millions still homeless a year after sichuan earthquake

8/14/2019 Millions Still Homeless a Year After Sichuan Earthquake

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Millions still homeless a year after

Sichuan earthquake

A year after the Sichuan earthquake, millions remainhomeless, many stuck in makeshift camps without

the money to rebuild their lives and homes.

Despite this, the Chinese government is keen to

show how it is making great advances in the

region.

By Malcolm Moore

Published: 7:30AM BST 30 Apr 2009

The latest estimate is that 70,000 people lost their lives and a further 10 million, many

of them poor and elderly, were made homeless. Photo: EPA

The town of Beichuan sits in a naturally perilousposition, in a cleft in the mountains

that swell up from the rice-growing plains of Sichuan province and eventually flatten

out into the immense Tibetan plateau in the north. This is the heart of Sichuan, in the

centre of China, a giant landlocked basin between the Himalayas to the west, the

Qinling range in the north and the mountains of Yunnan to the south.

Larger geographically and more populous than Germany, Sichuan is the country's rice

bowl, growing more food than any other province, from pork, rice and wheat to

peaches and sweet potatoes. But due to the sheer weight of humanity living in

Sichuan, the province has always remained poor.


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The region has not only been left behind by China's economic success, it has actually

suffered as a result. Villages in the countryside have been drained of almost everyone

of working age, leaving only the very old and the very young. Sichuanese workers can

be found on almost every construction site in China.

It was the Qiang, an ethnic tribe of nomads, who first settled around the Minjiang

river between the 11th and 16th centuries bc; neither wholly Chinese nor Tibetan,they were known both for their sumptuous embroidery and for their taste in smoking

orchid leaves. Researchers believe that the Qiang may be China's oldest people, with a

culture and religion that predates both Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism. They farmed

the slopes and collected Chinese caterpillar fungus and fritillary butterflies to sell as

traditional medicine. Further up in the mountains lived some of China's rarest species:

giant pandas, golden monkeys and flying foxes.

With its mist-shrouded mountains and lush plains, the scenery around Beichuan is

beautiful, the land naturally fertile, with a mild climate and soft showers. But today

Beichuan looks like it has been smashed into matchsticks by a giant fist.

At 2.30pm on May 12 last year, the 155-mile Longmenshan Fault that runs diagonally

through Sichuan buckled, then ripped in two, causing China's strongest earthquake for

more than half a century, with a magnitude of 8.0 (the recent Italian quake measured

6.3).

Tremors were felt 1,000 miles away, leading to the evacuation of skyscrapers in

Shanghai and Hong Kong. Buildings on the slopes of the valley above Beichuan slid

and piled up on each other in a concertina before smashing against the homes below,

though it is likely that these would have collapsed anyway.

The town, just over 60 miles from the epicentre of the quake, was completelydestroyed. Only half of its 20,000 inhabitants survived. In the aftermath volunteers

who rushed to Beichuan from all over China described the tangle of limbs wedged in

the debris, the faint cries of the survivors and the corpses lying in the road, suffocated

by the dust that caked their eyes and hair.

'Everything was covered in blood. It was like hell,' Zhang Wei, who works for a

disaster relief charity, says. 'I've seen disasters before, but nothing like this.'

The earthquake devastated a huge swath of Sichuan. Even now, as the anniversary of

the disaster approaches, the death toll is still rising. The latest estimate is that 70,000people lost their lives and a further 10 million, many of them poor and elderly (the
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4434400/Chinese-earthquake-may-have-been-man-made-say-scientists.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4344879/Sichuan-earthquake-relief-money-spent-on-luxury-cars.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4030640/Grim-conditions-force-Chinese-president-to-revisit-site-of-Sichuan-earthquake.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4434400/Chinese-earthquake-may-have-been-man-made-say-scientists.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4344879/Sichuan-earthquake-relief-money-spent-on-luxury-cars.htmlhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/4030640/Grim-conditions-force-Chinese-president-to-revisit-site-of-Sichuan-earthquake.html


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cities of Sichuan were left relatively unscathed, while the villages bore the brunt),

were made homeless.

