Wen Jiabao and Guangzhou--George W. Bush and New Orleans: Can Governments Be Trusted to Handle Disasters?

When Katrina struck New Orleans it was a natural disaster compounded many times over by the failure of City, State, and Federal authorities to respond effectively to the situation. Remember the buses that the Mayor didn't use to evacuate people? Remember Dubya and the infamous "Browney" comment?

Plenty of anti-Bush, anti-Republican, anti-FEMA bashing all around....

But an International Herald Tribune story on the surprising ineffectiveness of the Chinese government's response to record-breaking snowstorms across the People's Republic potentially raises a new issue: are governments just inherently bad at large-scale, rapid-response emergency situations?

For two weeks, much of China, which was long known for its capacity for mass mobilization, has been tied in knots by a series of major snowstorms. Although large, in most places the snowfall - described as having been the worst in 50 years - has been nothing like the deep cover that other parts of the world often experience in winter.

Instead, its crippling effects - which have included knocking out electricity and water supplies, threatening the coal supply that fuels the country's power plants and stranding millions of Chinese on the eve of the year's most important holiday - seem mostly a result of surprise.

Many of the worst effects have been seen in parts of east-central and southern China, which are largely unaccustomed to serious snowfall. For the victims, however - and as many as 100 million people have been directly affected - surprise on such a massive scale equates with lack of preparation.

To migrant workers unable to take their annual leave for the Chinese New Year, and to others who have been stuck in their homes without electricity, water, regular supplies of food and even reliable news, the government, as much as any unpredictable weather system, increasingly appears to be the culprit.

In the past week, the Chinese government has worked as hard at public relations as at crisis management, with both of the country's top leaders traveling to some of the worst-affected areas. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who has moved about China almost nonstop during this period, traveled early last week to the southern city of Guangzhou, where as many as 800,000 people had gathered at the train station at one point seeking to begin their annual leaves.

In America over the past decade we have two different examples of large-scale disaster striking one of our cities: New Orleans and Katrina, New York and September 11. Both, unfortunately, have become so shrouded in different mythologies that only in the specialist community of first responders has any serious analysis of the emergency management successes and failures been conducted. Almost all of that concentrates on what I would call tactical rather than strategic issues, and virtually nothing asks the question that has been nagging at me since watching the Tsunami hit Indonesia, typhoons hit Bangla Desh, and now snowstorms striking China:

Should governments be trusted with disaster response at the largest scales?

Idiotic question? Maybe not.

Governments are, at heart, bureaucracies, organizations famous not only for grinding very slowly but also very stupidly.

Our emergency response community is essentially a de-centralized network of local and state services that are organized from the bottom up, primarily to deal with everyday disasters: automobile wrecks, burning buildings, snipers in the bell tower, etc.

In the wake of 9/11, the Federal government has attempted to impose a command hierarchy and a nationalized emergency response doctrine downward from the bureaucratic headquarters of FEMA and Homeland Security.

What the Feds would really like (and are really aiming at with their grants and funding) is to impose standardization on every fire department, rescue squad, and police department in the country.

That's led to a gigantic conflict that's really cultural in nature, because our first responders--like our schools--traditionally emerge from our communities rather than from our government. They are fiercely independent, and--perhaps most importantly in terms of massive disasters--willing to operate without orders, "marching to the sound of the guns" as it were, in the best volunteer traditions of American citizens from Bunker Hill to the Johnstown Flood.

But the day of individual effort is over, say the statists in America and the collectivist Marxists in China: we must impose, standardize, and routinize. Good ole boys with pickup trucks and gun racks rushing to the firehouse can't possibly handle Al Qaeda or a hurricane. The world is too complicated, the issues are too big, the responsibilities are to heavy: we must have the State overseeing everything.

There's a technical term for this assessment: bullshit.

Good ole boys in pickup trucks or rickshaws running toward the disaster is in fact the only strategy that's ever worked.

What did the government do during Katrina? Just kept hundreds of ambulances, fire trucks, and other relief supplies frozen in place by bureaucratic orders, when the best instinct of every single person sitting in those driver's seats said, "Let's get the hell in there and help somebody."

While people died.

China's disaster only reinforces this point, because decades of Maoist Marxism have attempted with great determination to kill that individual sense of initiative and replace it with the command structure of the state.

There are researchers examining this idea, but frankly, collectivism is on the rise, and the rugged individualism and small community organization that created the best emergency response community in the world is in ill repute.

Not surprising, really.