By David Bandurski — One of the most persistent issues to emerge in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake is of course the question of shoddy school construction. In a column running in The Beijing News just before the weekend, Peking University professor Zhang Qianfan (张千帆) argued that the building of local “democratic mechanisms” was necessary if China wished to avoid repetition of the tragedies of Wenchuan. [Homepage Image: Screenshot of Sohu.com coverage of rescue efforts at Juyuan Middle School in Sichuan on May 13, 2008.]

“Local Democracy is the Basis for Rebuilding after the Disaster”
By Zhang Qianfan (张千帆)
The recent Wenchuan quake resulted in massive injury and loss of life, including the death and injury of many students and teachers as their school buildings collapsed, something that has saddened our whole nation. After experiencing this massive earthquake . . . we cannot help but soberly consider the institutional causes of this phenomenon [of shoddy school construction], and how we might remedy these institutional problems as we go through the process of rebuilding. Only in this way can we avoid repeating the tragedies of Wenchuan.
The school buildings that collapsed in the disaster area were those of five-stories and higher, and most were pre-fabricated, in direct violation of the Primary and Secondary School Architectural Design Standards (中小学校建筑设计规范). While some government administrative buildings in the disaster area were similarly constructed, the vast majority were not, and this has invited controversy among Internet users. Officials from the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Housing (建设部) have publicly addressed the concerns expressed by Web users, and the Ministry of Housing has also asked that the Ministry of Education join it in conducting a joint inquiry. But while these are signs of definite progress, they are insufficient to address the problems exposed by the Wenchuan quake.
As one researcher from the China Earthquake Disaster Prevention Center (中国地震灾害防御中心) has pointed out, “Earthquakes in and of themselves are not killers, rather it is the destruction of buildings that causes injury and loss of life.” If we explore this a bit deeper, we understand that while these collapses owe to quality issues, human beings built the buildings themselves. So why weren’t they built to national standards? And why is it that government buildings are of much higher quality than the school buildings?
The answers are not difficult to find. The reason is that a great deal more is spent on constructing government buildings than on constructing schools, so of course they are of higher quality and better able to resist earthquake damage. But where does the government’s money come from? Some of it comes from central government outlays, but the majority comes from taxes on ordinary local people. If we were to allow the local people to determine how to spend this money, what would they decide? Would they reserve more money for government buildings, or for the school buildings where their own children carry out their studies? There’s no sense in even answering this question – what family doesn’t care more for its own children?
So why are there so many school buildings of inferior quality? The answer is simply that ordinary people have not had any real say in how tax money is spent – this phenomenon cannot otherwise be explained. Governments and schools both are public entities sustained by tax revenues, and the structures that house them are built with appropriations determined by local governments. But because the specifics of appropriation are primarily determined by the government, it naturally follows that more building funds are budgeted for government buildings. The natural result is that schools face funding shortages, inferior quality and construction that falls short of national standards.
Why is it that local governments fail to implement national standards? Is it because supervision from the central and regional government is to no avail? The specific case in Wenchuan has already drawn attention from the central government and the whole nation, and the Ministry of Housing has already said it will conduct a thorough investigation. And perhaps we can hope that the central government will resolve the problem of school building quality in Wenchuan through direct intervention. But of course there is no conceivable way that the Ministry of Housing, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Supervision and other central government authorities can remain in Wenchuan for the long haul, fixing their eyes on local officials to ensure they abide by national construction standards. They have plenty of other priorities. Once they have made their exit, how are we to ensure that rebuilding in the earthquake zone is done with a mind to the basic interests of the people?
And across China, how many Wenchuans are there exactly? We cannot possibly expect the central government to keep its eye on every local official in order to ensure national regulations are followed. If we rely exclusively on the top-down supervision of the central government, well then, even if we do solve the problem of substandard school buildings in the area of Wenchuan, problems in other areas will remain. The tragedies of Wenchuan will be played out in some other place.
This being the case, how can we ensure that schools in other areas do not collapse? Essentially, this needs to happen through local democratic mechanisms making local officials answer truly to the local people. More specifically, ordinary people must either directly or indirectly participate in the government budgeting process so that expenditures become truly “public expenditures” rather than budgets made at the discretion of the local governments themselves.
In Zhejiang’s Wenling (温岭) and other areas, local governments have already begun conducting so-called “democratic consultations” (民主恳谈), budgetary hearings and other experiments to protect the rights of local constituencies to participate in the budgetary process. These are very valuable democratic experiments, and they deserve to be energetically pushed out into other areas.
Naturally, ordinary people do not necessarily have the time or the interest to directly participate in the political process, and this is why, in democratic nations, they generally entrust their own representatives to supervise government administration and make budgetary decisions. From the beginning, decisions about taxation and budgeting are passed by local congresses, and the role of local governments is simply to execute these budgets. This means of course that taxes won’t simply be channeled into the construction of government buildings.
Why would these representatives (代言人) of the people give more money for the building of schools? Because they are elected by the local people. Should their decisions contravene the interests of the local people, or jeopardize the safety of children, or should they squander the public’s money to build lavish offices or other pointless ventures, the people can in similar fashion vote them out. If the representatives of the people wish to be elected, and if they wish to remain elected, then they must act in the interest of the electorate, and they must exercise their authority to ensure that the whole government operates for the good of the people.
In 1982 China’s constitution stipulated that local people’s congresses and people’s congress delegates across the country had the authority to supervise the budgetary process. But due to numerous problems in the elective process for people’s congresses [IE, local party leaders controlling the selection process and/or serving on the congress], the stipulations of the constitution could not be actually be carried out. It is for this reason that we now see this phenomenon of luxurious government complexes contrasting with the frailty of school buildings . . . And therefore, to say that the Wenchuan earthquake exposes the frailty of a great number of rural school buildings is not as good as saying that it reveals the need to improve democratic mechanisms at the local level in China.
If we wish to ensure school buildings stand up in the midst of disaster just as government buildings do, the only way is to actually implement the elective systems (选举制度) mandated by our constitution. Reconstruction in the disaster area looms on the horizon, but what we need to rebuild first and foremost are local democratic mechanisms.
[Posted by David Bandurski, May 26, 2008, 6:35pm]

By David Bandurski — While the initial dangers of the Sichuan earthquake seem to have passed, the area continues to be rocked by aftershocks, landslides and mud and rock flows that endanger survivors and rescue workers. In his latest column on the Wenchuan quake, CMP director Qian Gang re-visits the Diexi earthquake of 1933 and the lessons it holds for today.

“’Bursting ‘earthquake lakes’ send us a warning through history”
Qian Gang (钱钢)
A magnitude 8.0 earthquake, powerful aftershocks and massive landslides and mud and rock flows superimposed on one another have made the Wenchuan earthquake extremely destructive. Many rivers have been obstructed, resulting in at least 21 barrier lakes in the area. These lakes are large and their water levels high. In some areas, destroyed homes have already been submerged. Disaster relief headquarters has already ordered a thorough investigation of these barrier lakes. The Ministry of Water Resources, armed hydroelectric police units and experts organized by the Sichuan provincial government are closely watching the situation.
The largest barrier lake collapse in China in the last century had cataclysmic results. Well-known Chinese earthquake forecasting expert Geng Qingguo (耿庆国) observed the disaster scene at that time first-hand, and he wrote about it in “The Collapse of ‘Earthquake Lakes’: The 1933 Diexi Earthquake” (published in the book One-hundred Major Disasters in 20th Century China/二十世纪中国重灾百录).

[ABOVE: Image of remains of the Diexi barrier lake, from the Science Museums of China website.]

Notice the name of this place – Diexi. Diexi is a town in Sichuan’s Mao County (茂县), and it falls within the area of today’s major quake. At 3:50 pm on August 25, 1933, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake struck Diexi, with an epicentral intensity of X. The town of Diexi was entirely destroyed. As is the case in Wenchuan, the Diexi quake brought massive landslides at three points in Diexi, obstructing the Minjiang River (岷江). Eleven days after the earthquake a lake had appeared high up in the gorge. The water in the lake stretched back more than 12 kilometers, and at its widest point it was two kilometers across. It had become a major lake.
45 days after the quake, at 7pm on October 9, 1933, powerful aftershocks burst the barrier lake. The water gushed forth from the lake, tearing away the steep slopes on either shore and sending towering floodwaters rushing down the valley.
Geng Qingguo leaves us the following startling account:
“The waters gushed forth at 7pm, reaching Mao County by 9pm, Weizhou (威旧) by 11pm, reaching Wenchuan (汶川) by midnight and Guan County (灌县) by early the next day . . . “
These historical records reveal that the Wenchuan earthquake region of today was in fact in the past wiped out by the catastrophic bursting of a barrier lake caused by a quake. And the bursting of that barrier lake 75 years ago reminds us of the immense secondary dangers posed by earthquakes. In the Diexi earthquake itself, an estimated 7,000 lives were lost, but in the secondary bursting of the barrier lake 20,000 people died. 4,000 corpses alone were pulled out of Dujiangyan.
The aftershocks of today’s Sichuan earthquake have not yet ceased, landslides and mud and rock flows are still occurring, and precipitation is still building. Those 20 or so barrier lakes are ticking time bombs. I hope engineering experts conduct further inspections in order to fully understand the potential dangers, and take effective measures, diverting water and ensuring the safety of survivors and rescue workers in the disaster area.
I once worked at the China Earthquake Administration’s China Disaster Reduction Press. The editor in chief was Geng Qingguo. He is a scientist who has devoted his life to the study of earthquake prediction, and in The Great Tangshan Earthquake I make many references to his work. After the Wenchuan quake occurred, I recalled that when I was working together with Mr. Geng, I often heard him talking with other earthquake experts about a place called “Maowen” (茂汶). This, in fact, was Mao County and Wenchuan. In 1958 they were merged into the Maowen Qiang Autonomous County (茂汶羌族自治县). This is an area earthquake specialists in China have long paid attention to.
Probing deeply into this massive earthquake will be the work of many days. At present, relief work goes ahead under precipitous circumstances, as the barrier lakes are raised like swords overhead. By recalling the historical facts of the Diexi quake, I want only to encourage those leading the relief effort to be watchful!
[Posted By David Bandurski, May 23, 2008, 1:47pm]

FURTHER READING:
“Rains threaten China quake lake disaster“, Reuters, May 23, 2008
“Rain forecast for SW China, adding to ‘quake lake’ risks“, People’s Daily, May 22, 2008

By David Bandurski — As the hope of finding survivors in the rubble of the Sichuan earthquake grows dim, the focus of the relief effort is turning toward the needs and conditions of the close to five million people left homeless by the disaster. Disease prevention is a key priority. In his latest editorial on the quake, CMP director Qian Gang talks about the urgency and enormity of disease prevention efforts on the ground in Sichuan.

“The Decisive Battle Against Disease in the Quake Area Has Begun!”
By Qian Gang (钱钢)
The most important matter now facing the disaster area [in Sichuan province] is disease prevention. Temperatures are rising by the day, and many bodies of the lost have yet to be recovered from the rubble. Threats to the well being of quake survivors and relief workers are on the rise.
32 years ago, when I entered Tangshan as a member of the disease prevention team, I witnessed abysmal living conditions in the disaster area. Tangshan and the Sichuan quake are similar in the sense that the lifelines for cities and towns — things like electricity and water – have been completely wiped away, and poor sanitation and lack of drinking water are major problems. Mechanisms for removing human waste, polluted water and other garbage have all been totally paralyzed. Medical and disease prevention systems have been seriously impacted. After Tangshan, the bodies of 240,000 victims had to be disposed of. Disease did not break out, but this was a miraculous stroke of luck.
But there are several things that make the battle against disease today different from the situation following the Tangshan quake.
For starters, the area encompassed by the disaster [in Sichuan] is many times larger than that of the Tangshan earthquake, and severely damaged towns and cities are spread throughout the area. The upshot of this is that the battle lines in the fight against disease are incredibly long. In the city and countryside, there are vast numbers of corpses of domesticated animals in addition to human bodies. As areas are cut off from the power grid and large-scale cooling facilities either destroyed or out of operation, a great mass of other items is now rotting as well. The amount of daily garbage now rotting out in the open is truly staggering. All of this distinguishes the present situation from what we saw back in Tangshan, in a time when goods were scarce. Disease prevention will be a major undertaking. The current strategy from the [earthquake relief] command headquarters, in which disease prevention teams from various provinces spread out and cover particular counties [in the disaster area], is correct, but what we don’t know is whether these disease prevention teams are sufficient.
The task of clearing bodies from the rubble is more difficult than for Tangshan. The collapsed structures in the Sichuan quake area, with their steel-reinforced concrete, far surpass the scale of Tangshan. That is to say, rescue workers will have to work through a mass of complex and intricate collapsed structures in order to find survivors and clear out bodies. In the coming few days, this work will go ahead under increasingly tough conditions. In the end, I’m afraid there may be many bodies that cannot be retrieved.
The management of disease prevention is more complex than it was for Tangshan. 32 years ago, in the final days of the Cultural Revolution, the disaster area was managed almost like a militarization. In today’s disaster area, it is much harder to handle things as they were handled in Tangshan, when corpses were gathered and buried expediently. In this quake, the government has given consideration to the feelings of the bereaved in formulating procedures for the handling of corpses. The government has designated a procedure for the claiming of bodies, even allowing the laying out of corpses prior to cremation. Some relatives of the dead have resisted the idea of mass burial, which has added a new level of difficulty to handling the situation.
This time, the rescue workers, news reporters and volunteers in the disaster area are also far more diverse than was the case for Tangshan. There is the potential for inadequacies in the handling of personal hygiene and protection. Journalists on the front lines tell me that their own disease protection and sterilization is being handled by volunteers. While this is an effective method, I hope it can be extended to everyone.
As we see on television, ordinary people in the county-level city of Wenchuan are now using cardboard to shield themselves from the sun. The temperature in the disaster area has already reached 30 degrees Celsius and is steadily going up. In the two weeks following the Tangshan earthquake the temperature quickly dropped, exactly the opposite situation. A crisis in the handling of bodies in the Sichuan earthquake region is already imminent . . .
In Tangshan, many bodies were not buried deep enough, and toward the end of the year, the Ministry of Health issued an order for mass exhumation and reburying. In Sichuan, if the same thing happens in the hot summer just around the corner, the ramifications are hard to even imagine.
The war against disease has already begun. The leaders of the relief effort are taking decisive measures, cordoning off areas of rubble where contamination is severe and arranging for temporary quarters for disaster victims further away from the rubble. Here, I want to offer my deepest respect to those brave soldiers doing the difficult work of removing bodies!

