If you weren’t able to catch the live broadcast of China’s President Hu Jintao at the official observance of the anniversary of the Wenchuan Earthquake, you can see it here. President Hu went to Yingxiu Township, the hardest-hit town in Wenchuan County, the quake’s epicenter. The monument is in front of the collapsed Xuankou Middle School. The clock on the monument is frozen at 2:28, the time of the quake.

Let’s all hope that the public spiritedness that animated so many people across China doesn’t wane. Total donations (domestic and foreign) came to US $11.2 billion. More than 10 million volunteers across the country gave their time and effort. There are now 100 NGOs operating in Sichuan doing earthquake-relief-related work. Some 1 million rural homes have already been rebuilt. But there’s obviously still a long, long way to go.

I’m cheered by President Hu’s thank-yous to foreign dignitaries, too; he noted the other day, following a State Council Information Center white paper, that some 170 countries donated cash totaling US $650 million. The UK alone donated £3 million.

My own thoughts a year after the quake after the jump.

Like many people, I was initially quite encouraged by the transparency that Beijing and local officials all seemed to show in the immediate aftermath of the quake, drawing very favorable comparisons to Myanmar, which suffered a devastating cyclone at about the same time. I’m worried, as many are too, about backsliding into old habits.

As we’re all aware, officials — I’m not sure whether this was exclusively local or provincial, either — have taken a dim view of people who’ve sought to identify those to blame for shoddy construction that, as people all seem to agree, was at the root of the massive death toll for students in Sichuan. Responding perhaps to popular pressure and the efforts of folks like the artist Ai Weiwei, Sichuan’s education department finally released an official death toll for students: 5,335 dead or missing. But Ai and others aren’t placated by this: their tally is much higher, at over 6,000, and Ai wants names, ages, and places of death too. He’s gotten considerable popular support among intellectuals, rights activists, and ordinary netizens.

We’ve read in recent days about obstruction and harassment of foreign correspondents like Jamil Anderlini, a Kiwi living in Beijing and writing for the Financial Times, who was roughed up by people suspected to have been plainclothes cops after he started interviewing parents of students killed in the quake. Now to be clear, while I do understand the official line, and why officials might reflexively worry that investigations like this somehow undermine social stability, I think they need to take the longer view and realize that bottling up these powerful emotions — we’re talking about parents who’ve lost children here — is ultimately a greater threat to social stability.

There’s a sense among many Chinese — not just officials, but even among ordinary people — that the western media is fixated on reporting negative news: that rather than focusing, as local officials would clearly rather they would, on brave survivors, the new public-spiritedness that the quake brought to life, and the impressive reconstruction efforts, they all seem to want to report on the tofu-dregs school buildings and on the frustrations of the parents of dead schoolchildren. The problem is that when officials make these assumptions about western media and act to try and prevent them from reporting, it only makes the situation worse. Then it really does become the story, because the story that “authorities” are trying to keep you from hearing is always the one you’re going to be more interested in hearing.