by James Palmer
The heat was killing. A few soldiers fainted and had to be carried by their companions. None of the troops received anything to eat until they arrived in Tangshan, whereupon the mess orderlies began to cook up basic meals of rice gruel. Water was in such short supply that parched troops drank from stagnant pools tainted by oil or coal runoff. As they marched, villagers ran towards them, desperate for aid. Small groups of soldiers broke off to help the worst-hit, but officers urged them not to be distracted, to keep going for Tangshan. The countryside was not the priority.
Indeed, outside the centre of Tangshan, it would be a long, long time before anyone saw the PLA, or any other form of government relief. The first troops made it to the city by the early morning of the 29th, but there were villages only a couple of hours away that didn’t see any sign of the army for a week or more, if at all. Up in the hills, the army never came.
The generous interpretation of the decision to concentrate solely on the city is this. The PLA and the central authorities were working with limited resources, and facing a disaster of vast magnitude. They needed to perform what was, in effect, a form of triage. The infrastructure of the region had been wrecked, and it would take hours or days to reach even nearby villages and towns. Central Tangshan had the highest population density and was, after all, the epicentre of the earthquake; it made sense to save lives there as quickly as possible, and only after that to spread out and concentrate on the countryside.
But the reality is that the countryside simply didn’t matter to the central authorities. The quake victims there were only farmers, and the country had hundreds of millions of them. Nor were the northern Hebei villages and small towns important political battlefields.
Tangshan, in contrast, was a critical industrial centre, a mining powerhouse that couldn’t be lost. Industry was far more important than agriculture, as had been demonstrated during the Great Leap Forward, where basic agronomy was neglected in favour of frantic industrialisation to ‘catch up’ with Western nations. And while the PLA eventually fanned out from the city centre into the counties close to Tangshan, great swathes of the region, and many individual villages in the areas the military did reach, saw not a scrap of disaster relief for months. Some never saw any at all.
Hundreds of thousands of rural Hebei residents were left to cope with the catastrophe entirely by themselves. Their fields had been destroyed, and the state granaries that could have supplied them were cordoned off by local militias and the army. Food aid took weeks to be delivered, if it ever came. In a previous era, they would have spilled down from their homes into the big cities, looking for work or charity. But it was bitterly hard to leave your home without proper registration, and especially to move from the countryside into the city.
Those who tried, unless they had relatives elsewhere willing to sponsor and help them, were rounded up and shipped back to the quake-struck area like any other illegal migrant. Even in the wake of the disaster, the residence laws were enforced as inflexibly as ever; maintaining proper order was far more important than helping suffering farmers. Indeed, given the vigilante mobs guarding their ruined towns from the peasants, flight had become even riskier.
The concentration on the city was also a simple case of panicked and inadequate planning and communication. After it became known that Tangshan was the earthquake’s epicentre, it was the natural destination for every battalion commander. Nobody could risk not going to Tangshan. Heading into the countryside, away from the rest of the army, would have left them open to accusations of exploiting the situation for counter-revolutionary ends.
A better plan would have spread men across the region, focusing on important towns and establishing relief centres to help the areas around them. But with no planning in place for an event of this scale, and poor communications between different units, it was unsurprising that all the soldiers ended up in the one spot, and that it was days or weeks before the military authorities got their act together enough, and received approval from the higher political leaders to dispatch men to the countryside.
One political decision was later universally admitted to be a mistake, the refusal of aid from foreign nations. Upon hearing of the quake, Japan, the UN, the EEC and the US had immediately offered help, including dedicated technical teams, helicopters, rescue tools, blankets and food. China turned them down flat. Foreign help was inconceivable because ‘imitating foreign devils’ was one of the cardinal sins during the Cultural Revolution. Only two years before, Jiang Qing had used the building of the SS Fenging, an ocean-going freighter constructed as part of a campaign of vigorous self-reliance, as yet another opportunity to attack Zhou Enlai through allusions to foreign ministers of the past who had sought help for China’s navy overseas.
Chi Haotian, then a deputy political commissar for the military in Tangshan and later PLA deputy chief of staff, cheered the decision at the time but, like many others, was to regret it later:
A sympathy delegation headed by one of the leaders from the Party Central Commission came to the disaster zone and . . . said to us ‘Foreigners want to come to China and provide us with aid, but this great and powerful country of ours . . . does not need the interference of others and does not need anyone else coming to our assistance!’ At the time, listening to him, we all got very excited and applauded and wept and yelled out the same kind of thing. So many years went by before we realised what a stupid thing we’d done!9
The refusal of foreign aid is still a sore point in Tangshan. It didn’t escape local notice that an unusually high percentage of foreign-built buildings, both from the mining companies and from the period of Soviet aid, had survived the quake. It’s uncertain how much foreign expertise could have helped, given the timescale. Even if the regime had accepted aid, it would have been days before it could have reached Tangshan, especially in view of the constraints and suspicions foreigners would have been operating under.
