Reactions Within China
The State Council declared a three-day period of national mourning for the quake victims starting from May 19, 2008; the PRC's National Flag and Regional Flags of Hong Kong SAR and Macau SAR were raised at half mast. It is the first time that a national mourning period had been declared for something other than the death of a state leader, and many have called it the biggest display of mourning since the death of Mao Zedong. At 14:28 CST on May 19, 2008, a week after the earthquake, the Chinese public held a moment of silence. People stood silent for three minutes while air defense, police and fire sirens, and the horns of vehicles, vessels and trains sounded. Cars on Beijing's roads came to a halt. People spontaneously burst into cheering "China jiayou" and "Sichuan jiayou" afterwards.
The Ningbo Organizing Committee of the Beijing Olympic torch relay announced that the relay would be suspended for the duration of the mourning period. The route of the torch through the country was scaled down, and there was a minute of silence when the next leg started in the south-eastern city of Ruijin on the Wednesday after the quake.
Many websites converted their front page to black and white; Sina.com and Sohu, major internet portals, limited their homepages to news items and removed all advertisements. Chinese video sharing websites youku and Tudou displayed a black background and only videos related to the earthquake were available on the homepage. The Chinese version of MSN, cn.msn.com, also displayed banners about the earthquake and the relief efforts. Other entertainment websites, including various gaming sites, were also blacked out, or had corresponding links to earthquake donations. After the moments of silence, in Tiananmen Square, crowds spontaneously burst out cheering various slogans, including "Long Live China". Casinos in Macau closed down, and servers for online computer games (such as World of Warcraft) were shut down.
All Mainland Chinese television stations, along with some Hong Kong stations, displayed their logo in grayscale, while broadcasting non-stop earthquake footage from CCTV-1. Even pay television channels, such as Channel V China, showed earthquake footage. Foreign broadcasts in expatriate communities were suspended for the days of mourning.
The Sichuan earthquake also proved to be a rather sensitive issue in terms of nationalistic fervor in China.
On the evening of May 18, CCTV-1 hosted a special four-hour program called The Giving of Love (simplified Chinese: 爱的奉献; traditional Chinese: 愛的奉獻), hosted by regulars from the CCTV New Year's Gala and continual coverage anchor Bai Yansong, and attended by a wide range of entertainment, literary, business and political figures from mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. Donations of the evening totalled 1.5 billion Chinese Yuan (US$208 million). Of the donations, CCTV gave the biggest corporate contribution at Y50 million. Almost at the same time in Taiwan, a similarly themed programme was on air hosted by the sitting president Ma Ying-jeou.
On May 24, Hong Kong actor Jackie Chan, who donated $1.57 million to the victims, announced that he wished to produce a film about the earthquake.
Read more about this topic: 2008 Sichuan Earthquake
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