In regards to the nearly 10,000 children who’ve died in China’s most recent earthquake, the New York Times has a fascinating article on the way the disaster has become politicized at local levels, leading to demonstrations against the government for having failed to address the unsafe building conditions prior to the earthquake, as well as exaggerating the role they played in disaster recovery. Concerning the issue, the Times has this to say:

The protests threaten to undermine the government’s attempts to promote its response to the quake as effective and to highlight heroic rescue efforts by the People’s Liberation Army, which has dispatched 150,000 soldiers to the region. Censors have blocked detailed reporting of the schools controversy by the state-run media, but a photo of Mr. Jiang kneeling before protesters has become a sensation on some Web forums, bringing national attention to the incident.

… The authorities in Beijing appear to recognize the delicacy of the issue. On Monday, a spokesman for the Education Ministry, Wang Xuming, promised a reassessment of school buildings in quake zones, adding that those responsible for cutting corners on school construction would be “severely punished.”

The article goes into more detail regarding the protests aimed against specific officials who the parents have identified as being negligent in regards to building safety conditions. What makes this particularly interesting is that it demonstrates that even so-called “totalitarian” states (in truth, China’s politics could be more aptly described as pragmatic authoritarianism) must be responsive to their citizens. The distribution of power between the (Party-)State and its People is never fully one-sided, even at the very limits of delegitimization. The events have spurred, to varying degrees, a form of local collective action against party bosses that are forced to acquiesce to the demands of the rightfully enraged parents. The only truly serious political question is whether this politicized message will come to play a crucial role at the level of national politics, against any predictable depoliticizing logic of “victimization.”

But I think what’s especially breathtaking here is that, while this development seems somewhat unremarkable, can anyone imagine the same procedure taking place in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? Not at the level of talking-head-faux-outrage, but the direct politicization of the disaster and the mobilization of the poor against the state apparatus and its varyingly corresponding parties. The irony is that in the U.S., contrary to China, such a development would be truly unfathomable, despite the latter’s aforementioned “totalitarianism.”

With the Olympic games coming up in a matter of months, the question that remains will be what, if anything, will occur in China. On the one hand, it is more than likely the case that things will continue running smoothly and any events that appear to disturb the smooth run of things will simply appear as “blips” on the radar screen. Yet, the reduction of such events to mere “blips” ignores a key Marxist insight apropos capitalism’s cyclic fluctuations (as well as Freud’s insight in regards to the symptom): these these momentary lapses represent the repressed “truth” of a ruling order. To varying degrees, they are capable of carrying with them a deeper truth-procedure towards an Event. On the topic of politicization, however, the crucial question is what kind of Truth emerges in the midst of an event. Will the masses opt for neoliberal ideology as did a number of post-Communist countries (including Russia), or will something new emerge? Obviously, then, one shouldn’t blindly throw a monkey wrench in a machine without in some way discerning out of that action what will emerge in its aftermath.

On a more macroscopic level, what humanitarian ideology, a thoroughly depoliticizing bourgeois ideology if there ever was one, has taught us is that natural disasters, which render people into victims, require the benevolence of some privileged third party capable of administrating the affairs. Yet, what if the appearance of disaster (e.g., global warming) and its after effects points to a general failure at the level not only of state-citizen interaction, but at the level of Capital as well. That is to say, what if the logic of Capital does not accommodate itself to disaster relief, and hence relies upon the ideological mystification of humans reduced to the status of “victims” to elicit support at the individual level. Consequently, the politicization of disasters and the formation of local collective action seems like a positive development for the most marginalized members of society (those are disproportionately affected by such disasters) against the ruling strata. And this, of course, is not simply the case for impoverished Third World countries: we should recall the events of Katrina and keep them in mind when developments such as these arise, in order to seize them before they dissipate under the guise of mere “blips” on the radar.