For years China’s socialism has been under attack from democracies all over the world. Having lived in India and the United Kingdom, I saw China in red much the same way as most democracies do. But a study tour to China- its booming cities and beyond the boomtown was an eye-opener. On my itinerary was the Sichuan province marked as the ‘epicentre’ of China’s development. On May 12, just days before the scheduled visit, the earthquake struck. The choice of the word ‘epicentre’ back then left an eerie feeling.
Sichuan earthquake changed my perception of the government in China. I felt my scepticism dissolve and in its place grew a renewed respect for those in power in China (though I may still not completely agree with all their policies).
Leading from Ground Zero
Sichuan earthquake measured 7.9 on the Richter scale(1) and was one of the most devastating earthquakes in three decades to hit China. According to United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the death toll by May end was 68,858 with an additional 366,596 injured and 18,618 missing. At least 9,000 of the dead or missing are school children and teachers according to state media reports. A total of 45.61 million people have been affected, including 15 million evacuated from their homes; of these, 5 million are living in temporary shelters.(2)
Interestingly, while the details of the earthquake were still pouring in, Premier Wen Jiabao had already flown in to Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan province, to set up the rescue command. The People Liberation Army and the paramilitary forces were immediately mobilized for rescue operations and the state news agency was regularly giving updates on the earthquake situation - the deaths and devastation. A remarkable response from a country that earlier took three years to reveal the casualty figures in the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan in north China, which many still believe was two to three times lower than actual casualties.(3)
Contrary to the traditional methods practised by the Chinese political system, where decision were taken at the top behind closed doors and information flow would be tightly regulated, this time the government led from ground zero.
Unlike Myanmar that stubbornly put ‘security issues’ above safety of its citizens by refusing international assistance after cyclone Nargis, China welcomed support from international agencies. In fact it even wholeheartedly appreciated Japan and Taiwan who were first to send in relief, which many believe could be the beginning of a new relationship. Both Japan and Taiwan share a strained relationship with Mainland China which got especially worse after China began to build up its navy in the South China Sea.
By May end, rescuers saved and evacuated 782,004 people to safe places; hospitals took in a total of 89,818 injured people, 59,877 of whom recovered and were discharged. A total of 678,900 tents, 4,371,500 quilts and 10,754,000 garments had been sent to quake hit regions.(4)
Premier Wen Jiabao’s presence in Chengdu gave an impetus to the entire operation and President Hu Jintao’s declaration that no efforts would be spared to save those trapped boosted the morale of rescue workers and those affected. This is particularly important in a country like China where citizens look upon the leadership for support and empathy during these trying times. In China I saw that most citizens believe their leader’s words to be gospel truth and derive tremendous solace and hope from them.
Also, when Premier Wen Jiabao promised to construct new and better villages, most people seemed confident that the government will do so.
New constructions… New beginnings
Just when the rescue operations were coming to an end, fears of dams bursting and quake lakes over flooding rocked China. But the government quickly set into motion the evacuation of 1.3 million people who live downstream of the Tangjiashan ‘quake lake’, the largest of the 34 bodies of water formed after the earthquake due to landslides. On June 5, Premier Wen Jiabao was at Tangjiashan personally supervising the evacuation efforts. Over 250,000 people have been evacuated with many more to follow with rising water levels.
With so many homes, villages and livelihoods destroyed, many wonder how the people will survive when this is all over. The Ministry of Commerce announced that up to 10 million additional people are now living below the poverty line as a result of the earthquake.
Perhaps this is where the villages that are newly constructed to rehabilitate those displaced by the Three Gorges Dam (5) can serve as a model. One such village I visited is called Muhe (which means Harmony) in neighbouring Chongqing municipality, that was a part of Sichuan until 1997 and is today one of China's four provincial-level municipalities with Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin.
Muhe village in Nantuo town is 33 km from the district of Fuling on the banks of the Changjiang river and has an area of 5.9 sq km with 545 households and 2063 villagers.(6) Concrete roads lead to this village on top of the mountain where nicely painted brick houses line the streets. Most houses have solar heaters and biogas. Families I spoke to said that life only got better with relocation- they make more money by growing cash crops, their produce sells at higher rates, better connectivity with other parts of the state means they can tap more market and transport their produce. Also with a fast growing town nearby, their children can get university education and work in factories there. What many missed however was the beautiful view of the river that their old homes provided.(7)
But rehabilitating hundred thousands of villagers hit by the earthquake will be far from easy. It will put a huge pressure on the region in terms of not just construction but also employment. Villagers displaced due to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam recently rehabilitated in Kaixan, another village in Chongqing have found themselves with homes but without jobs forcing the government to offer subsides for industries to move to the region, says an expert on the region.
The Mayor of Chongqing, Wang Hongju (8), told me during our meeting at Wu Du Hotel (Wu Du means Foggy city that best describe Chongqing) that efforts were being made to develop the province in such a way that at least 5 million additional people could be accommodated. “I want to create prosperous rural towns so that fewer people move to big cities and slums are not created,” the Mayor said emphatically.
The Mayor believes this can be done by upgradation and modernization of agriculture, investment in research to increase productivity and to improve the service sector in rural areas. Also in the pipeline are huge infrastructure projects - a train line that will link Chongqing to Shanghai in six hours, nine expressways and a 100,000 km optical fibre system. “Our urbanization rate is higher than the national average,” he proudly claims.
But rapid industrialization also leads to environmental degradation. I met the Director of Chongqing Environmental Protection Bureau, Cao Guanghui (9) for some answers on the issue. “In Chongqing, 12% of the GDP is invested in environment protection- 85% of all water in city homes and 65% of household water in rural areas of the province is treated. Besides 90% of city’s garbage is also treated,” says Guanghui. The figures could be inflated but during the course of my travel within the province I saw the efforts the government has put in to make this municipality stand up against Beijing and Shanghai to compete for foreign direct investment.
In Yunnan, one of the poorest provinces in China, several houses were destroyed by earthquakes in the past few years, but now they have been rebuilt with better construction and amenities. According to Luchan He, Project Assistant of The Nature Conservancy, an NGO that works with the local government to protect the environment, 96% of the villages have biogas and solar heaters and the other 4% are in the process of installing them.(10)
Also cash crop plantations have helped the village income grow. Mr. Chang, a farmer in a hamlet not too far from Li Jiang, said his income increased by 300% to 30,000 RMB per year (USD 4300) since he adopted the new methods of cultivation. “The use of biogas has saved me 110 man-hours per year used to chop firewood, allowing my children to pursue university education,” said Chang.(11)
One hopes to see a similar rehabilitation project in Sichuan. With the local government under tremendous pressure to cover its mistake in Sichuan’s shoddy construction, one would assume that they would go all out to invest in better infrastructure and environmental projects.
The earthquake relief headquarters of the Sichuan State Council promised to set up a dedicated team for rehabilitation work. The team will start evaluating local geological conditions and selecting new locations. The government will offer various schemes, subsidies and preferential policies to rebuild the economy of the province. The government has also promised to protect cultural heritage sites and quake ruins with research significance as well as investigate the damaged public buildings.
‘Harmonious society’ and Media gag
The local papers in China focussed only on stories of hope and rescue efforts. As a journalist I had my reservations with such one-sided reports and wondered on the state control on the media. Why were their no reports on the threats to dams and what about the nuclear facilities? Why did no one write about the contamination of water resources and the low quality construction material used to build the schools that fell like a pack of cards killing thousands of children?
China stayed quiet on these rather important and glaring issues for the first couple of weeks. And for the foreign media that reported these things, they were considered biased and ‘enemy of China’.
A friend from a leading Chinese newspaper explained this. “The government is not stupid. It has a panel of experts and they know what went wrong and will take corrective measures,” he calmly said. “By writing about all this at a time of grief and devastation, we will only stir up emotions that will take attention away from rescue and relief work and destroy this harmonious society.”
‘Harmonious society’ is a phrase I’ve heard often and have always dismissed it as government rhetoric. Yet as I followed the reports in the Chinese media over the next few days, I could see his point. The government did speak about the suspected shoddy construction; it did send experts to the region to examine the construction material and also promised to punish those found at fault. And in China those found guilty of corruption have often been put behind bars or executed.
