Earthquake Disaster.
Some of the Zenzu team have lived in South China over the border from Hong Kong which is an area that attracts people from all over China. Among these people are some from Sichuan province and the Chendgu area. Several of our close friends have family from that region but fortunately non were injured. The Zenzu team visited their Chinese Furniture supplier recently and it was remarkable to see what an impact the disaster had had on the nation. As a mark of respect all foreign / non-essential TV channels were taken off air for almost a week and several were only transmitted in black & white for a while.
During our visit to out Oriental Furniture suppliers our contact Ann said that she had put an offer in to adopt an orphan from the earthquake disaster. Apparently this was not unusual with people flooding in with offers from all over China. Stories abounded with hugely generous offers of monetary donations from officials and celebrities. Althought this focus was largely positive a murkier underside was the internet tittle-tattle comparing the amounts of money donated by film-stars, TV-stars, muscians and sportsmen. Singers deemed to have given selfishly have already seen sales of albums drop significantly, irrespetive of whether gossip-mongering was true. A real shame to focus on this in the contect of such a humanetarian disaster. In contrast though, it seems as if nearly every person in the population has donated a little and there was a heartening story of a beggar who had donated all of his meagre savings to the cause. As a company our chinese furniture suppliers had donated a huge amount of money to charities which we were quite proud of. A very nice company with a very nice attitude.
Really was fascinating to see the media response from within China with nearly every domestic channel dedicated to ongoing reports. While the European perspective tended to focus on the negative stories such as poor quality school buildings, the Chinese themselves seemed to have pulled toghether to focus on solving the immediate problems of food, water, shelter and resuce. Our Chinese furniture suppliers said they had heard of such rumours but were staying postive in the short-term. Of course we have no idea how much of this focus has been guided by the chinese state through the heavily controlled domestic media but the empathy did indeed seem genuine wherever we went.
