Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes

by James Palmer

  The summer heat was bad enough that most people slept without clothes, even in the crowded three-to-a-bed rooms. It was a startling sight for some teenage survivors. ‘All those naked girls everywhere, and I didn’t even have eyes for them!’ one man recalled. ‘In all that dust and filth, it wasn’t like they were even people any more.’

  Back in the city, Mrs He found a neighbour, Old Zhang. He was holding his naked daughter, who was clinging to him in shame. It was her period, and she was bleeding badly, and Zhang had no idea what to do. Mrs He found a cotton quilt, which she wrapped around the girl, rocking and comforting her.

  Others were not so kind. There were stray reports of rapes among the ruins, usually in villages rather than central Tangshan itself. Some of them were individual cases, but others were gang rapes carried out by packs of young male survivors. The details were, understandably, never released, but a few perpetrators would later be tried and executed.

  Qinglong was ready for the earthquake. It even came as a relief, after days of tension, waiting for disaster and with the region’s officials mindful of the political consequences if no quake occurred. Families fled their homes at the first sign of shaking bottles. Those already outside had to endure, at worst, collapsed tents. In the hospitals, every doctor and nurse, in a fantastic feat of organisation, had been assigned specific duties in the event of a quake. Less seriously injured patients were given the task of tending to weaker ones, carrying them outside as soon as the shaking started, one man holding on to an IV drip as four others shifted a bed.

  But the Qinglong evacuation was not as extensive, thorough, or life-saving as claimed by the officials involved, who assert that, ‘Save for the very remote villages, everybody knew that an earthquake was coming.’ When I travelled around the county, I found that, other than very close to the county centre and in the largest villages, people had no memory of any training or evacuation programmes. They had reacted to the earthquake spontaneously, fleeing their homes at the first sign of shock, but had still not suffered significant loss of life. The officials involved, whatever their successes, had obvious motivations for exaggerating their achievements afterwards. (As, indeed, do the experts in the US who use Qinglong as a positive example of disaster preparedness today – usually in contrast with disasters like Hurricane Katrina – and are eager to swallow stories of success.)

  The Qinglong team’s efforts were still an act of considerable bravery, hard work and remarkable prescience. The preparations saved some lives, but even in completely unprepared villages, nobody died. The figure of 180,000 ‘collapsed’ buildings but no deaths sometimes gets bandied about, but this is based on a very simple mistake – 180,000 was the number of damaged buildings in Qinglong, not collapsed ones, and that damage could be as small as a few tiles shaken off a roof.

  In one typical village, Changguo, which had never heard of any evacuation, the damage was limited to sliding roofs, collapse of free-standing walls, and the shattering of large mirrors. Qinglong’s neighbouring counties, an equal distance from Tangshan, suffered a small number of deaths at worst. Qinglong was simply too far from the earthquake’s epicentre for the disaster to have been that devastating even without any precautions being taken.

  Another life-saving struggle was taking place only 15 km away from Tangshan. As the rain swept across the region, the water level in the Douhe reservoir was rising rapidly. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t have been a problem, but the earthquake had left the reservoir’s dam looking as if a giant claw had scraped across it. As the water rose, the dam strained, water leaking through the worst cracks. Local villagers panicked, abandoning rescue efforts to run for high ground. If the dam broke, a wave of water ten metres high would smash down upon Tangshan, drowning the already devastated city.

  The army saved the day. An artillery regiment was stationed nearby. After rescuing what they could, they’d been immediately deployed to protect the dam. The reservoir’s floodgates had to be opened and the water let out into the spillway before the dam gave out under the strain, but the electricity that fed the dam’s controls was dead. In an astonishing feat of physical endurance and communal spirit, the artillerymen seized the winding mechanism that controlled the floodgate, never designed to be moved by hand, and began to lift the fifty-ton gate millimetre by agonising millimetre. Teams of four worked in ten-minute shifts, chanting work rhythms, their hands still covered with blood from digging out bodies at the barracks. It took eight torturous hours to lift the floodgate and release the water, sparing Tangshan from a second disaster.

