The Politics of Compassion: The Sichuan Earthquake and Civic Engagement in China by Bin Xu (review)

The Politics of Compassion is a wonderfully detailed book that reveals the nuances of the civic response to the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, which killed nearly 90,000 people and left about 5 million people homeless. The book discusses the earthquake and its aftermath, but its main purpose is to unpack the complexity of the civic and political response to the discovery that much of the damage and many of the deaths were not due to shifting geologic plates but rather a direct result of political graft and greed.

Sadly, events that cause protesters to cry out, "Natural disasters are unavoidable; man-made catastrophes are despicable" (p. 121) are common. We made similar cries as abandoned elderly drowned in their beds New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and as helicopters flew over Fukushima in futile attempts to stop a nuclear meltdown. Residents and onlookers feel compassion for the victims and outrage at their governments. The Politics of Compassion does a masterful job telling the story of the Sichuan disaster and its aftermath in ways that draw readers into the specific details of a particular time and place while allowing us to see the broader political pattern as one that is repeated time and again in every corner of the planet.

The Politics of Compassion is told as a play with four acts as it seeks to explain what it calls the "'politics of compassion': how political conditions shape expressions of moral sentiments through civic engagement" (p. 16). The introductory chapter offers up the details of the earthquake itself and the immediate response. With maps, statistics, voices from the victims, and testimony from witnesses, it recounts how it felt for those who were there and the spectacle it presented for those who watched and listened from afar. "Tonight, there were dozens upon dozens of families going through this same grim ritual, their heads bowed in unspeakable pain as they set vigil over small lifeless forms" (p. 3).

It describes the outpouring of volunteers (estimates ranged from 200,000 to 10 million) (p. 8), which led 2008 to be called the "'birth year' of civil society in China" (p. 13). The chapter also articulates the tension that lies at the heart of the book, a tension between two kinds of civic engagement: (1) harmless and warm volunteering that shows compassion and care for victims but ignores the underlying problems that lie at the root of their suffering, and (2)the "angry activism" that strives to hold political leaders accountable for their greed and poor decision-making and demands a lasting solution to the deeper problems in society that are the ultimate cause of the suffering (p. 15).

Act One: Chaotic Response. The political context of the Sichuan earthquake was such that the state did not have sufficient capacity to deal with the magnitude of the disaster. As a result, the state needed civil society's participation, but it was concerned that unregulated giving and participation could lead to rampant fraud and might undermine the state's moral authority. This "consensus crisis" created a political opportunity for established organizations (NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and GONGOs (government-organized NGOs)) to expand and new groups to form. Xu offers a masterful portrait of "emergent NGO networks" that formed as preexisting groups of mobile private citizens, small organizations, and companies quickly organized to bring relief directly to victims. One of my favorite stories is how two members of the Shanghai Car Club, who usually met to enjoy friendly drives through the countryside on the weekends, stuffed their cars full of medicine and food, drove 2,000 km due west, met a random young man begging assistance at a gas station, delivered their supplies to a local hospital that was catastrophically low on supplies, and helped bring in a PLA military medical team to the town. They called their friends back in...