media. Journalists have asked damning questions about local corruption's role in the shoddily-built "tofu" schools that collapsed in the quake. They have also been allowed unheard of access to disaster zones – with one journalist reporting from a speeding helicopter as a People's Liberation Army soldier threw boxes out of an open door to scrambling peasants below.

The Chinese government has previously been strict when it comes to journalists covering natural disasters, such as flooding or the hurricanes that regularly lash the country's eastern coastline. But from the very start of the earthquake, says Agnès Gaudu, who monitors the Chinese media as China editor for French news magazine Courrier International, this disaster has been totally different. "They ignored an order from the propaganda department not to go," says Gaudu of the Chinese journalists. "That was the first time that has happened. They rushed to the scene and did their job. The orders are usually observed. I've never heard an order of such a scale being ignored by all the press. It was purely and simply ignored. The order was to only publish [state-owned news agency] Xinhua dispatches."

There were other central diktats as well, which came later, such as only reporting positive news of the relief efforts. But, as far as Gaudu can tell, these have been ignored – and may well continue to be, despite a recent Financial Times report about a new order to rein in critical coverage, issued to reporters by the Chinese government. Indeed, on 3 June, the Chinese liberal weekly investigative newspaper Southern Weekend published an extensive investigation into a school that collapsed in the quake: its principal had approached officials about dangerous building conditions in 1998 and been told to buttress a collapsing roof with steel wire. This time, the disaster coverage "wasn't a glorious appraisal of the work of the army and the government. That is new," says Gaudu. Hugo de Burgh, director of Westminster University's China Media Centre, says the scale of both the earthquake and the changes in China's media have combined to make the media coverage remarkable, even if it fits into broader trends in China's evolving journalism.

"This disaster is different. There hasn't been anything like this in China since 1976 and everything in China is different now," he says, referring to the Tangshan earthquake that killed up to 300,000 people. The 1976 earthquake occurred before the commercialisation of the media throughout the 1990s, which eroded state-funding for newspapers and forced them to compete for readership by carrying out more investigative reporting. Spurred on by their shameful journalistic complicity with Mao-era disasters and during the ideologically paranoiac Cultural Revolution, journalists began identifying with the values of international media.

This earthquake also occurred in an era when Chinese people are texting and blogging. Last year, more than one million text messages bounced between mobiles in the city of Xiamen, mobilising protests to halt the opening of a chemical factory. Government censors can't keep up. Online commentary during the earthquake has been especially vociferous, with cyber criticism of everyone from a local government official who smiled too much during the rescue efforts, to a teacher in one school who ran off during the quake, leaving his full classroom to fend for itself, and actress Sharon Stone, a Buddhist who blamed the quake on China's bad "karma" over Tibet.

"A huge disaster like this cannot be hidden and it's to the government's advantage that the West should know, and that Western agencies should help," explains de Burgh, adding that coverage led to China being compared favourably to Burma, where the government response to the devastating cyclone involved refusing outside help and harassing survivors.

Beijing has won praise from abroad by allowing reporters access to most of the disaster areas, and by being forthcoming with information – even at the local government level, which is normally jittery and secretive. This is in stark contrast to when the government denied its own citizens and journalists information about the SARS outbreak in 2003; or when Beijing denied foreign reporters access to anti-Chinese protests in Tibet in April, a period that displayed the worst side of the government and the Chinese press.

"Officials realise that there are more benefits than dangers to be had from being helpful to the media," says de Burgh. No one has realised this more than Jiabao, who was seen dashing around the quake zone, calling out to trapped children and urging on rescuers. When the premier gave a lecture to a makeshift classroom in the quake zone, he wrote on a blackboard "Distress rejuvenates a nation". After he left, according to a journalist at Southern Weekend, no one had the heart to erase the characters. The words were then protected by glass and now await cultural preservation. Luckily for Chinese citizens, the press doesn't seem anywhere near as static.