7.8-magnitude quake rocks China
　

THOUSANDS DEAD: The quake struck 92km northwest of Chengdu and was thought to be larger than the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 that killed more than 240,000 people

AP, CHONGQING, CHINA
Tuesday, May 13, 2008, Page 1

　

A massive earthquake in central China yesterday killed at least 7,000 people in Sichuan Province, with the overall death toll expected to increase sharply.

Xinhua news agency said 80 percent of the buildings had collapsed in Beichuan County and that another 10,000 people were believed hurt there.

The epicenter was in Sichuan, striking 92km northwest of the provincial capital of Chengdu. The 7.8-magnitude earthquake hit in the middle of the afternoon — when classes and offices were full.

Thousands of soldiers and police have already been dispatched to the epicenter in Wenchuan County, about 100km away from Beichuan, which has a population of 160,000.

In another area close to the epicenter, workers were struggling to dig out an estimated 900 middle school students trapped when the Juyuan Middle School building collapsed. Photographs showed heavy cranes trying to move rubble from the ruined structure.

It said four of the students were confirmed dead, but did not say how many of others were feared dead.

The earthquake comes fewer than three months before the start of the Beijing Summer Olympics, which China hopes to use to showcase its rise in the world.

Xinhua said its reporters in Juyuan Township about 100km from the epicenter in Wenchuan saw buried teenagers struggling to break loose from underneath the rubble of the three-story school “while others were crying out for help.”

Photos posted on the Internet and found on the Chinese search engine Baidu showed arms and a torso sticking out of the rubble of the school as dozens of people worked to free them, using small mechanical winches or their hands to move concrete slabs.

Another photo from Wenchuan showed what appeared to have been a six-story building flattened, ripped away from taller buildings of gray concrete.

Xinhua quoted the Ministry of Civil Affairs as saying the 107 dead had been killed in Sichuan, Gansu and Yunnan provinces and in the municipality of Chongqing. It said many had died in collapsed buildings, but did not give details.

More than 5,000 soldiers and police have been rushed into Sichuan to help with the disaster relief.

The airport in Sichuan’s provincial capital, Chengdu, was closed and roads were clogged with traffic after the earthquake, state television reported.

Rain was also predicted for the disaster area.

The quake of the 7.8-magnitude earthquake at 2:28pm, the US Geological Survey said on its Web site. It was centered about 10km below the surface. A series of smaller aftershocks followed.

Calls into the city did not go through as panicked residents quickly overloaded the telephone system.

“In Chengdu, mobile telecommunication switches have experienced jams and thousands of servers were out of service,” said Sha Yuejia (沙躍家), deputy chief executive officer of China Mobile.

Although it was difficult to telephone Chengdu, an Israeli student, Ronen Medzini, sent a text message to the Associated Press saying there were power and water outages there.

“Traffic jams, no running water, power outs, everyone sitting in the streets, patients evacuated from hospitals sitting outside and waiting,” it said.

Xinhua said an underground water pipe ruptured near the city’s southern railway station, flooding a main thoroughfare. Reporters saw buildings with cracks in their walls, but no collapses, Xinhua said.

State television broadcast tips for anyone trapped in the earthquake.

“If you’re buried, keep calm and conserve your energy. Seek water and food, and wait patiently for rescue,” CCTV said.

The earthquake also rattled buildings in Beijing 1,500km to the north. The Chinese capital is expected to be full of hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors when the Olympic Games start on Aug. 8.

Many Beijing office towers were evacuated, including the building housing the media offices for the organizers of the Olympics, which start in August. None of the Olympic venues was damaged.

Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) arrived in Chengdu just before sunset to oversee rescue work.

People ran screaming into the streets in other cities, where many residents said they had never been in an earthquake. In Fuyang, 1,100km to the east in Anhui Province, chandeliers in the lobby of the Buckingham Palace Hotel swayed.

“We’ve never felt anything like this our whole lives,” said a hotel employee surnamed Zhu.

Patients at the Fuyang People’s No. 1 Hospital were evacuated. An hour after the quake, a half-dozen patients in blue-striped pajamas stood outside the hospital. One was laying on a hospital bed in the parking lot.

Closer to the epicenter in Chongqing, Lai Dequn was napping while her mother watched TV on the 19th floor of a hotel.

“I suddenly felt the bed shaking and then realized it must be an earthquake,” the 42-year-old Lai said. “So I just put on slippers and helped my mother down to the ground floor.”

In Shanghai, skyscrapers swayed and most office occupants went rushing into the streets. The quake was also felt as far away as Thailand, Vietnam and Pakistan.

