Early21st-century China is undergoing several radical transformations that are profoundly affecting its physical, social, and cultural fabric. Not as dramatic, perhaps, as the earlier series of Land Reform, collectivization, Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and final decollectivization that framed the era of Mao Zedong's state socialism, the current processes of urbanization, labor migration, universalization of education (Kipnis 2011), transport network modernization, reconstruction of villages (Lora-Wainwright 2012, Abramson and Qi 2011, Looney 2012), and social class formation (Pun and Lu 2010; Lee and Selden 2008; Zhang 2012, May 2010), nevertheless seem destined to have an even more permanent and profound effect on the physical landscape, social structure, and culture of the world's largest nation. Physically, China's cities already contain about half of its citizens (Chan 2009), while freeways, highspeed trains, and ordinary paved highways radically reduce transport distances, and hundreds of millions of rural residents migrate yearly to cities to work in factory, construction, and service jobs (Pun 2004, Chang 2009, Banfill 2012), while increasingly modern urban social services remain unavailable to them because of the caste-like restrictions of the household registration, or hukou 户口 system (Chan 2010, Chan and Buckingham 2008). Almost all urbanites and most rural children in the wealthier coastal provinces receive at least a high-school education, while even in remote rural areas middle-school has become the legal and in most cases the factual minimum.

Like all catastrophes, 3.11 generated pain and imagination, heroes and villains. Political entrepreneurs with motivation and resources were quick to do battle for control of the event. They spun narrative explanations for the tragedy across a broad horizon of meanings and values, all conforming to their own preexisting preferences and to what they believed would be effective with the Japanese public. Existing enemies were enemies still, but newly villainous. The stakeholders, thus rearmed, used these narratives aggressively in an effort to shift the still unformed preferences of a general public struggling to make sense of otherwise unfathomable events. But 3.11 is not alone in this respect. This chapter locates the dueling narratives of 3.11 in their historical and comparative contexts to derive guidance for understanding how disasters can be used by politicians and their allies as well as by citizens.