China and democracy
The idea of Democracy was introduced in China in 1890s by an exiled Chinese writer named Liang Qichao. Liang was involved in the 1895 Beijing protests that called for increased participation in government by the Chinese people. After his exile he moved to Japan and translated the works of several western political thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Bentham which were smuggled into China.
Liang believed that in democracy there was no difference between the individual interests and public interests; individual citizens were granted rights in order to better strengthen the state.(12)
Mao Zedong and the Chinese communist were also, in some ways, for democracy and like Liang, Mao believed that the state must draw on the energies of the people in order to be strong and unified. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was, in part, a radical attempt to achieve Mao’s “Great Democracy”.
In 1970s Deng Xiaoping came to power and advocated a kind of democracy that would be played within four parameters - socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the combination of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and party leadership.
Today, the Communist Party of China (CPC) believes that China is in the primary stages of building socialism. When CPC won state power in 1949, China had been ravaged by civil war and invasion. Also Mao’s Cultural Revolution saw political upheavals that dealt a severe blow to development. But in 1980s under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the policies of reform and opening of China to the outside world led to today’s massive development. Xiaoping asserted that opening up to private domestic and foreign capital was necessary to jump-start a developing economy.
A New China?
Sichuan earthquake saw a China never seen before. The whole nation stood strong including the government and the citizens. The consciousness of the citizens was highly evident - their expectations high and their demands loud. The government did not disappoint them either. It stood with them through moments of grief lending a helping hand and a shoulder to lean on. It cried for their loss and shared their anger against suspected corruption. It worked ceaselessly to move them to safety and keep them away from diseases and harm. The rescue efforts created a strong bond of shared compassion and empathy between the government and citizens and saw a solidarity never seen before.
But with citizens demanding justice against the unscrupulous builders and local government officials, threatening to even file law suits, this consciousness will bring about activism that could challenge the supreme authority of the government. Hence, sowing the seeds of democracy we know in the world today.
But this change did not happen overnight. It is a result of three decades of reforms following Deng Xiaoping’s opening up of the economy. Now the government too knows that any attempts to ignore and contain citizen’s demands could only lead to confrontations. Days of Tiananmen Square massacre are long gone where hundreds of students died when the army opened fire on them to crush pro-democracy protests in 1989. Human Rights Watch has been demanding release of the Tiananmen detainees before the Olympics. If China abides, it could be a new dawn. Because for China to prosper, the government needs conscious citizens as much as the citizens need a responsive government.
Sichuan earthquake changed China forever. It showed the world that socialist China has the heart of a democracy.
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References:
1. US Geological Survey put the earthquake on 7.9 Richter scale whereas the Chinese government puts it at 8.0 on Richter scale.
2. Sichuan Province, China: Earthquake OCHA Situation Report No. 10 by United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on May 30, 2008
3. The death toll figure of 242,419 in Tangshan earthquake came from the Chinese Seismological Service in 1988. The initial estimates of 655,000 dead and 779,000 injured were released by Hebei Revolutionary Committee.
4. Figures obtained through Xinhua news agency
5. The Three Gorges Dam is the world’s largest hydro-electricity project situated in China’s Hubei province. During the planning stages in the 1990s it was estimated that 1.13 million residents would be forced to relocate; new developments have doubled that number to 2.3 million. On October 11, 2007 Chinese state media announced that an additional 4 million affected people will be relocated in the Chongqing metropolitan area by the year 2020.
6. Statistics obtained from Wen Tianping, Deputy Director General of Information Office of Chongqing Municipal People’s Government on May 15, 2008
7. Interview with residents of Muhe village in Chongqing on May 19, 2008
8. Interview with Wang Hongju, Mayor of Chongqing, at the Wu Du Hotel in Chongqing on May 15, 2008.
9. Interview with Cao Guanghui, Director of Chongqing Environment Protection Bureau at the Wu Du Hotel on May 15, 2008
10.Interview with Lushan He, Project Assistant, Visitor Centre, The Nature Conservancy at TNC Li Jiang office in Yunnan on May 21, 2008
11.Interview with a villager Mr Chang at his home in a village in Yunnan on May 21, 2008
12.“Chinese Democracy” by Andew J Nathan in chapter Liang Qichao and the Chinese Democratic Tradition. Published in 1986 by University of California Press
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