[Posted by David Bandurski, May 22, 2008, 12:03pm]

By David Bandurski — Over the past week in China there has been an outpouring of support for victims of the Sichuan earthquake. Donation drives around the country have drawn in millions upon millions of yuan for the relief effort. But in a country where institutional corruption is a perennial headache, how can Chinese citizens who have opened their hearts and their wallets for the victims of this disaster ensure that relief donations reach those who need them?
In a recent article, columnist Lao Dan (老蛋) said this was a question not just about accountability, but about the dignity of the Chinese people. Lao called for the creation of a special authority to oversee the use of donations and make regular reports to the Chinese public.
“We have a responsibility to demand that the government establish an interim authority to conduct a transparent and effective audit of donations,” he wrote.
Portions of the article follow.
On this issue, we also recommend that readers check out CMP’s case study on the Project Hope corruption case, reported by CMP fellow Zhai Minglei (翟明磊).

“Aside from Giving Donations, There is Something Important Required of Us”
By Lao Dan (老蛋)
In recent days, countless Chinese have devoted great love in the face of disaster, and countless tears have washed our inner hearts. And still, all of our words and donations cannot remedy the sadness and hurt of those disaster victims who have lost their loved ones. All of our angst and toil cannot bring back the precious lives of loved ones lost.
Everyone is asking within him or herself, how can I do my part for this disaster? . . .
The vast majority of people have decided to donate money, and this is the best and most direct method. For days now an ever-rising amount of donations has served to sooth the hearts of people across the nation.
However, there is one other thing we need to do . . . For the disaster area, for those brothers and sisters who have lost their children, for those brothers and sisters who have lost their parents and relatives . . . we have a responsibility to demand that these donated funds are dispensed under effective supervision by relevant government authorities in order to ensure that they are actually used for disaster victims, in order to ensure that they can really help disaster victims rebuild their homes, and to ensure that the Chinese people are not deprived of their dignity in the face of this massive disaster.
We have a responsibility to demand that the government establish an interim authority to conduct a transparent and effective audit of donations, and make regular reports to the public via the media and the Internet. We must know that the work of rebuilding after this disaster will not happen overnight, that we have a long road of disaster relief ahead of us . . .
So, as we all face this disaster together, we have a personal responsibility to call on and supervise government units using donated funds to ensure that they are used transparently. The state has a responsibility to empower relevant offices to supervise the use [of funds]. And those units distributing and using the donated funds have a responsibility to put the people of the nation at ease, knowing that the funds they donated to fundraising efforts are used for disaster relief . . .

[Posted by David Bandurski, May 21, 2008, 5:35pm HK]

By David Bandurski — On the morning of May 12, just hours before the disastrous magnitude 7.9 earthquake struck Sichuan, many readers in the provincial capital of Chengdu would have been poring through the latest edition of Huaxi Metropolis Daily (华西都市报), one of the region’s leading commercial newspapers (which, in fact, broke the Henan Aids epidemic story back in 1999). And the paper would have offered its characteristically dynamic look into city life, in marked contrast to its stiff and stodgy party counterpart, Sichuan Daily.
Sure, the main story that morning leaned a bit toward the party boilerplate — a Xinhua News Agency piece about China’s launch of its own domestic commercial jet manufacturer. Sure, there was an editorial off to the right from Sichuan Daily, blathering on about the party slogan “emancipation of minds” (思想大解放).
But there was plenty else to induce the discerning reader to pluck the paper off the newsstand.

