Within 72 hours after the earthquake, Chinese individuals and companies had raised nearly $200 million. In almost every neighborhood of Beijing, volunteers were seen collecting money.
At a blood donation van parked in front of a McDonald's in downtown Beijing, volunteers had to turn away hundreds of prospective donors. The Beijing Municipal Health Bureau announced that all of the city's blood banks were full.
"I feel like I want to give a piece of myself," said 25-year-old Can Li, a caterer who said she also was on a waiting list to volunteer. "It's not enough to give money."
For centuries, China has operated under a top-down system. During the height of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Tse-tung ordered millions of city dwellers to the countryside, upending society and leaving scars that remain more than 30 years later. But since the 1990s, economic liberalization and a changing culture have placed far greater emphasis on the individual, creating an ever-tougher balancing act for a one-party state attempting to maintain control and stability.
Rising living standards and an increasingly willful middle class have shifted vitality and initiative to the private sector and individuals. Seeing disaster in their country, their every impulse is to head out to the scene with blankets, food, medicine and drinking water.
Their enthusiasm might be more helpful to the country's cohesiveness than slogans about national unity and harmony.
"It's wonderful to see young people working together like this. Nobody's ordering them to do it. It is all voluntary," said a retired doctor, Xiang Guichen, 73, who was strolling past the bloodmobile.
Together, she and her 74-year-old husband marveled at the scene, the hordes of well-dressed volunteers and a crowd that had gathered to watch news updates of the disaster on a three-story-high television screen affixed to the McDonald's.
The couple are from northeast China and remember the earthquake in 1976 that killed more than 240,000 people there.
"Nobody knew anything of what was going on then . . . now we're watching on the television eight hours a day," Xiang said.
Also in evidence this week was a shift in the news media.
For decades, China's reaction whenever there was a hint of trouble was to cordon off the affected area and squelch alternative views. The government this time made a fleeting effort to control the news media; an order went out Monday that Chinese outlets should not send reporters to the damaged areas and should take material only from the official news service. But the order was ignored, causing the government to loosen its expectations.
