Chinese Quake teaches Compassion ?

I was thinking when I watched the footage on TV... maybe this tragedy will make the Chinese less harsh to each other... I have heard from tourists that it was a very materialistic society, with low levels of kindness.. So this event could be transformational, like a Cancer for a high-flying businessman.

From the extract below, it seems it may even revive spirituality - extirpated violently by communism which hates religion with a vengeance (torturing Tibetan monks as an example of this). Communism aims to be the religion - the State is God, all your efforts are to please and glorify the state (or that asshole Mao).
European Socialism is not all that different in it's desires to be worshiped and to do away with religion and private initiative - just less violent.

The Sichuan earthquake not only energized him, but led to a step that, after our two decades of friendship, came as a surprise. Never before one to talk about religion, he told me he organized a private Christian service, over dinner, with eight relatives and staff members at a restaurant in Shenzhen. "We sang hymns, took turns reading from the Scriptures, and prayed for the lost people. No beer or wine on this occasion. We felt better afterwards."

"It's been 30 years of chasing after money in China," he said, striking another new note. "And people haven't paid enough attention to spiritual life. Now we Chinese have money; we must also have care and trust in each other. Because China has improved, there's a real private realm where action may be taken--we took it." This businessman in his 40s, briefly a civil servant in Beijing before coming to Harvard, links his self-reliance to a wariness of the Beijing government, frustration at its lack of transparency, and disgust at its corruption.

"If the Sichuan earthquake happened in Japan or USA, there would have been many more survivors," he said with agitation. "Our rescue rate of less than 1 in 10 was very low."In China some matters are strictly for the government. Politics is for the Communist party-state. Ordinary folk may pursue private goals. Beijing trusts the people with their money, but not with their minds. But the Sichuan earthquake, throwing everyone naked into the air, momentarily bridged the divide.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/194pzaio.asp


also from Guy Sorman:

Numerous on-site reports make it clear that the quake victims are for the most part migrant workers. That is, they are people from the countryside who had taken to the road to find jobs in workshops or small industrial plants, finding makeshift lodgings in uninhabitable and heretofore uninhabited regions. These deaths are not to be explained by supernatural causes, but by the political exploitation of impoverished peasants who have been despised and neglected by the Communist Party.Journalists on location, as well as survivors, likewise observe that the buildings first to crumble, and that killed the most victims, were public edifices – schools and hospitals. Everyone in China knows that a common form of corruption in the ranks of the Communist Party consists in economizing on materials and construction standards

.http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121097707834199753.html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries