by James Palmer
Of the tens of thousands of soldiers in Beichuan in the days after the quake, the only ones we saw raise a sweat were a dozen who jostled in front of Premier Wen as they rushed to an imaginary rescue for the benefit of the China Central Television camera.16
And earthquake funds often went straight to official banquets and the purchase of new Land Rovers, rather than to the people they were supposed to help, prompting public calls for increased government financial transparency, a perpetual sore spot. Officials exaggerated the death toll in their districts in order to secure more funds, or simply filed paperwork twice with different departments.
Locals had been rightly cynical straight from the start, ‘The government will have to give me money to rebuild my house, but I have no confidence in the local officials. They’ll put the money in their own pockets,’ said one fifty-year-old factory worker a few days after the quake, looking at his ruined house.17 UNESCO made sterling efforts to reach remote areas and provide new housing programmes, just as it did later after a smaller, even more remote earthquake in the Tibetan county of Yushu in 2010, and so did other international agencies. There were definitely benefits to bringing in outsiders.
The reaction in Tangshan to the Sichuan earthquake was both generous and bitter. The Tangshan government sent numerous rescue teams, while donations from the city were among the highest in China. Yet, talking with Tangshan survivors about the Wenchuan earthquake, they showed an odd tone of jealousy. Wenchuan was getting all the attention, they felt, while their experiences were forgotten. ‘Tangshan was worse than Sichuan,’ I was told over and over again, ‘Ours might have been a 7.8 and theirs an 8.0, but we were right at the centre.’
The most disgraceful part of the Sichuan quakes was the ‘dofu-paste schools’, public buildings where money meant for construction had been siphoned off by local authorities in collusion with the builders. Real estate is a very corrupt industry in China, where lack of effective and adequate local taxation means that many local governments have become dependent on the sale of land, and officials expect hefty bribes from any bidder for a contract.
The cost for bribing officials to get a tender is often then taken in turn from the funds for building, which in Sichuan resulted in a greater percentage of schools and other public institutions collapsing in the quake than private buildings. The quake hit at 2:48 in the afternoon, when classes were packed, and at least 5,000 students were killed. It was even more devastating for the parents than for those who lost children at Tangshan, since the One Child Policy meant that a high percentage of the dead were the only child in their family. The assurances by the authorities that the One Child Policy had a provision allowing a second child in the event of the first’s death was little consolation.
The government went on to throw away much of the credit it had gathered in the initial response to the Sichuan earthquake by harassing, beating and attacking parents and activists. Tan Zuoren, a noted dissident and environmentalist, tried to set up a database to record how many children had died and where, only to find himself arrested and his materials seized. In March 2009, he was tried for ‘subverting state power’ and sentenced to five years in prison. Yet even this disgraceful abuse of state authority took place in a very different atmosphere to the past. The sentence was publicly condemned by prominent Chinese intellectuals, and Tan’s lawyer mounted a vigorous defence on the grounds that it was no crime to use democratic methods in a people’s democracy.
The Sichuan earthquake sparked wild stories everywhere. Within a few days of the quake, I had heard that the government had predicted the quake, that the year was cursed, and that a new earthquake was about to hit Beijing, which the government knew but was keeping secret to avoid panic, even as officials secretly fled. That last part was particularly widespread; Beijing and other major cities were noticeably empty the weekend after the quake.
One reporter was able to trace the origins of a rumour in the city of Chengdu, which had suffered slightly from the quake. ‘At 11:30 a.m. on 15 May, the businessman Wu Fengjun . . . received a call from a stranger who said that there would be a magnitude 7 earthquake in Chengdu.’ Wu called the paper, who traced it from him to a middle school teacher called Li, who had meant to call his mother, but dialled the wrong number. He’d got the wrong information from the school head, who’d got it from a chemistry teacher – who’d merely passed on news he’d heard from his daughter that there might be strong aftershocks, which she’d got from a friend of a friend who worked in the Earthquake Bureau. It had gone from aftershock to immediate threat in less than an hour, and the rumour was still being recorded on internet bulletin boards days later.