The earthquake also tore a deep wound in the public consciousness. Although the

region has a history of calamity, and has been hit hard by floods and landslides over

the years, this was the first time that images of a major disaster were beamed directlyinto homes across the country, stirring up strong feelings in a population that is

usually shielded from bad news.

The decision to allow journalists into Sichuan came after the government had blocked

media access to riots in Tibet in March 2008, a decision that fuelled protests across

the world at China's secrecy and brutality, as well as criticism that Beijing was not

upholding the terms under which it had been granted the Olympics. Journalists who

were used to hiding from the authorities suddenly found themselves invited on board

military helicopters headed for the disaster zone. The result was an unprecedented

well of public emotion and a colossal wave of donations.

Beichuan has become a place of pilgrimage. Four to five thousand visitors arrive each

day to pay their respects, or simply to see the scene of devastation for themselves. A

long queue of tour buses disgorge visitors two miles from the town itself and they

walk the rest of the way, often carrying small tokens for the dead: a steamed bun, a

bag of oranges or a bottle of bai jiu, a fierce Chinese grain alcohol. Robed monks

quietly pad along the road every day to pray for the victims.

Along the way, the town's survivors have set up stalls, selling their famous

embroidery alongside cowboy hats and plastic swords, blocks of dried tofu and

smoked meat. Several stalls sell laminated diagrams of the town's destruction and

photographs of Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier. 'Grandfather' Wen arrived in

Sichuan the day after the earthquake struck, and broke down in tears. The public

display of emotion was unprecedented for a Chinese leader, and Wen continues to

enjoy enormous support to this day.

The road finally winds its way up into the mountains, and widens out into a prospect

overlooking the ghost town. No one will ever live here again, the government has

said, because of the risk of another disaster. Rumours have circulated through the

town that Beichuan was marked for relocation decades ago, but that there was little

money for the project. Now, however, a 230 million museum will be built on the

site.

Relatives of the dead sit quietly on rocks next to the road, their heads bowed. Others

burn sticks of incense and pray on their knees. Small marble plaques dot the hillside,

each one engraved with a remembrance.

Wang Zhiqui, 43, walks up the mountain each day to sell trinkets to the tourists. She

makes only 400 to 500 yuan (40-50) a month, but there are few other jobs going.

'My family survived the earthquake, but my sister's family and my uncle's family all

died,' she says. 'And there was not just the earthquake, there was also a huge flood in

the valley in July. Only last October did we start to piece ourselves together again.'


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Like the vast majority of families who lost their houses, Wang now lives in a

temporary home not far from the scene of destruction, in a camp built hastily after the

earthquake to house the homeless.

Built in long rows, the prefabricated huts are identical: 40 sq ft grey boxes, their edges

trimmed in blue, with a solitary window punched in the wall. The sides are made fromtwo sheets of aluminium with a polystyrene core for insulation. Inside, there is a

single lightbulb, but no heating at all, because of the fire risk. Baking hot in summer,

the huts froze in the winter as condensation turned to ice.

Some of the quake victims refused to move to the temporary camps so that they could

stay close to their farms, their only source of income. The people who have made the

move say they are happy to be safe. Many have brought what they could salvage to

their new homes. Meals are cooked outside, in the corridors between huts, and often

shared with neighbours.

Small businesses have sprung up in the camps. Zhang Yueqing, a 42-year-old womanwith a hunchback and deformed legs, runs a shop in a camp near the town of Wudu,

selling instant noodles, bottled water and sweets. Boxes of stock are piled up inside

her hut next to her bed.

Mrs Zhang and her husband lost their 10-year-old daughter in the earthquake when

her school collapsed and do not have permission to have another child because of her

disability. Other victims who lost their child have been allowed to have a second child

to look after them in their old age.

'I only survived because I hid in our cellar,' she says. 'I crawled out, dragging myself

from under the house. I am recovered emotionally, more or less. I may not have

another child, but the government will provide for us.'

