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Two years on, history repeats itself
By Cao Changqing 曹長青
Friday, Apr 23, 2010, Page 8
‘The state-controlled media ... true to form, just waxed lyrical about how the
Chinese Communist Party and state leaders were so concerned about the people.
Premier Wen Jiabao rushed to the site of the earthquake to make a show of
compassion, spouting a lot of hot air about how everyone is in it together and
how they will pull through together. So now the populace has to show its
gratitude to the CCP, the very group that has made matters worse.’
On Wednesday last week, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit Yushu County in
northwestern China’s Qinghai Province. At the time of writing, the death toll
had surpassed 2,000, with the number of injured exceeding 10,000. Earthquakes
are natural disasters and as such are very difficult to predict. However, both
this one and the major quake that devastated parts of Sichuan Province two years
ago have led to a human tragedy exacerbated by the political system in China.
First of all, experts issued a warning before the earthquake hit, but China
Earthquake Administration (CEA) officials did not take it seriously. The same
thing happened with the Sichuan earthquake, when at least two seismologists
issued a warning that was later suppressed by the authorities, who were
concerned that the news would have an effect on the Olympic torch relay prior to
the Games in Beijing.
Before last week’s earthquake, the media in Guangdong Province reported that a
seismologist working for the Shanxi Earthquake Administration’s Houma station,
Yu Xianghong (余向紅), accurately predicted the time and location of the
earthquake, but again the warnings were not heeded. On March 9, a month before
the Qinghai earthquake, the CEA announced that a destructive earthquake was
unlikely to happen within China’s borders for the foreseeable future.
Second, the authorities have made absolutely no moves to apologize to the public
for having failed to issue a warning and for suppressing the accurate forecast.
Again, this is a repeat of what happened with the Sichuan earthquake.
You wouldn’t know it from the state-controlled media either which, true to form,
just waxed lyrical about how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and state leaders
were so concerned about the people. Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) rushed to the site
of the earthquake to make a show of compassion, spouting a lot of hot air about
how everyone is in it together and how they will pull through together. So now
the populace has to show its gratitude to the CCP, the very group that has made
matters worse.
The third point refers to another scandal that links last week’s earthquake and
the one that happened two years ago. That is, the authorities refused all offers
of international aid in the all-important 72-hour period immediately following
the quake. Both Taiwan and Japan, which have a lot of experience in dealing with
earthquakes and which are relatively near to China, offered to send rescue
teams, but both of these offers were turned down for the reason that China
already had sufficient personnel.
A journalist working for Reuters interviewed a teacher named Xu Haiying (徐海英)
from Yushu’s elementary school who said that there were students buried under
the rubble, but they did not have the equipment to get to them. Xu added that
there weren’t enough people to help out. A local rescue worker commented on how
the situation made him sad because some people were still alive in their houses
and the rescue teams were unable to get them out.
Not only are the authorities refusing offers of help from outside, they’re also
not letting civic organizations get in, having sealed off all of the roads
leading into Yushu.
A full 97 percent of the residents of Yushu County are Tibetan and many of them
only speak the Tibetan language. Surely, it would have made sense for Beijing to
send in rescue teams with Tibetans in them instead of Han Chinese teams. Even
Guangdong’s Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市報) complained that the language
barrier was negatively impacting rescue efforts and putting the lives of many
disaster victims at risk. The reason for this decision is that Beijing was
worried that if Tibetans went to help in the rescue efforts, they would be
shocked by what they saw and this would have an unsettling effect on the people
when the information leaked out.
The final point concerns the quality of construction, or the lack of it. This is
something that came to light after the Sichuan earthquake, when shabby
construction practices caused the needless deaths of more than 5,000
schoolchildren as a large number of schools collapsed. According to the head of
the Qinghai Department of Education, at least 11 schools were destroyed by the
Yushu quake and the Yushu No. 3 Elementary School alone, of which 80 percent of
its single-story classrooms collapsed, had 3,000 students.
An official safety survey conducted last year on schools in China found that 60
percent of school buildings in Qinghai fell short of the required standards. Two
people tried to look into the problem of school buildings collapsing in the
aftermath of the Sichuan quake, but were given a custodial sentence for their
pains.
Not long ago there was a magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile, but thanks to the
strict laws on quake-resistant buildings, the death toll was kept to less than
500. The Qinghai earthquake, at magnitude 7.1, has already left more than 2,000
dead. One Chinese Internet user commented about the difference between what
happened in Chile and China and how China is a country with 1.3 billion people,
has over US$2 trillion in foreign currency reserves, a load of billionaires,
countless academics and officials and how it couldn’t manage to do what Chile
has done.
There were also differences in the manner in which the two earthquakes were
responded to. In the case of the Sichuan quake, public reaction was very strong,
with people falling over themselves to make donations to the relief effort and
celebrities leading the way (although one suspects this was for show in certain
cases).
Last week, we saw something entirely different. One cannot discount the fact
that the predominant ethnicity of the locals in Qinghai had something to do with
this (the province is actually the birthplace of the Dalai Lama and the Ninth
Panchen Lama died there).
The Chinese are generally quite vocal in their opposition to the idea of Tibetan
independence, claiming that the Tibetans are their “compatriots,” but when it
comes to lending a hand in times of need, they cannot even bring themselves to
put up a front.
Cao Changqing is a writer based in the US.
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