China's Red Cross is scrambling to help rebuild after another disaster -- only this time it's their own reputation they need to reconstruct.
Self-Inflicted：自找的，自己造成的 scramble：爭奪，搶奪
The Red Cross Society of China is vowing to restore its sagging image, which has buckled under the weight of allegations of corruption and poor management and an undeniable loss of public confidence. Evidence of how bad things have become: In the first day after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake hit the county of Lushan in Sichuan, the Red Cross received roughly 140,000 yuan ($22,700) in donations, compared to 10 million taken in by martial arts star Jet Li's One Foundation.
sag：鬆弛，下垂，下跌 allegation：主張，斷言，辯解 martial arts：武術
One of its senior executives has vowed to resign if there isn't progress.
'The Red Cross still has three to five years of pain ahead,' said executive vice president Zhao Baige, according to the People's Daily online ( in Chinese). 'Only by open, transparent and effective restructuring with public participation can we overcome this crisis.'
And just in case you thought she might be kidding, she added this for good measure: 'If we do not make progress in putting this 'black cross' (which we have to bear) behind us, I will submit my resignation.'
What is it that has laid them so low?
China 's Red Cross, which unlike most Red Cross organizations is closely tied to the government, is still unable to shake the damage from the 2011 scandal linked to a woman known as Guo Meimei. While the woman had no official tie to the Red Cross, she may have traded on a presumed connection through a company called Red Cross Commerce. She famously bragged of her luxurious lifestyle, posting photos of expensive cars and luxury accessories on Sina Weibo, China's most popular Twitter-like microblogging service.
brag：吹牛，自誇，吹噓
While the Red Cross has denied any connection to Guo Meimei there has still been no full, public accounting of the embarrassing incident. Persistent rumors of ties to a senior Red Cross official have never been fully laid to rest. More recently there have been fresh calls from within the Red Cross for a reopening of a probe.
laid to rest：入土為安，安息
The Red Cross has also struggled to deal with another public relations disaster -- that one following the massive 2008 earthquake in Sichuan where billions of yuan in donations were said to have gone missing. A significant part of those funds were managed by the Red Cross.
The damage to the Red Cross's reputation has come into sharp focus since the Lushan earthquake hit on April 20. While the Red Cross once was widely seen as the relief agency of choice, that is no longer the case, with pedestrians largely ignoring collection boxes (the poor management of which was the subject of yet another scandal in January) and Internet users flooding the organization's microblog feed with thumbs-down icons. More than 1.3 billion yuan ($210 million) has been collected by a host of organizations -- but only about half went to the Red Cross, according to the People's Daily online.
The shift in donations away from the state-linked Red Cross toward private groups like the One Foundation presents a potentially serious challenge to the government, which has justified its moves to limit the growth of civic groups by insisting that it is better suited to serving Chinese people in need.
Ms. Zhao tried to put the best face on this, saying she was moved by the fact that despite all the doubts about the organization, many people around the country still trusted the Red Cross with their donations.
Sadly for the Red Cross, the relief organization may need even more time to recover than Sichuan.