Many towns and counties had some variant of the rumour that a quake was about to hit, prompting official announcements from local disaster relief boards that no earthquake was imminent. Seventeen people were arrested for ‘spreading malicious rumours’, but there was no malice in most cases, only fear and a shared disbelief in the honesty of the authorities.
The immediate reaction of many Chinese to the Sendai earthquake of March 2011 was to marvel at the calm discipline of the Japanese public, the open media coverage, and the sturdiness of Japan’s buildings. Zhang Lei, a writer for the Chinese edition of the Financial Times, implicitly contrasted the situation with that in China:
I wondered: Was Japan’s government not afraid that it would cause instability for them to report the quake on the TV without fear like this? But in the TV reports on the quake, you rarely saw pictures of high-level Japanese leaders ‘dealing with the disaster’, and there seemed to be no images of the Japanese Prime Minister directing the relief effort, spilling his tears over the disaster-stricken area.
Online commentators noted the lack of looting, the Japanese public’s trust that the government would provide food and shelter, and the open media coverage of issues around the quake. ‘In China,’ one wrote, ‘I bet [people] would have immediately broken into and looted the surrounding supermarkets,’18 while another noted that the difference is that ‘over there they have something called trust’.
In 2010, two different films captured different parts of the Chinese collective memory of the Tangshan disaster. The first, The Great Tangshan Earthquake – in English, actually rather more appropriately titled Aftershock – had a huge budget for a Chinese movie, coming in at 150 million yuan (around $22 million), and was accompanied by a giant marketing blitz. It broke box office records for a domestic movie (though still trailing a long way behind the Avatar juggernaut, which the Chinese audience read as a parable of forced demolition and resistance to real estate companies), though it seemed to have relatively little staying power; few people were going to see it twice, or talking of it as a favourite movie. It was simply something you were expected to see.
It was a competently done movie, and occasionally very moving, though the earthquake itself was over by the first twenty minutes.19 It put forward, unsurprisingly, a completely conventional narrative of China’s progress since the earthquake, following a brother and sister, torn apart when their mother was forced to choose which of them to save. The sister ends up being adopted by heroic PLA officers, while the son, one-armed, remains with the mother and becomes a successful businessman, until the siblings are reunited by chance when they go to aid victims of the Sichuan earthquake. China’s material progress is much emphasised throughout the film, as the characters’ homes fill up with electronic goods, revolutionary posters shift to pictures of sports stars and movie icons, and transport changes from bicycles to BMWs.
It was much criticised for product placement (‘What company should we use for insurance for the trip?’ ‘Use China Life, they’re very reliable’), but the political placement was shoehorned in almost as crudely. Scenes of Mao’s death appear out of nowhere, taking up two minutes of the film with mourning music and white flags for no particularly good reason. The PLA come in for abundant praise. The real political message is more subtle. As one commentator approvingly put it, ‘The message of the film
is that China has moved on from the historical pain of the past.’ The son’s lack of an arm doesn’t prevent him achieving business success, while the daughter cannot be truly happy until she puts aside the bitterness she feels towards her mother for abandoning her.
All this was a change from the original message of the story on which the movie was based, in which there are no clear emotional consolations and the wounds of the past are implied never fully to heal. The movie only hinted at a subplot made somewhat more explicit in the original text: the adoptive father of the rescued girl develops a sexual attraction to his new daughter. That the nurturing PLA family, which acts in the movie as a symbol of national conscience and government care for the survivors, might also be a source of emotional trauma was not something mainstream audiences were quite ready for.