In another corridor lives Zhang Shuyong, a 38-year-old teacher from Yuan Bao, a

village more than an hour's drive away, who takes care of two deaf boys, Yuan Chen,

seven, and Li Fengshui, six. 'We were lucky,' she says. 'When the earthquake

happened, we were in a hearing aid factory on the outskirts of our town, looking for

new hearing aids for the boys. That's how we survived.' Her husband was helping to

build a new railway line and also escaped unharmed. 'Our house in the mountains

totally collapsed. A lot of villagers stayed up there, but everyone with young children

moved here, to the camp.'

They aim to rebuild their house, but with aftershocks from the earthquake still rattling

Sichuan every week, they are concerned about landslides. Outside the camp, a red

banner has been stretched across the road: the people are invincible! we are heroes!

we will not be wiped out!

Zhang's old village is almost impossible to reach because of an endless stream of

identical red lorries trundling along the one-lane mountain road, carrying construction

supplies and removing debris. The rebuilding of Sichuan has begun in earnest.

In the past few months entire villages have sprung up from the rubble. Fleets of lorrieshaul bricks and steel into the earthquake zone and carry rubble out, kicking up thick


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clouds of dust on the roads. Yuan Bao, Zhang's village, sits astride a ravine. On one

bank, teams of men are unloading bricks into towering piles as male and female

workers with shovels stand over the foundations of a new development. On a large

billboard there is a computer-generated design for neat rows of apartment blocks and

even a swimming-pool.

But on the other side of the village the scene is grim. A squat shanty town has been

cobbled together from mismatched pieces of wood and corrugated steel roofs. In one

hut, 66-year-old Chen Jingzhong sits making cut-out men from yellow and green

paper. A basket of papier-mch heads is at his feet and he carefully glues the men

together at a low table. The paper army is designed to be burnt at funerals, to join the

deceased in the next life. The work nets him 100 to 200 yuan each month (10-20).

Although there are many empty prefab huts in the valley below, Chen and his wife,

Zhong Bangxiu, 61, were told to move out of their temporary homes and return to

their village in January and given 1,700 yuan (170) to fend for themselves.

Although the Chinese government has publicly pledged 100 billion for the

reconstruction of Sichuan, it has provided few details about how the money will be

spent and over what period of time. The majority of the money is thought to have

been earmarked for infrastructure projects, such as new roads, railways, schools and

hospitals, but there are continuing doubts over when the money will arrive. The vast

donations pledged by Chinese and foreign companies and individuals have also not

been accounted for. Donors were told they had to give the money either to the

government or to the Red Cross, and there has since been little information about

where their money has gone.

'After the earthquake, we came under a lot of pressure to give money,' one chief

executive in Shanghai told me. 'If we hadn't given money, we would have been

criticised by our partners and suppliers. We gave money towards rebuilding a school,

but we've heard nothing more about it since, or whether the school has been built.'

In common with many other villages, the homes in Yuan Bao are being built by a

private contractor which won a tender from the local government.

'They wanted to get us to build our own houses but they didn't give us enough money,'

Chen says. 'All we could afford was this shack, which we built ourselves, with our

own hands and without any help from anyone.' Wooden poles had been hastily nailedtogether and then wrapped in plastic sacking to waterproof the structure. 'At least we

could light a fire here, so we weren't too cold.'

Yuan Bao's 200 other villagers were also forcibly transferred out of the camps, and

are now wondering if they will ever be able to afford the payments that the private

contractors will charge for the properties on the other bank. Not all villagers will be

allocated a new home anyway there aren't going to be enough to house everyone in

the village. 'None of us here can afford to build his own home,' Ma Chuanping, a

neatly dressed 60-year-old woman, says. 'This town depended on the stone quarry for

work and for the local council to have cash. But the quarry has been closed since the

quake, so there's just no cash.'


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The residents pass the time gambling on mahjong, or, in Chen's case, sipping neat bai

jiu from a plastic two-litre bottle. 'It has been so long after the earthquake now that no

one cares about us any more,' he growls. 'We don't know what will happen. We hope

to move to one of the new homes, but we don't know how we will get the money.'

