The United States Geographical Survey has a handy .kmz file which displays real-time earthquake data when launched in Google Earth. Since the file is constantly updating, I took the liberty of isolating the Xinjiang earthquakes (it’s public domain!) and putting them right in this little file here. As you can see, although media outlets are vaguely pinpointing the earthquakes in Khotan or Yutian Counties, in reality the epicenters were high in the mountains straddling Xinjiang and Tibet, a very sparsely populated strip of land in an already sparsely populated part of China, which explains why Chinese media outlets are reporting no injuries and little damage beyond a few collapsed structures.

And this, of course, is good news. But I can’t help but note on the side that in the Chinese world view, a dizzying cascade of ill omens (say, for example, the roof being on fire, or, barely averted disasters in the heavens, or, of course, earthquakes literally sitting on the boundary between two trouble spots) usually is interpreted as the harbinger of chaotic change in the near future. In the old days, that meant dynastic change. Nowadays? Who knows.

It also would be unfair to omit the fact that in the Chinese world view, “near future” can be anywhere from next month to two hundred years from now. Well, time will tell.

March 22 Update: Xinhua has released a report in English regarding the earthquake. After the day was done, the final tally was 12 earthquakes total, including the big one that started it all. The article claims that 44,000 people were “affected” (without elaborating), that 2,200 houses were damaged or destroyed resulting in 10 million yuan of damage, but that no people were injured or killed.

Anyways, by covering the “paradox” of sexual opening and sexual taboo in China, CNN couldn’t avoid mentioning a special case in Xinjiang that caught peoples’ attention a while back.

A vocational high school in Xinjiang, a region about 1,500 miles west of Beijing, briefly enacted a rule last year requiring female students to take pregnancy tests as part of their annual school physical. An outcry about privacy forced the school to retreat.

Detailed coverage of the incident can be found in Mandarin here at Xinhua; less detailed information has been posted in English on ABC. The school in question is the XPCC 12th Agricultural Division Vocational and Technical School located about 10 kilometers from Urumqi’s city center. What’s interesting about that is the fact that the school is meant to prepare its students for military service (准军化的管理), and has strict time management policies which allow students only 40 minutes of free time during school days (usually used for eating; though I’m sure creative teenagers certainly can do a lot with 40 minutes) and weekend visits to family members and relatives only when a detailed itinerary and list of contact information is provided to the proper faculty members. Still, administrators at the school note that despite these policies they cannot prevent “that action which shall not be acknowledged” from happening (I’m not kidding; article quotes a sociologist’s euphemism “不愿看到的事情” for “sex”). Which makes me wonder how much sex occurs among high school students in far more liberalized cities like Beijing and Shanghai. Which makes me wonder, should that be the case, why, of all the hundreds of thousands of school in China, a military prep vocational school was the first to try mandatory pregnancy tests. Basically, what I’m thinking here is that this pregnancy incident test does more to highlight the contrast between the puritan, Manifest Destiny mindset of the Han Chinese in the West and the more Westernized, relatively laissez-faire mindset of the Han in the East than it does to point out the contrast between sexual opening and sexual taboo in China in general.

But anyway, cheers to Xinjiang getting some limelight on a CNN front story!