Ironically, the only three non-Chinese to die in the Tangshan earthquake had been there to teach the Chinese how to imitate foreign devils. They were Japanese engineers, working in Tangshan as part of an under-the-table deal struck between the Japanese and Chinese governments in the early 1960s, brokered by Zhou Enlai. Japan provided extensive technical aid, support and funds to China in return for China waiving any claims for wartime compensation, but neither side would mention it in public – the Japanese weren’t keen to admit any kind of guilt, and the Chinese didn’t want to broadcast that they had received foreign aid.
The Japanese had been working to help build the Douhe power plant for over a year, as part of a team of nine technicians. At the Spring Festival in February, they’d celebrated with their Chinese counterparts, with whom they’d been working closely, and one of the Japanese suggested that they all sign their names in a small book as a memento of their time together. The Chinese stared blankly at each other, and then walked en masse out of the room and called the mine’s political officer, in a panic. Who knew what the foreigners were up to? The political officer told them firmly not to sign – maybe it was some kind of cunning Japanese ploy.
By the time the troops arrived in the city, Tangshan stank. The quake had torn up the sewage system, wrecked the public toilets, and left piles of shit to rot in the hot sun. Bodies were already bloating, and maggots squirmed in corpses and garbage as black clouds of flies fed on the human debris. Like the troops, the survivors were desperately thirsty, and drank whatever was available – from broken public toilet bowls, swimming pools into which sewage pipes had burst, canteens of stale tea two days old. People filled cups and thermoses with the green rainwater that had collected in the newly cratered ground.
Without any professional expertise in rescue work, the PLA, at least at first, amounted to nothing more than strong backs and willing hands. That helped, of course, though the vast majority of the easier rescues had already been accomplished by Tangshanese. Since the soldiers were worn out, hungry and thirsty themselves, in some areas the influx of men was at first a burd
en rather than a help, although the troops were consistently generous in giving their food and water to survivors, especially children. But they were also relatively well-fed, and generally extremely fit; wiry-bodied tough young men trained to work in teams. They saved, according to the official figures, 16,400 people from the ruins, a fraction of those recovered earlier, but still a heroic and exhausting effort.
The army had another task besides rescue. The excesses of the militia soon became obvious, especially to the relatively well-disciplined professionals of the PLA. On 1 August the army issued ‘General Order No. 1’, both forbidding looting and noting that, ‘Effective today, members of the People’s Militia are forbidden to open fire without due cause.’ The army had forcibly to disarm some of the militias, drunk with their own power. The militia members were never officially prosecuted, though at least one case of gang rape was rumoured to have been committed by the members of a militia brigade, subsequently executed or sentenced to hard labour.
When it came to rescue work, within a few hours, one of the most critical shortages became obvious. The heavy relatively modern buildings of central Tangshan offered a surprising obstacle to rescue efforts: wood was very rare. Timber is desperately important in any disaster that involves collapsed buildings, and sturdy four-by-fours have saved many lives. It is needed to stabilise shafts and hold up tunnels; without it efforts to dig in to save the buried become even more grindingly slow and risk further collapses. The troops did their best with wood scavenged from other buildings, but there was never enough. Nine million planks would eventually be shipped to Tangshan, but far too late.
On top of that, there was no heavy rescue equipment. The PLA had no more way to break through the wreckage than the initial rescuers had that first morning. With few combat engineers in the first battalions to arrive, when it came to shifting rubble without crushing the people below, they went mostly by guesswork and luck. They were an army without weapons, forced to resort to sawing through steel rods with nothing more than hacksaws, or using blasting caps from the mines to blow holes through fallen walls and hope they wouldn’t bring the whole structure down. Astonishingly, rescue equipment didn’t arrive until 7 August – ten days after the quake.
Those still trapped tapped out messages to the soldiers, or called out weakly – sometimes no more than a metre or two away from the men trying to save them. The soldiers stuck food on bayonet blades and lowered them down on string through thin cracks to try to give those trapped a little more time, but often it was hopeless, and agonising scenes played out across the city as a baby’s crying stopped, or a voice heard calling ‘Save me, soldiers, save me’ gave out at last.
The soldiers remembered the children and the women most of all:
There were three young women we couldn’t reach [one former soldier said later]. I kept talking to them, trying to give them hope to hang on just a little longer. None of them were Tangshanese; they had all come from other provinces, and I kept thinking how awful it was, that they had come to this place to die. They told me about their families, and I told them about my sisters and my mother. I kept talking, even after they stopped answering. When we brought their bodies out of the rubble they were all so beautiful.
But some were saved. It was Zhu Yinlai’s third day underneath the rubble when he heard the sound of soldiers moving outside. He had had no water, and when he tried to call to them his mouth was dry and cracked and at first he could barely force a sound out. He banged on stones, wondering how they couldn’t hear him. It was so quiet, and they were ignoring the noise! He reasoned it must be deliberate, that they must have heard him but were afraid of being blamed if they couldn’t save him. And then, as he heard more people, he realised that it might be quiet for him, but not for them.