  Back in Beijing, the staff of the Seismological Bureau ran to work. Like most people with government positions, they had free housing near their offices. Their office was covered with shattered glass and smashed plates. Hu Keshi, still the nominal head of the Bureau, had come in as soon as he heard, but stood in a corner uselessly, ignored by the frantic scientists as a political unperson. The Bureau staff didn’t know it yet, but they’d lost colleagues in the quake; a team of four scientists sent to observe Tangshan’s seismic monitoring had been crushed in their beds. They still had no idea where the epicentre of the quake was; their communications setup was far too primitive even to pinpoint the direction. Instead, they sent four teams out by car to cover every point of the compass, interrogating stunned locals and glancing at crushed buildings to estimate where the damage was worst.

  As the scientists fanned out in search of the quake’s centre, a van sped towards Beijing from Tangshan. Four men, two of them, Li Yulin and Cao Gaocheng, officials attached to the Tangshan mines, and the other two, Cui Zhiliang and Yuan Qingwu, ordinary miners, had commandeered an ambulance, determined to get word to higher authorities. After crawling out of the ruins of their living quarters near the mines, they’d headed straight for the local Party offices, only to find them annihilated. They grabbed the ambulance, and set out looking for a phone.

  The ambulance sped through the streets, ignoring desperate survivors trying to flag it down, who threw bricks after the vehicle when it failed to stop. They moved in fits and starts, veering past new potholes in the roads and stopping to shift fallen trees. Searching for a phone, they tried county after county, trying large factories and government offices that might have phones. At one point they were stopped by a Party official who demanded to know their work unit, names and political status – then interrogated them about the collapsed Party offices in Tangshan, where his family lived. None of the places they stopped at had a working phone.

  In Jixian county, north of Tianjin, they ran into one of the seismological teams dispatched from Beijing. They swapped people, Yuan Qingwu heading back to Tangshan with the scientists while one of them jumped into the ambulance with the miners. Eventually they came to a factory twelve miles outside Beijing, and hammered on the door, only to have the gate porter tell them, ‘You’re phoning Beijing? In the time it’ll take to put the call through, you’d be there in that ambulance of yours!’16

  Flipping the siren on, they sped into Jianguomen, Beijing’s central avenue, looking for the State Council. They could see people in shock in the streets, and shaken buildings, but nothing nearly as damaged as Tangshan. As they arrived at the State Council, they told the soldiers on guard where they’d come from, and, together with two air force men who had just flown in from Tangshan, they were rushed to Zhongnanhai at 8:30, and hurried into a pavilion in which a number of important leaders, including Chen Xilian, the Beijing area military commander, and Wu De, who had brutally crushed the Tiananmen protestors, were gathered around a large map. None of them were dressed for the visit; Cao Gaocheng was wearing nothing but a long undershirt and a helmet, while Li Yulin was clad in a pair of swimming trunks and a miner’s jacket. Looking at the assembled officials, Li stumbled out words. ‘Vice-premiers, there’s nothing left standing in Tangshan!’

  Three of the ministers gathered round Li, holding him. ‘Don’t get upset . . . take your time.’ He began to cry. ‘Vice-premiers, a million people in Tangshan; at the very least 8
00,000 of them are still buried.’ Several of the officials began to weep, as the others interrogated the miners as to the extent of the damage and what was most urgently needed. Wu De, who had been a Party secretary in Tangshan at one point, asked after a particularly sturdy building constructed by the British for the Kailuan mines, and Li told him it had already collapsed. Wu sighed. ‘Tangshan is gone, just gone . . .’17

  5 Everybody saved me

  Tangshan saved itself. It’s a phrase you hear so often from earthquake survivors that it seems clichéd, but it’s true. ‘I was rescued by my neighbour.’ ‘Somebody pulled me out of the ruins that morning, I don’t know who.’ ‘I never met the people who rescued me, but I will never forget them.’ On that grey, deadly morning, the people of Tangshan – and the countryside around it – turned to each other for salvation.

  The impulse to rescue is universal. It can override even the most extreme of hatreds. In the fighting around the ruined monastery of Monte Cassino in 1943, one of the most intense and gruelling battles of WWII, a damaged wall collapsed, burying two British soldiers. The Germans immediately put down their weapons and went to help, hauling rubble alongside their foes to rescue men they had been trying to kill a few moments before.

  Mencius, the greatest and fiercest of Chinese philosophers, pinpointed the impulse to help. ‘Suppose a man sees a child about to fall down a well,’ he wrote, ‘He will be moved to compassion, but not because he wants to get into the good graces of the parents, nor because he wants to improve his reputation among his friends and fellow villagers, nor because he dislikes the cry of the child.’1 The instinct of benevolence is always there, though it may be stifled.

  Mencius’ words were proven in Tangshan. Whatever condition they were in – terrified, grieving, wounded, widowed, orphaned – people went to help others. They worked with nothing. The closest thing the city had to rescue equipment was mining gear. Thus, rescuers moved iron bars and fallen stone with their bare hands, impromptu teams forming to shift pieces too heavy for one man to clear alone. Across the city you could hear the chants of ‘One-two-three, lift! One-two-three, lift!’

  Many people lost all their fingernails tearing through the rubble. As soon as a family had finished looking for their own, they went to help neighbours. People were drafted in wherever needed. Often, the rescued plunged right in to the work of saving others. One man would dig another out, and then the two of them would find a third, and thus the chain expanded, the bond of mutual salvation pressing them on to help others.

  In places, the rescue work started within minutes of the earthquake ; in others, the coming of dawn gave people courage to move beyond their own terrors and help others. Saving others was so normal that survivors only casually mention it in their testimonies. ‘After I got my cousin, then I went and pulled my neighbour’s children out, and old Meng from across the road . . .’ Somehow between 80 and 90 per cent of those rescued were dug out in those first few hours.

  On the morning of 28 July, Tangshan was the most truly communist place in the world. Food, clothing, blankets – anything people had – were shared freely, even with strangers. Shop managers guided people to their surviving stocks, handing out clothing, shoes, coats and socks to half-naked survivors. A farmer grabbed He Jianguo and pressed half a watermelon in her hand, telling her ‘Little sister, eat!’

  They did this in spite of the sheer scale of their own loss. Across Tangshan, somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of the population was dead. About 6,000 households – around 30,000 people – had been wiped out entirely, from grandmothers to infants. The rest of the casualties were fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, children, gaping wounds torn out of families. When friends met, after the initial sharp burst of joy at finding each other alive, the first thing they asked was, ‘How many lost in your family?’

  In their home village, Yu Xuebing’s family did what many others did, pulling rescued bedsheets down from a ruined wall to form an impromptu tent and cooking whatever food they could find to give to the just-rescued – sometimes the same people who had labelled them ‘black’ and ransacked their houses in past years. Later, theorists would describe what occurred as a form of ‘primitive communism’ similar to that shared by soldiers in wartime. It seemed to work rather better than the advanced kind.

  Later propaganda would naturally emphasise the role of the Party leadership in the rescue efforts, and that was often true. The Party pervaded every aspect of life and Party officials tended to be more assertive and have at least some leadership skills. They also provided a reassuring hierarchy; they were the first people everyone looked to in a crisis. In the same way as survivors or mourners of disasters in the US cluster round local churches, people in Tangshan gathered at Party centres.

  It was a profound shock for many survivors when, after instinctively heading to local Party headquarters to report, they found the buildings flattened. Where there were no Party survivors, people turned to other forms of authority instead. In villages deep in the hills, half-educated schoolteachers coordinated rescue efforts, drawing on vaguely remembered lectures at teachers’ college on geology and engineering.