The second film, Buried, was made for almost no money at all by independent director Wang Libo.20 It’s a simple documentary, consisting mostly of talking heads and the occasional archival record, which repeats the claims of covered-up predictions around the Tangshan earthquake. Made in the aftermath of the Sichuan quake, and based largely on the work of reporter Zhang Qingzhou, it linked the two, and suggested that the Chinese government had deliberately concealed the success of the Qinglong county government and the extent of pre-earthquake warnings.
Buried won praise at the 2009 Beijing Film Festival, and was a sleeper hit online, despite being repeatedly taken down from Chinese sites. Yet the fundamental premise, as I outlined earlier in this book, was wrong. The earthquake forecasts were vague, covered huge areas, and nowhere near the level of specificity or urgency that would have prompted immediate action, let alone evacuation, under any system. As with the validity of any prediction, it looks stronger in hindsight because we don’t have access to the full volume of predictions made, in different times and regions, that didn’t prove true. They were similar to the ‘predictions’ of 9/11 within the US intelligence agencies – general forecasts that any system throws up on a regular basis. Qinglong’s prediction was a remarkable work of intuition and guesswork, but it was so far distant from the epicentre that the number of lives saved was very small. Although Hebei officials cautioned Qinglong staff to keep quiet, there was no systematic long-term cover-up of the prediction – knowledge of it was already common currency in Tangshan soon after the earthquake, and articles on Qinglong were appearing in Chinese papers by the early 1980s.
There was also a certain amount of personal bitterness involved. The scientists interviewed in Buried are all keen proponents of the validity of earthquake prediction and continue to tout the Haicheng story as a success. In the meantime, the State Seismological Bureau has moved back towards a more mainstream scientific understanding of the limitations of prediction, putting them distinctly at odds with their former colleagues.
Yet the film went beyond the earthquake. It expressed much deeper doubts about the official historiography of the period, the feeling that the truth of what had happened was still being covered up and smoothed over. The slogan of the film was simple: ‘The truth cannot be buried.’ A similar work, the 2006 satirical essay ‘Did the Tangshan Earthquake Really Happen?’ by blogger Han Song, was full of the same kind of doubts, using the official reports of the quake to highlight political hypocrisies and fictions.21 What is being talked about here is not just the earthquake, but the cover-ups, fictions and false histories surrounding the whole of the Cultural Revolution.
The Cultural Revolution actually gets one of the better treatments in terms of recent Chinese historiography and censorship. This isn’t saying much. Honest history is hard to do in China, given the determination of Beijing to put forward a historical narrative that presents an essentially benevolent Communist Party guiding China from weakness to strength and occasionally going astray through no fault of its own.
Still, the crimes of 1966 – 76 are acknowledged even in the official media, even as their scope and origins are minimised. Details are kept very much out of the mainstream; scar literature is never going to be televised on Chinese Central Television. All the blame, naturally, is heaped upon the Gang of Four, and criticism of Mao’s role is very largely absent. But it can be talked about and the period’s horrors recognised while, for instance, the atrocities committed during the land reform process simply can’t be discussed, nor the oppression of the Anti-Rightist Campaign, or, most glaringly, the political causes of the Great Leap Forward.
Apart from the gaping absence of Mao, the greatest flaw in the official line on the Cultural Revolution is how it treats the period as if it was conjured out of nowhere, sprung full-grown from Jiang Qing’s thigh. Apart from the startling role of the very young, there was no form of political violence or oppression in the Cultural Revolution that was new to the Maoist regime. Attacks on intellectuals, mass murder of class enemies, the denigration of past traditions, campaigns against religion, paranoia about counter-revolutionaries, factional conflict, ‘struggle sessions’ – all of these well pre-dated 1966. The Cultural Revolution, like the Gang of Four, has become a general scapegoat; all of the Party’s past atrocities can be dumped on it.
The Tangshan earthquake has contributed something unique and powerful to Chinese historical memory. Both Aftershock and Buried end on the image of the new Tangshan memorial wall, finished in 2010. The wall is, as far as I know, unique; it’s the only memorial of a major disaster in China which lists the names of every known victim. Most of China’s disasters aren’t memorialised at all, and those that are, such as the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, focus on general images of martyrdom. Tangshan’s is the first to recognise individual loss, rather than collective sacrifice.