A magnitude 7.8 earthquake is considered a major event, capable of causing widespread damage and injuries in populated areas.

The last serious earthquake in China was in 2003, when a 6.8-magnitude quake killed 268 people in Bachu County in the west of Xinjiang.

China’s deadliest earthquake in modern history struck the northeastern city of Tangshan on July 28, 1976, killing 240,000 people. Yesterday’s quake was thought to be more powerful.

The quake was also felt in Taiwan at around 2:38pm yesterday. It measured 1.0 and lasted for about two minutes.

Hsiao Nai-chi (蕭乃祺), a specialist at the Central Weather Bureau (CWB), said yesterday that the center of the earthquake was located within a tectonic plate, which is very different from regular earthquakes that occur in Taiwan.

The epicenters of the earthquakes generally fall on the rims of tectonic plates, he said.

The energy released through the earthquake was five times greater than that of the 921 earthquake in 1999, which measured 7.3.

Lu Pei-ling (呂佩玲), deputy director of the Central Weather Bureau’s seismology center, further explained why an earthquake in Sichuan could generate repercussions in Taiwan.

“The surface waves of the earthquake are able to travel a long distance,” she said. “So you can feel the tremor not only in Sichuan, but also in Beijing as well.”

The Travel Agents Association estimated that about 2,360 Taiwanese tourists are in Sichuan.

Could it be the economy, stupid?

By Gerrit van der Wees
Tuesday, May 13, 2008, Page 8

Back in 1992, then-US Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton hammered away at his opponent — incumbent president George H.W. Bush — by saying his administration was to blame for the downturn in the economy.

“It’s the economy, stupid” became a catchphrase. Bush Sr, who had an approval rating of 90 percent the previous year because of his successes in handling the end of the Cold War and the Gulf War, lost the election.

This year in Taiwan, presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) used very much the same tactic against the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government. However, in Taiwan there were some significant differences. First, President Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration was already in the doldrums for other than economic reasons and it was difficult for DPP candidate Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) to distance himself from the sitting administration.

Second, the economy was actually doing quite well, growing at a rate of 5.7 percent last year. Still, the “economy-is-down” argument stuck. There are several reasons why.

First, we must remember that Taiwan has a developed economy: At a per capita GDP of US$29,600 (2006), it has surpassed many countries in southern Europe and is close to the high-tech economies of western Europe.

On the S-curve of economic development, Taiwan is close to the top and therefore necessarily has a relatively flat growth rate. Still, Taiwan’s growth would be the envy of many a Western country. Indeed, it is very much sustainable.

China, on the other hand, is — with a per capita GDP estimated at US$5,300 (2006) — still near the bottom of the S-curve, although there are pockets of high development along the coast, in the industrial zones of Shenzhen and Shanghai. Particularly in view of the environmental costs and high income discrepancies, many economists do not believe China’s present growth rate is sustainable.

When Ma’s camp compared the apples of Taiwan’s 5.7 percent growth with the oranges of China’s 11.4 percent growth, the absolute levels of development were conveniently not mentioned.

The results of a recent opinion poll punctures the myth — expounded by most international news media — that a vote for Ma was somehow a vote for closer relations with China. The poll, published by the DPP on April 27, shows that 82 percent of respondents disagreed that the results of the presidential elections indicated that Taiwanese were more willing to accept unification with China — even among pan-blue respondents the percentage who disagreed was 76.5 percent. Of those surveyed, 69.3 percent agreed that any important future cross-strait agreement must be voted on through a referendum. Some 88.3 percent of respondents agreed that Taiwan and China were separate, sovereign countries. Even among pan-blue respondents, the figure was 86.4 percent.

Thus, for many voters the economy was the decisive factor in casting their vote. Why did economics get so much traction during the elections? The main reason was that although the overall economy did very well the income distribution was increasingly skewed: Well-off businesspeople grew richer from their investments in China, while the incomes of workers and farmers stagnated, precisely because of the opening to China. Workers saw their jobs disappearing to China, while farmers saw an increasing flow of cheap Chinese agricultural products flood the local market.

So, what will happen in the next four years? Ma campaigned under the “Six-three-three” slogan: 6 percent economic growth, less than 3 percent unemployment and a per capita GDP of US$30,000. At the end of last month, Ma was already backtracking, saying that the 6 percent growth was probably not feasible and that it would be more likely in the neighborhood of 5 percent.

After an initial honeymoon, it will become increasingly clear that Ma’s campaign promises are a far cry from reality: Taiwan is closely linked to the global economy and the economic downturn in the US — some speak of a recession — will have a major effect on China’s export-oriented economy, which in turn will have severe repercussions on Taiwan’s economy. That is the danger of Taiwan’s economy being too closely tied to China’s economy.