  People also went to their elders, in a sharp contrast with the contempt for the old shown during the Cultural Revolution. ‘Old’ is an affectionate and usually respectful epithet in Chinese – ‘Old Wang’, ‘Old Liu’ and so on – and every community, even in those times, had its respected elders. By the standards of rural China, that could mean being in your late forties.2

  In the thick of the disaster, the young looked to the old for direction, not least because the accumulated wisdom of living through decades of disaster had left them better able to cope with trauma and to improvise solutions. What to do about a broken limb with no doctor within a hundred miles? How to get a bull driven mad by fear back behind a locked gate? How do you move a broken bedstead out of the way to reach a trapped child, when the bedstead may be the only thing keeping the mound she’s buried under from collapsing? With the well blocked, where’s the nearest source of clean water? What’s the strongest wood to be found within carrying distance? What do you feed a three-month-old orphan when there are no other nursing mothers in the village?

  There were many examples of selfishness, greed and cowardice to be found that day, but they pale beside the extent of generosity, selflessness and courage. Across Hebei, hundreds of thousands of people were dug from the rubble. The rescuers knew the risk of aftershocks, and what these could do to already wrecked buildings. Whatever their fears, they climbed into half-destroyed houses, clambered over piles of unsteady rubble, and pressed into narrow cracks to save people.

  The first and most severe aftershock came late the next afternoon. It hit far to the north of Tangshan, but the city was shaken again. Thankfully, there were very few new casualties, although many of those trapped were crushed or further injured as the debris shifted. Further small aftershocks continued to shake the ground for nearly a day afterwards, but didn’t deter rescuers.

  Yet, amidst this bravery and determination, the story that the state media chose to publicise was quite different. The front page of People’s Daily, two days after the earthquake, told the heroic story of Che Zhengming, a senior cadre in Tangshan who had been helicoptered up during the Cultural Revolution. When the quake hit, his house had been shattered, burying his sixteen-year-old son and thirteen-year-old daughter. His daughter cried out ‘Dad, save me!’ His priority was not to save her, but to retrieve the local Party chairman from the ruins of his apartment nearby. While he was digging him out, his own children died. The article praised his political commitment, noting approvingly that he ‘felt neither remorse nor sorrow’ for the death of his children, but had shown ‘a willingness to benefit the majority at the expense of his own children’, which was an example to everyone.

  Other published stories talked of people risking their own lives or ignoring the plight of family to rescue busts or paintings of Mao Zedong, but these may have been outright fiction; it was
a well-developed trope in Communist disaster stories, perhaps copied from similar stories in Japanese papers of the 1930s about the much-venerated imperial portrait. Identical stories regularly appear in the North Korean media today about the portraits of the two Kims each family is supposed to hang on an otherwise blank wall.

  There were other stories that were never going to make it into the Chinese papers. For two days after the earthquake, the sound of gunfire could be heard across the ruins of Tangshan. The people’s militia were opening fire.

  The militias had been established in the 1960s, as part of Mao’s vision of a politicised, ideologically fervent military of ‘men over weapons’. They were envisaged as the building blocks of a vast insurgent army that would swallow up potential invaders while the PLA itself retreated and regrouped. China’s leaders remained worried about the possibility of invasion long after securing the country.

  The militias had a touch of Dad’s Army about them, as, at their peak, they included a quarter of China’s population, regardless of age. Those who turned out regularly tended to be young men, thrilled at playing at war. The same people often made up the militia and the village Red Guard. They drilled with wooden rifles or spears most of the time, and when they were given live ammunition for practice proved likely to be more dangerous to each other than to the enemy. Trained to fight Japanese, Americans or Russians, they never saw combat against foreigners but, instead, were turned against their fellow Chinese in internal battles or to suppress protestors.