It took him another full day before anyone heard him. The soldiers kept coming past, because there was a ruined swimming pool nearby. They were so thirsty they were refilling their canteens from the stagnant water. When they heard him at last, they dropped everything. They started to yell to him. ‘Be quiet! Don’t waste your energy!’ but he wanted to talk, to hear a response from them.
The soldiers began clearing the fallen stone, until a chink of sunlight appeared above Zhu. As the light fell on his face, the first he’d seen in four days, he felt an immense sense of salvation. But the soldiers were then confronted by a tangle of metal, and had to wait for a cutter to be brought up. Zhu tried to direct them as best he could based on his mental image of the dormitory, but it was so wrecked his efforts were more hindrance than help.
Zhu wanted water desperately after they pulled him out, but the soldiers were worried he might die if they gave it to him straight away. Eventually they threw a nutrient bag over a nearby tree and hooked it into his arm. He passed out then, but not before seeing another classmate of his, Chen Yi-Hui, carried out of the ruins, only just alive, his face swollen purple and black from numerous bruises. They were two survivors out of ten in his department; his other fifty comrades were dead.
Zhu’s four-day ordeal was not unusual. Survivors were still being found, pulled up alive after five, six, seven days in the darkness. The most remarkable was Lu Guilan, a 46-year-old housewife who was pulled out on 9 August, after thirteen days underneath the wreckage of her house. She had slipped into a coma, but recovered, although lame in one leg. Perhaps, like many others, it was the toughness of her previous life which gave her the strength to last through those days, in which ‘my tongue got so dry in the end it was like a clod of earth banging away inside; I tore off a bit of the skin and the blood started dripping out, at least it felt a bit moist that way’.10
She lost her third husband in the earthquake, having first been widowed at seventeen. ‘The Japanese bullets had as good as taken my head off; they’d killed my first man.’ She’d had to look after her parents-in-law after losing her first husband, and would walk a dozen kilometres to bring them firewood, but ‘I was that strong then, I’d get a thirst on doing all that work, and then I’d drop down into a ditch and drink the cold water there, never got ill from it once.’ She married another man at twenty-two, only to have him die when she was twenty-five, leaving her ‘without a pair of shoes to my name’. It was memories of how she’d survived previously that gave her the strength to keep going, singing revolutionary songs in her head and thinking about how much she despised her next-door neighbour.
Many attempts at rescue ended tragically. Feng Chengbo was a young nurse in the No. 255 hospital, a twenty-year-old girl known for her gentle nature, but who suffered frequent criticism for her ‘love of beauty’. By the standards of 1976, this meant that she styled her fringe, and that she liked to wash her face with scented soap.
She was on the first floor with patients when the building collapsed. The next day rescuers broke through to find her trapped in a small cavity, caught at the waist between a huge concrete slab and an iron hospital bed, her legs buried in the ruins but her top half free. The rescuers struggled for over a day to find a way to remove her from the rubble, but the concrete slabs were too heavy to shift. Without cranes or drills, there was no way to save her. They considered amputation, but without transfusion facilities, she couldn’t survive the massive blood loss.
By now most of those trying to save her were young soldiers, looking down into the cavity from above, and they couldn’t bear it. Feng kept standing there, leaning her head on her elbow smiling weakly up at the men around her as they wept. The soldiers took it in turns to climb down and be with her. One crushed up half a watermelon he had with him and fed her spoonfuls.
She’d had a shower just before going on her last shift, and her hair was fluffy and tangled. A friend of hers arrived at last, asking ‘Little Feng, is there anything I can do?’ Feng was trying to speak, but was too weak, yet her friend understood. She picked up a comb and began to go through Feng’s hair, cleaning out the tangles, until her eyes closed. The slab still couldn’t be shifted, and so she was left standing there as if still alive, her head re
sting on her arms and her hair combed.
Goods as well as people needed to be saved from the rubble. Many of the survivors had been left with almost nothing, and were desperate to save some fragment of their old lives, especially rare and precious items like sewing machines and radios. One man picked through his old home to find every last scrap of his sewing machine, broken into seventeen pieces, which he then rebuilt. In the factories, workers and soldiers tried to salvage valuable industrial equipment – in some cases nearly irreplaceable, given China’s lack of imports and the paltry state of technical knowledge after a decade of closed universities.
In Tianjin, the writer and teacher Feng Jicai found himself dealing with a particularly tricky rescue operation. For years he had been collecting stories from victims of the Cultural Revolution and storing them in cracks in his house. His house was shattered by the earthquake, and he dreaded rescuers or clean-up crews coming across his works. In the days after the quake he ‘carefully rummaged through the ruins to look for my writings. In the end, I collected a whole bagful of small pieces of paper.’11
Apart from rescue operations, the troops’ main task was to dispose of bodies. The journalist Qing Gang, who had arrived alongside the army, watched:
. . . some soldiers coming down from the ruins with a corpse. The body had been wrapped in an old piece of cotton and tightly bound at either end with wire; it was hanging from a steel support bar . . . The two soldiers were so small and thin, with the faces of young boys. Their army caps were tilted to one side, and their sleeves hitched high up their arms. Fluid was dripping down the corpse on to their trousers where damp patches had already formed.12