The Chinese government has set a target that everyone should have started buildingtheir own homes by the anniversary of the quake, but few have managed to find the

resources. The price of bricks, cement and steel has inflated rapidly, and the average

cost of a home is now about 80,000 yuan (8,000). The government compensation to

victims ranges between 16,000 and 23,000 yuan per family, and the process of

winning compensation for their collapsed homes has been long and bureaucratic. Each

home has had to be inspected by an official to check that it is uninhabitable.

The government plans to start shutting down the temporary camps this coming

August, although many charities believe that victims will still be in the camps several

years from now.

'I reckon only 10 per cent have started rebuilding, a year after the quake,' one NGO

worker in Chengdu tells me. 'Now that a year has passed, everyone's immediate needs

have been taken care of. The problem is that people are now waking up to the idea

that they are going to have to spend the next five years of their lives in a small metal

hut or makeshift shack. A lot of people are still falling through the gaps here.'

The sheer size of Sichuan makes the overall picture all but impossible to judge, in the

absence of any reliable statistics from the Chinese government. Francis Markus, who

works for the International Red Cross in Sichuan, is optimistic about the rebuilding

programme and says that almost a third of people have finished building their homes

in the areas where the Red Cross operates. British donors gave 2.7 million in aid, and

much of the money is being used for bridging loans to help people construct homes.

Yuejia village, near the city of Mianyang in the north of Sichuan, is one of the

villages that has received Red Cross money and construction has nearly finished on a

development of neat white-washed villas, each with its own courtyard and

earthquake-proof foundations. The houses can withstand a magnitude eight quake,

according to Markus. 'We are so used to the aftershocks we don't even notice anything

less than a seven,' one villager jokes.

The old village was entirely destroyed by the earthquake, Cao Cheng, a 44-year-oldwood carver, explains. 'When the quake hit, we had no idea what was happening. The

wind suddenly started blowing hard and the telephone poles collapsed. Fountains of

black mud exploded from the ground, and people started screaming.' Amazingly, no

one in the village was killed.

'Funnily enough, only one man was injured in the quake he had gone to the hospital

in the morning to see the doctor and the hospital fell down on top of him,' Cao says.

Overlooking a valley filled with yellow rape, the villagers have left up the red lanterns

they hung for Chinese New Year as a sign of celebration. 'There's a very definite

sense of momentum. Everyone in Sichuan is very eager to make progress towards thegovernment targets,' he says.


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All donations from within China have been funnelled either through the government

or the Red Cross. 'This was a hugely significant event for the Chinese Red Cross,'

Markus says. 'The way that the Red Cross has been given a major role is a real sea

change.'

He explained that the Chinese Red Cross, which had traditionally been a part of theCommunist system, had only recently been spun out of the health ministry and given

its independence. The earthquake was the first real test of whether an outside body

could play a role in disaster relief without threatening the party apparatus. According

to Markus, the Chinese Red Cross had risen to the challenge magnificently. Other

charities claim that the organisation remains deeply tied to the Chinese government

and is institutionally opaque about its actions.

Further down the road teams of workers in hard hats are laying heavy steel girders

into the foundations for a new school, also funded by the Red Cross. The collapse of

schools throughout Sichuan remains one of the most painful and upsetting aspects of

the tragedy, and continues to provoke huge anger across China. Construction in Chinais often slapdash, with builders usually claiming to be able to throw up a two-storey

school in less than two months, but in Sichuan there was a suspicion of deliberate

negligence.

In towns where ancient buildings remained standing, schools simply toppled, killing

thousands of children. Some parents said the schools looked like they had been built

out of 'the dregs of tofu' and blamed officials for stealing the budget during

construction. One father said he had scrabbled in the rubble searching for his

daughter, and had seen that bamboo, rather than steel, was used to reinforce the

concrete.

The Communist Party has still not officially confirmed the death toll among children

or admitted that the construction of schools was at fault. In his rage, Ai Weiwei, the

designer of the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing, has started to publish an

unofficial list of the dead children on his website. 'I'm really tired of this bullshit,' he

said in a recent interview. 'I went there, and I saw school buildings collapsed, and

next to them are buildings that are fine.' Perhaps surprisingly, Ai's dissent has so far

gone unpunished.

