Earthquakes, past & present

Thursday, 15th May 2008

If there's any sliver of hope to be salvaged from the terrible events in Sichuan, it's that the Chinese media seem to be giving out much more information than used to be the case. I mean, how many people ever heard of one of the great natural disasters of the last century, the Tangshan earthquake of 1976? About a quarter of a million people died then:

It took 12 hours for the central authorities in Beijing to discover that Tangshan... had been completely leveled. Mao lay dying, and his potential successors were engaged in a fierce power struggle. They learned of the scale of the disaster only because a Tangshan coal miner, Li Yulin, drove a red ambulance for six hours along dirt roads to reach Beijing... It took days to mobilize the army and start relief operations. The Tangshan residents dug with their hands, stacking tens of thousands of bodies along the alleyways and roads...
China's leaders forbade foreigners from traveling to the area and rejected offers of aid from international relief agencies. Instead, they organized a lean recovery operation whose name reflected the politics of the time: "Resist the Earthquake and Rescue Ourselves."

[Photo: Billboards in Beijing call for people to unite in helping the Sichuan earthquake victims. Photo credit: STR/AFP/Getty Images]