So, what is Ma proposing? Opening up further to China and linking Taiwan’s economy even closer to China’s. This is a recipe for disaster, since it is tying Taiwan’s robust but still relatively small economy to that of the Chinese supertanker that is hitting an iceberg.

Taiwan’s political and economic viability can only be ensured if the new policymakers in Taipei steer away from China and strive toward making Taiwan a full and equal member in the international community, not a mere appendix of China.



Gerrit van der Wees is editor of Taiwan Communique, a publication based in Washington.

Learning from the Communists

By Paul Lin 林保華
Tuesday, May 13, 2008, Page 8

By late 1948, the CCP had won a decisive advantage over the KMT, and only then did it propose eliminating all resistance to the party.

The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) loss to the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the past two elections reminded me of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also experienced defeat by the KMT. Many lessons can be learned from the loss. Although the DPP is not the CCP, it can learn from the CCP’s strategic thinking.

In 1927, KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) purged the party of communists and the CCP suffered a major defeat, although it maintained some military power. The KMT army surrounded the Communists’ Jiangxi base, while CCP leadership was unable to extract itself from a struggle to eliminate left and right-liners in an attempt to assign blame.

In 1933, the KMT’s 19th Route Army, which had been transferred to Fujian Province from Shanghai, established the anti-Chiang Fujian People’s Government (福建人民政府) and wanted to cooperate with the CCP.

This caused debate in the party: Mao Zedong (毛澤東) wanted to join forces with the group, but fellow CCP leader Wang Ming (王明) didn’t want to get involved in what he saw as an internal KMT conflict. He even thought that pretending to be a moderate way was the best way to deceive the people, thus making the 19th Army appear to be the most dangerous enemy.

Wang headed up the CCP mainstream and had the support of Moscow’s Comintern, and in the end the CCP didn’t join forces with the Fujian government.

After Chiang defeated the Fujian People’s Government, he directed his full force against the CCP’s Jiangxi base for his fifth encirclement campaign.

The resourceful Mao was stripped of his military power for being a rightist, and Wang and Zhou Enlai (周恩來) fought the KMT together.

The CCP was inferior to the KMT in terms of money, arms and personnel, and suffered heavy losses. The CCP was forced to abandon its base and in 1934 fled westwards on the Long March.

The defeat taught Mao an important lesson and he made plans to strike back. In January 1935, he regained command over the army at the Zunyi Conference. When the army reached the north of Shaanxi in October that year, it had lost 90 percent of its troops, and almost all its members from the old Jiangxi base. The CCP stopped fighting Chiang, instead joining him in the fight against Japan.

The KMT was divided over this development and in the end Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang (張學良) kidnapped Chiang in Xian to force him to cooperate with the Communists in the second united front against Japan.

The Sino-Japanese war broke out in 1937. The CCP abandoned its policy of attacking landlords and dividing the land among farmers, and instead began lowering rent and interest. The Communist army merged with the national army.

On the surface, the CCP seemed to have given up its fundamental ideology: winning the support of intellectuals and moderates in KMT-controlled areas.

But the CCP did not give up command of its own army. They changed their tactics to both cooperate with and oppose Chiang, and to force him to fight the Japanese, while the CCP grew stronger as its two enemies destroyed each other.

In 1939, Mao summarized the three main priorities for the Chinese revolution: building up the party, helping the KMT in the united front against Japan and encouraging armed struggle. I understand building the party to mean maintaining the fundamental communist ideology: The highest aim was the struggle to establish a communist society while avoiding the establishment of a new democratic society that would include capitalism.

When it was part of the united front, the party followed this program to attract moderates. When the united front had won the war, the Communist army had grown from 30,000 to 900,000 members.

Still, Mao went to Chongqing to tell the KMT government his peaceful intentions and proposed a truce to stop the civil war.

In Chongqing he cried “Long live President Chiang!” and won over many moderates.

Taking aim at KMT corruption, Mao then introduced the slogan “oppose hunger, oppose civil war.” Using livelihood issues, he shifted blame for the civil war to the KMT and thoroughly won over the moderates in the KMT-controlled areas. By late 1948, the CCP had won a decisive advantage over the KMT, and only then did it propose eliminating all resistance to the party.

The above is to illustrate that the fundamental ideology is a goal, and taking a moderate line is the means.

While the two cannot necessarily exist together, they should complement each other, rather than be mutually exclusive.



Paul Lin is a political commentator based in Taiwan.