Youku and the Sichuan Earthquake: Reporting on Shaky Ground 2008-06-12

BEIJING, June 12, 2008 - As China mourned the 1st month anniversary of the tragic Wenchuan Earthquake of May 12, Youku.com - China's leading Internet video site - proved its ability to bring the people of China together in somber grief, in selfless charity, and in resilient optimism over the past month.

During the three days official mourning mandated by China's State Council from May 19 to May 21, Youku's tens of millions of users actively joined in together to express their profound condolences, grieving for the losses endured by their compatriots. Youku's team transformed the entire site, from its home page to every single content page, so that beginning on the morning of the 19th, all of Youku was in an appropriate state of mourning. After a period of intense preparation, on that morning the Official Wenchuan Compatriots Video Earthquake Memorial" was posted online. That morning, the lead video was titled "Flags at Half Mast in Tiananmen in Memory of the Disaster Victims."

After the three-minute silence that began at 2:28 PM, exactly one week after the quake of May 12, the site carried the video, "Silent Grief: 1.3 Billion Reflect Amidst Tears on This Moment," followed by the video "Convulsion in Tiananmen Square: Patriotic Shouts follow Solemn Silence."
 
In one 90 minute period, netizens watched 240,000 videos—a record since the founding of Youku.com. In the immediate aftermath of the moment of silence, video uploads began to pour in from Beijing, from Shanghai, from the central heartland to the desert Northwest, from the mountains of the Southwest to the industrial East and the prosperous South, from remote Tibet and elsewhere. In just 10 minutes more than 100 videos, many of them extremely stirring, had been uploaded. The video "Mourning in Tiananmen Square," shot by a Youku user named Kachacha, was watched over 2 million times, was shared on the Internet by over 10,000 netizens, and was widely regarded as the most moving of the many videos shot in Tiananmen that day.

In order to understand better about the conditions after the quake and on the progress of rebuilding, a group of Youku "paike (citizen video)" users rushed to Sichuan. There they have had front-line access to the areas affected by the disaster, and spoken face to face with the people hardest hit by the quake. Their personal, close-up look at the human face of disaster needs to be seen by netizens across the nation. And people at home can respond, too—giving much-needed support and encouragement to these brave online video users and, more importantly, to those who are have lost so much in this calamity.