The memorial wall itself had a sketchy start. It was set up at first as a private operation, which demanded that anybody who wanted a relative’s name inscribed pay around 800 yuan (about $100 at the time) to get a name on the back of the wall, or 1,000 yuan if they wanted it on the front. Local anger over this coincided with the appointment of a new reformist mayor, who had the city government take over the project and execute it on a far grander scale.
I visited the wall while it was being built. The construction workers had set up camp in a quake-ruined factory nearby, the flames of their cooking fire flickering on the looming black walls on either side, which rose like the remains of a medieval cathedral. It had no ceiling, but provided at least some shelter from the harsh wind. They were all Sichuanese or Hunanese, part of the vast wave of migrants from the south looking for work, and felt little personal connection to the memorial site.
The memorial itself was bleakly moving, even half-finished. Eventually it would have over twenty-five blocks, and be more than 300 metres long. The names were ordered by stroke count, which must have been a nightmare to compile. Each block looked like a tombstone, the names engraved in gold. Like everything in China, it was big, far more overwhelming and much less intimate than its original model, the Vietnam Wall in Washington – also designed, as it happens, by a Chinese architect. Each block was nearly ten metres tall; to read the names at the top you had to stand back and stretch your neck. Before it was a small lake, the grey waters broken by jagged rocks. A few wreaths had already been laid at the base of the wall; on the anniversary of the quake it would be covered with flowers.
I wandered along the wall, writing down blocks of names:
Liu Xue Chun
Liu Xuen Sun
Wang Li
Lia Xilin
Liu Lianzhong
Ma Dianyi
Liu Cunjin
Liu Junling
An Xiaoyi
Dai Xiurong
Yang Guilan
Li Lianmao
Xu Xiaolian
Xu Fengxia
Xu Gengdong
Xu Genzhu
Lia Xiujun
Liu Ai
Dou Guangrong
Liu Xuemin
Tan Aiguo
Dai Liying
Dai Lina
Dai Ruexing
Xu Gengju
Xu Genglin
Liu Faping
Xu Huanqing
Xu Xiaopei
Zheng Shuhua
Liu Xudong
Yu Langui
After the memorial was completed, the Tangshan government built a new earthquake museum, which I visited shortly after its opening in late 2009. It was a step up from the old city museum, which had focused mostly on statistics, with long lists of the various donations from different provinces, technical diagrams crammed with seismological details, and long corridors full of Tangshan’s industrial advances. The new museum was largely below ground, and was heavy on dioramas, models, flashing lights and dramatic films. There was a model of the red ambulance that had borne the four messengers to Beijing, scenes of soldiers feeding grateful survivors and individual accounts of heroism and survival. It was a fine effort, and I was moved, as were the other visitors that day, all Chinese and mostly locals.
Before leaving the museum, visitors had to pass down a long corridor, with five heavy inscriptions on the left-hand side. They repeated the same themes found on the Tangshan Earthquake Monument in the centre of the city. ‘The great Chinese Communist Party is wise, the socialist system is incomparably superior, and the People’s Liberation Army is loyal and reliable.’ Each one had several paragraphs of political bombast, detailing how the earthquake relief efforts had shown the perfection of socialism and the continued wisdom of the Party as the sole leaders of China.
I was the only one reading them. Everyone else in the crowd walked straight past, heading up the stairs to the sunlight outside.
Acknowledgements
I could not have written this book without the help of Peter Yang, my tireless fixer and translator in Tangshan and Qinglong, who found interviewees, conducted his own archival and photographic research, and organised bus tickets and hotel rooms. His diligence, intelligence, and curiosity were invaluable. His parents welcomed me into their home and gave their own accounts of the disaster.