Privately, officials are prepared to admit fault. 'Of course the schools were badly

built,' one said. 'They were built in the 1980s, when China was poor and we didn'thave enough money to go around.' But promises of an investigation have not been

honoured.

'No one has been here to look over the school,' Zhen Zhenxian, 53, a barber from the

city of Dujiangyan tells me. Zhen's threadbare shop faces the site of the former

Dujiangyan middle school, where up to 900 children are thought to have died. In the

old playground, white butterflies flit over the rubble, which has been covered in a

carpet of grass. A rusty basketball hoop stands in a large puddle.

Zhen plays me a video of the scene that he captured on his mobile phone three

minutes after the earthquake struck. Frantic crowds of children, dressed in blue, white


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and red tracksuits, were running and screaming while others lay prone on the ground,

knocked unconscious by falling bricks.

'When the earthquake happened, I was in the shop,' he says. 'I heard something that

sounded like huge rocks clashing together and I saw the road buckle. We ran outside,

but there were tall buildings all around and the school building itself was swayingfrom side to side.

'Then it suddenly collapsed; the whole thing became rubble in less than a minute. I

have a niece who was on the third floor and she jumped out of a window to escape,

and survived with just a few injuries. Only two classes survived, the ones doing PE in

the playground and the computer class in a different building,' he says.

'Everyone in the town started running towards the school, and parents were tearing at

the rocks with their hands. Fifteen minutes later a policeman arrived on his motorbike,

but he was hit by a piece of falling masonry and hurt his leg badly. So he couldn't ride

back and call for help, and the phone lines were down.

'When night fell, we put up our own camp, but we didn't have any water or food and

we couldn't sleep because the children were just next to us, buried. On the first day we

could hear lots of voices of those who were buried, but on the second day there were

only two or three voices and then there were none,' he says, bowing his head.

The thousands of dead children across Sichuan have become one of China's biggest

taboos. Many of their parents, who had clamoured loudly for an investigation, have

now fallen silent. Several NGOs speculate that they have accepted compensation in

cash, together with a clause that silences them. 'How much of the earthquake relief

fund went on paying off the parents?' one charity worker asks.

With the anniversary of the earthquake imminent, the Communist Party is keen to

show the world that every effort is being made to rebuild Sichuan. On the road to

Beichuan, where Communist Party officials regularly visit in their limousines, several

Qiang villages have been beautifully restored. Some resemble clusters of alpine

chalets: the houses are clad in stone and boast timber roofs and intricately carved

windows and doors.

But the authorities have also gone to great lengths to ensure that some areas are off-

limits and out of sight, and in the run-up to the anniversary, the Sichuan provincialgovernment has closed down access to the region for journalists. Since the beginning

of April, reporters have had to apply for a separate permit for different towns within

the earthquake zone, a lengthy bureaucratic procedure designed to control or stop

foreign media travelling through the region.

Wenchuan, the epicentre of the earthquake, is completely off-limits, partly due to its

proximity to Tibet. Police roadblocks have closed off all access routes to the area to

anyone without important business. Teams of paramilitaries in camouflage gear

search through cars and stop lorries. According to 5.12, an umbrella group that seeks

to coordinate the NGOs working in the region, a large population of Tibetans was

badly hit by the earthquake, but has received little help.


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In Beichuan the main worry is now the economy, which was destroyed by the

disaster, leaving large numbers jobless. Farmers believe it will take several years to

rebuild their herds and their land, and while there are some short-term construction

jobs available, they are only for the young and physically able, and unlikely to create

a sustainable economy.

'We don't know when we will have a job again, or the money to leave our camp,'

Wang Zhiqui says. 'This is what we have to focus on now,' Francis Markus at the Red

Cross adds. 'The financial crisis has affected China and the economic situation here

makes it very difficult for people to work their way back up the ladder.'

In what is left of Beichuan, soldiers work to clear a path through the rubble, to ensure

that by the anniversary of the earthquake the world will see that the Chinese

government is laying the ghosts of the disaster and bringing Sichuan back to life. But

just below the surface, the fault lines remain.

millions still homeless a year after sichuan earthquake

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