New Delhi : The video of a mammoth wall of floodwaters swallowing an immigration centre at Gyirong Port, the main border crossing between Tibet and Nepal, as hundreds of people ran frantically, went viral soon after surfacing online. Beijing’s censor was quick to respond, with the video disappearing from their social media in the blink of an eye. Only a single frame shot of the viral video has been broadcast so far by the state-run flagship news bulletin.
The devastation from the flash floods is not hard to understand, considering the deaths in Nepal have exceeded 500 and are highly probable to increase. And yet, China said on Friday that only five people have died so far, with 558 missing, including 260 foreigners. That’s about it. There is no other information beyond that: zero survivor accounts, no specific details about the villages that have been impacted, and no messages from victims’ families.
They cannot travel to Tibet without government permission, and even if videos of destruction or people’s accounts surface, it’s only a matter of mere hours to track them before they are wiped off. Various tweets have called out the ruling Chinese Communist Party for “gagging” the citizens. One account claimed that numerous flood disaster videos posted on WeChat were deleted and censored across the internet.
Several smaller Chinese media outlets, also state-run, did manage to get footage from the affected site that has thousands of people living nearby, and published interviews with some witnesses initially. But within hours those pieces were taken down. Thus, the only reliance currently is on state media that has so far focused on dramatic rescue efforts. These show specialist search teams scaling mountains or crossing raging rivers to get to the most-hit regions.
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