[ABOVE: Front page of the May 12 edition of Sichuan’s Huaxi Metropolis Daily.]

At center was a teaser for a juicy human interest story about a local woman who suddenly went into labor while she was in the car. There were two color photos to tug on the heartstrings, the first of the swaddled newborn, the second of happy new parents (a pair of Mother’s Day stories).
Tags pointed readers to other exciting content inside — coverage of the Cannes Film Festival, where the paper had posted a correspondent, analysis of China’s ping-pong hopes in the upcoming Olympic Games, and a story about a policeman in Chongqing who died of exhaustion at his desk.
Four days later, after the devastation wrought by the Wenchuan earthquake, Huaxi Metropolis Daily looked like a different newspaper altogether.

[ABOVE: Front page of the May 16 edition of Sichuan’s Huaxi Metropolis Daily.]

The difference was not merely that all of the front page news dealt with the earthquake and its impact on the area. That was understandable.
But in its layout the paper had made a sudden return to the habits of its party-paper ancestors. There was no longer any material difference with the layout of the wooden Sichuan Daily, save tiny advertisements for Sanyo and China Mobile, and the welcome respite of a right-hand sidebar.

[ABOVE: Front page of the May 16 edition of Sichuan’s Sichuan Daily.]

There were other important changes too. The space just to the side of the newspaper’s masthead, generally a photo-accompanied teaser for reader-relevant inside coverage, had been scrapped for a Sichuan Daily release about how Sichuan Party Secretary Liu Qibao (刘奇葆) and vice-secretary Jiang Jufeng (蒋巨峰) had “taken the lead in contributing funds” for the relief effort.
All of the coverage on the front page of Huaxi Metropolis Daily was either from the official Xinhua News Agency or from the province’s party mouthpiece, Sichuan Daily.
The lead photograph — indeed, the only large photograph — was of top provincial officials, a clear throwback to the party-paper rule book.
This, of course, is not what we have come to expect from China’s new brand of commercial newspapers.
Since commercial newspapers emerged in China in the mid-to-late 1990s, their coverage has been increasingly distinct from that of the party newspapers, or dangbao (党报), which have persisted in the party news style, a stiff recounting of the actions and decisions of party and government leaders. While party papers have remained true to the media’s historic “mouthpiece” (喉舌) role under the CCP, commercial newspapers have, “propaganda discipline” notwithstanding, offered much more diverse content and a livelier look and feel.
Here’s the front page from the May 17 edition of Shanghai’s Oriental Morning Post, more of what we’ve come to expect from commercially-oriented papers.

For a more thorough look at differences in coverage between party and commercial newspapers, we point readers to CMP’s 2006 case on the corruption scandal involving Beijing mayor Liu Zhihua.
It’s tough to say right now what the reasons are behind Huaxi Metropolis Daily‘s party-retro makeover, or why it seems to have occurred on May 16 (the previous three editions show the paper in reasonably commercial form).
While we know that China’s attitude in handling the disaster has so far been refreshingly open, it is conceivable — though this is purely speculation at this point — that Sichuan’s top party leaders have utilized (not necessarily with the worst of intentions, mind you) local commercial newspapers in order to take advantage of their vastly greater circulations.
Since the 1990s, the circulations of party newspapers throughout China have steadily dropped, and Sichuan’s officialSichuan Daily is no exception. This has presented something of a dilemma for party leaders hoping to get their own messages out to the public.
Of course, we do need to keep in mind that Huaxi Metropolis Daily has dispatched its own reporters to those areas most affected by the quake. An announcement in Friday’s edition, in fact, mentions that the paper has sent out an additional 13 reporters.
And today’s edition, which features an arresting black-and-white photograph of a child’s hand emerging from the rubble, seems to be a return to form for Huaxi Metropolis Daily, even as much of the front-page content remains Xinhua News Agency stuff.
Were the May 16-18 editions design hiccups? Nods to the provincial leadership? For now, we will leave the question open.
Meanwhile, we offer the following front-page images from Huaxi Metropolis Daily, in consecutive order from May 8 to May 19.
Readers may note that the space to the right of the masthead has been used consistently for content since the earthquake struck, a party-paper throwback. Content in this spot is as follows:

May 13 — a teaser from a report from Huaxi’s own reporter
May 14 — official news about top national leaders
May 15 — official news about top national leaders
May 16 — official news from Sichuan Daily about top Sichuan provincial leaders
May 17 — official notice from provincial leaders reported more or less verbatim by one of Huaxi‘s own reporters
May 18 — Xinhua News Agency release about top national leaders

[Posted by David Bandurski, May 19, 2008, 12:45pm HK]