This chapter charts four social channels leading into China’s Northwest at the time of the great earthquake centered in Haiyuan, Gansu, in 1920: native Gansu networks; national (political and charitable) networks; foreign (missionary and other) networks; and scientific (geological) networks. Using newspaper accounts, telegraph cables, letters and reports as they made their way through journalistic and consular channels, the chapter aims to capture different strands of cultural memory of a monumental disaster as reports of it travelled beyond stricken areas to Chinese cities and overseas. As this chapter shows, exploring the ways in which crisis events were responded to, commented on and remembered reveals a good deal about cultural practices at the time. Writing on the earthquake and wider famine fields of early republican China would reflect three increasingly conflated areas of intellectual activity around the May Fourth movement of 1919: the valorization of science and the scientific method; commentary on China’s ongoing transition to republican politics; and diagnostic exercises on the social and moral health of the nation. One key aspect of the cultural production of this period explored in this book is the invisibility it afforded certain historical actors and the indispensability it afforded others.

The series of ecological crises in the years after May Fourth in 1919 presented dramatic opportunities to employ methods and techniques of the social survey movement gaining momentum in China at the time. This chapter focuses on instances in which local accounts of earthquake and famine can be held up against reports by university students reporting on, roughly, the same time and places in Gansu and Zhili (Hebei) in 1920–21. Using the student-run magazine Xin Long (New Gansu) and student reports in Chenbao (Morning Post) and other Beijing dailies, the chapter juxtaposes accounts from different social networks for what it reveals about journalistic practices at a pivotal moment in twentieth- century revolutionary politics. As the chapter shows, student handling of disaster did not necessarily tinker with the time line of events, or with “factuality” itself. Student messaging was encoded with meaning, instead, through a combination of emphasis, repetition and pointed absences. In this way, May Fourth disaster coverage involved politics played at a deeper level than partisan political attack. With gentry or Buddhist initiative excised from disaster accounts – deinscribing, in other words, these actors’ significance from cultural memory – what remained in representations of rural life were dead cultures and communities.