The Great Sichuan Earthquake

Posted May 14, 2008

China’s May 12 earthquake was massive in scope and ruthless in intensity, visiting destruction on a mountainous, peripheral region where the Tibetan plateau meets the Sichuan basin in the southwest. The death toll is now more than 12,000 and is sure to climb higher as soldiers and rescue teams pull bodies from the rubble. The initial temblor was magnitude 7.9, and there were nearly 2,000 aftershocks within the first day, three of which were magnitude 6 or greater at the epicenter in Wenchuan County.

The quakes were so powerful that workers in Beijing, some 900 miles from the epicenter, fled trembling high rises. Last night, millions of people in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, slept on the streets due to concern over more aftershocks. Meanwhile, the agonizingly slow tragedy of schoolchildren buried in rubble drags on mercilessly.

In the moments following the quake, the world’s source of breaking news on the disaster was neither the Chinese government nor the Western media. As the first wave of shocks receded, Chinese and foreign residents across the country reached for the closest broadcast tools at hand, their cell phones and computers. Providing first-hand accounts of the earthquake and its immediate effects were thousands of “tweets”—blog entries posted to the Internet via text message. On QQ and MSN, two massively popular instant message services in China, friends traded second-by-second updates.

Minutes before the U.S. Geological Survey reported the quake on their home site and hours before media outlets ran their first stories, technology blogger Robert Scoble was publishing reactions to the quake from Chengdu to Beijing, giving voice to a corps of citizen journalists. With telecommunications severed, and more than 2,300 cell phone towers in the region toppled, news teams remained hours away.

One of the very few firsthand reports came from a survivor who escaped a bus ride from Wenchuan to Dujiangyan. He saw the water level of a reservoir suddenly surge and massive mudslides coming down slopes washing out whole villages in a blink of the eye. In Beichuan County, northwest of the epicenter, swaps of buildings collapsed, leveling the landscape and killing more than 7,000 so far, the largest death toll reported for any single county.

Disconcertingly, there’s still no information on fatalities from Wenchuan (population roughly 100,000), which remains largely cut off from the rest of China due to landslides, poor road conditions and severe infrastructure damage. According to some reports, tens of thousands are unaccounted for. Helicopters carrying rescue workers made attempts to enter the area but couldn’t fly in due to strong thunderstorms. As information becomes available in the next few days, we will know how much damage from there is near the epicenter and how high the overall death toll will be. The worst news is likely yet to come.

A Chinese proverb has it that “heaven is high and the emperor is far away.” By this standard, Beijing responded swiftly. Premier Wen Jiabao, a geologist by training, was at the scene of the earthquake in Dujiangyan, 15 miles from the epicenter, within six hours. It took U.S. President George W. Bush four days (approximately 96 hours) to visit the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Xinhua, the Chinese state media service, began a series of rapid updates on its Web site, providing reports from local officials as they were able to check in.

With roads to the hardest hit areas buried in rubble, the Chinese government reported a mobilization of 50,000 troops. It’s a striking contrast with the ruling military junta in Myanmar. Although they displayed chilling efficiency in cracking down on protests by Buddhist monks in September, the junta chose not to mobilize its forces to provide aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. Instead they chose to carry on with a planned constitutional referendum. In Sichuan, when driving rain kept helicopters and paratroopers out of the skies, Chinese troops continued from Chengdu on foot. The first-aid teams reached stricken Wenchuan County by 11 p.m. Tuesday, 33 hours after the quake.

As aid finally began to reach those in need, a debate over the nature of the government’s response erupted on the Internet. As with the SARS epidemic and the blizzards in south China this winter, the Chinese government was faced with a choice between stifling discourse on a potentially inflammatory and destabilizing issue or giving the media free rein. What has the Chinese government learned from the past? Does their response to the earthquake display a new openness to public discourse?

Premier Wen’s physical presence at the disaster site seems to be making a strong impression of state responsiveness. Of course, he has an illustrious history of being a first-responder for the Chinese government. Recently, he spent his New Year’s holiday overseeing the relief efforts for winter storm victims. In 2003 he was among the politicians who revealed the scope of the SARS epidemic to the world and in 2004 he was the first Chinese politician to acknowledge China’s AIDS crisis. In another era of his political career, as aide to reformist official Zhao Ziyang, Mr. Wen visited the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in late May, 1989, to talk with the student leaders.

Premier Wen’s presence may be dismissed by many as a symbolic gesture by the central government’s senior leaders. But in China, a high level visit can be the most effective way to mobilize local bureaucrats. So far, local governments have also shifted into high gear. At the provincial level, Tibet and Yunnan seismological bureaus are sending in support teams and the Chongqing government has announced plans to ensure the availability of its airport and two highways to Chengdu to help transport aid supplies and rescue personnel. Chinese army and armed police troops stationed in Sichuan also immediately sent in tens of thousands in the race against time and bad weather after the quake.

On the other hand, we are hearing increasing reports of discontent, even outrage, with officialdom’s response on the part of residents who have lost loved ones. There is a powerful linkage in Chinese political culture, including at the populist level, between natural disasters and state failure (the most famous example being the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, which claimed some 240,000 lives, just before the death of Chairman Mao Zedong).

Critics of China’s deteriorating environmental situation are raising questions about the links between the government’s poor environmental track record and the scope of the disaster. Geologist Yang Yong went so far as to tell the Singaporean newspaper Lian He Zao Bao that China’s construction of numerous dams in the region destabilized the fault line and directly led to the earthquake.

Whether this is true or not, the quake has certainly led to fears about the structural integrity of engineering projects in the region. Although China has possessed a building code since 1978, retrofitting buildings to meet standards has proved daunting in rural areas. Premier Wen and the military’s swift response represents a genuine effort to rush aid to those in need. But will Beijing and local governments address the underlying issues of irresponsible construction and uncontrolled growth that may have indirectly led to the deaths of scores of children in Dujiangyan school, built only 10 years ago? As long as economic growth remains the standard by which Chinese political decisions are measured, Beijing may find itself engaged in a perpetual clean-up mission.

Mr. Michael Zhao, a former Beijing-based journalist, is multimedia producer for the Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations in New York.