Two days after the storm, and a day after Hui visited the area, reporters from the headquarters of Xinhua in neighboring Zhejiang Province arrived to discover scenes of devastation unlike anything that had been reported.
Following a tradition from the time of Mao Zedong (毛澤東), who pressed the agency into service as part of an exclusive information gathering network for the country's top leaders, the agency's team wrote an "internal reference" report that night. The report, parts of which have been quoted in the Chinese news media, forced the Fujian Province officials to raise their estimates of the death toll to 178, with another 94 missing, for the area.
The revised figures were published grudgingly, with comments in a local newspaper from the provincial Communist Party secretary condemning "some media, including reporters from other provinces who came to the area hit by the calamity and produced a lot of unreal reports based on hearsay."
FACADE
Over the ensuing weeks, though, cracks in the facade of silence over the true extent of death and devastation from the storm continued to widen, including a report from a state television crew that put the number of boats in the harbor at the time of the storm at 10,000.
The most telling accounts of what happened, of the carnage and of the more than 900 boats reliably known to have been lost at sea, still come from the residents themselves. They willingly supply details -- like the beating of a mayor by women angered by the disappearance of their loved ones and what many here say was a poor response to the emergency -- that have not been published even in the Chinese reports that have dared to challenge the official view of the disaster.
"This tragedy won't make our hearts turn cold; it's the lack of government performance that will," said a fisherman who spoke on the condition on anonymity, citing dangers to anyone who dared talk about the storm's toll, even a month later.
"This is the consistent style of the Chinese government," he said.
"Big or small problems are suppressed as much as possible. They have no courage to face any of them," he said.
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