The Walls Tumble Down

Zhang Xuede stands near what was once the Xinjian Elementary School surrounded by mud, debris, twisted metal and slabs of concrete. The 70-year-old has kept vigil in the city of Dujiangyan for the better part of a day after a 7.9-magnitude earthquake rocked China’s Sichuan province on May 12, flattening the school his grandson attended. “After the quake hit, I ran to the school and started removing rubble,” Zhang says. “I uncovered several children. Some were dead, some were still alive. But I couldn’t find my grandson.” Unlike many of the other parents and relatives waiting in the rain, Zhang seems drained of hope that his grandson will be found and rescued. When a neighbor asks about the boy, Zhang replies flatly: “He’s dead.”

That awful realization awaits tens of thousands of Chinese as time inexorably runs out for their loved ones who on May 14 were still trapped in collapsed apartment blocks, homes, schools and factories. A huge relief effort, including 50,000 Chinese soldiers, was under way, but the devastation from the powerful quake, which rocked skyscrapers in cities as far away as Bangkok and Taipei, was vast. Two days after the first shock, the official death toll had risen to almost 15,000 — and was certain to soar. Whatever the final toll, the Wenchuan earthquake, named for the Sichuan county at the epicenter, will likely be China’s worst natural disaster since a quake erupted under the northeastern town of Tangshan in 1976, killing an estimated 242,000.

For most of China’s long history, earthquakes and other calamities have been viewed as both portents of change and a test of the ruling government’s “mandate of heaven.” Many Chinese point out that Mao Zedong died only months after the Tangshan disaster. The Wenchuan quake is being discussed in similar terms in Chinese Internet forums, restaurants and tea shops, often generating an inchoate anxiety about possible cataclysms to come or punishment for past wrongs. Some commentators find significance in the fact that the quake hit just where the vast Sichuan plain meets the foothills of the Himalayas, the geographical and ethnic boundary separating China from Tibet — where Chinese troops put down bloody protests against Beijing’s rule in March, sparking global protests that sullied China’s image as it prepared to host the Olympic Games in August. Others gloomily point to a series of other recent tragedies — destructively cold snowstorms, an outbreak of disease that left dozens of children dead, a train accident that killed 72 — as evidence of some kind of heavenly displeasure.

Communist Party leaders in Beijing can set things right if they pass this test: they must show the country and the world the government can cope with nature’s worst. Beijing is aware of the backlash that can come from a slow or ineffective response. The Administration of U.S. President George W. Bush was stained by its sluggish reaction after Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans in 2005. Beijing is also painfully conscious of the opprobrium heaped on Burma’s military rulers for their callous refusal to allow the international community to help in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, which killed at least 100,000 in early May. China has “a chance to show the world that it has the capability and readiness to handle an emergency like this,” says Huang Jing, a visiting scholar and China expert at the National University of Singapore.

That’s why President Hu Jintao called for an “all-out” response, and why Premier Wen Jiabao was on an airplane to the earthquake zone even before the aftershocks subsided. On the night of May 12, millions of Chinese watching state-owned television stations were repeatedly shown video footage of Wen rallying rescue forces, issuing orders in a driving rain, poring over maps and venturing into the ruins to assure victims still trapped that they should “hold on a little longer” as help was on the way. By the second day of the crisis, an exhausted Wen sometimes appeared to be near tears himself as he attempted to comfort yet another weeping victim. The media was “not shy at all about showing him in full crisis mode, much more unsanitized stuff than would normally be allowed” by the state propaganda machine, says Beijing-based scholar Russell Leigh Moses. “The government’s legitimacy is very much dependent on its ability to show that it can care for and look after ordinary Chinese, and this case is one where they have clearly made a decision to make absolutely sure there’s no doubt they are doing everything humanly possible.”

In the past, Beijing has often handled crises by suppressing the media and trying to pretend problems did not exist. In 2003, authorities covered up the full extent of the deadly SARS outbreak for weeks, a decision that critics said delayed efforts to fight the virus and may have increased the number of deaths. But lessons have been learned from that episode, which came during Hu’s first months in office. The earthquake received blanket coverage by the Chinese media, with TV stations broadcasting almost hourly updates of the number of fatalities along with sometimes gruesome video of rescue operations, including scenes of grieving parents hovering near bloody corpses of children killed when schools collapsed.

Allowing the cameras to roll was unusual for Beijing. But far more significant was China’s swift mobilization of an army of more than 100,000 relief workers, including soldiers, police and medical teams, to save those who could be saved, to provide food and shelter to those who lost everything, and to keep the peace. Chinese media on May 14 estimated that there were 25,000 people trapped in collapsed structures in the quake zone, including more than 18,000 in Mianyang, a city of 5 million. In Dujiangyan (pop. 600,000), where row after row of apartment buildings were reduced to heaps and corpses lay on the sidewalks, rescue operations resembled an invasion. Military vehicles ranging from heavy trucks to jeeps, ambulances and mobile kitchens were everywhere. So were People’s Liberation Army soldiers and the paramilitary People’s Armed Police, who used improvised pry bars and bare hands to try to get to survivors, and who stepped in to control emotional crowds of victims’ relatives.

At the collapsed Dujiangyan City Chinese Medicine Hospital, rescue workers raced death as they laboriously tried to lift crushing slabs of concrete to get to victims pinned in the debris pile. A woman waited outside for news of her seven kin who were visiting her father at the hospital when the quake struck. The woman says she heard her father call from the rubble the day of the disaster. The following morning he called out again, this time saying, “I don’t think I can hold out much longer.” When night fell in Dujiangyan, a loudspeaker truck cruised the streets broadcasting the same message: “Please stay calm. The State Council, the Central Committee, and the Sichuan, Chengdu and Dujiangyan governments are trying their best to help. Earthquakes are not something that mankind can avoid.” Sadly not. But bungled relief operations are, and Beijing is pulling out all the stops to ensure that this time it doesn’t repeat past mistakes.