China's Learned Response
Never willing to permit the world to know of unfortunate straits within the country, it was always China's response to internal disasters to admit of no internal problems to the outside world. As though to reveal any internal disturbances caused by natural disasters or infectious diseases causing havoc in the geography and within the population would be akin to admitting fault with itself, an inability to control events quite outside the control of any human agency.When the SARS epidemic in China spread outside its borders, even to cities in North America, as it did in Toronto, China feared being blamed for the deadly outbreak and was loathe to admit the extent of the problem it was itself facing, failing to alert the UN's World Health Organization, along with the international community. As a result, it was relatively simple to export the virus leading to SARS through infected passengers from China flying westward.
China had resolved to open itself up to the world, in her effort to persuade the International Olympic Committee that Beijing could be entrusted with the honour of holding the 2008 Summer Olympics. Fully understanding the expectation from the world at large that she would also be anticipated to improve her human rights record. The fact is that the totalitarian and occasionally reasonable government of China has struggled to improve the lives of the Chinese people.
While at the same time committing human rights offences against disparate groups living within China; Christian Chinese, Chinese Muslims, Tibetan Buddhists, Falun Gong practitioners. China sees differences in her population leading to challenges in her ideology, the adherence to religious dictates, chafing of some rebellious segments of her far-flung populations for independence, as injurious to the country, an seditious assault upon the state.
But she genuinely does want to improve the lives of her people. Economically, socially, culturally. China embraces inclusiveness, while at the same time demanding that all those square pegs shape up and fit themselves into the round holes so generously prepared for them by their government. Still, China today is a far cry from the horrible repression and outright social catastrophe she once was during the Chinese Revolution.
When seismographs around the world picked up unusual activity, according to scientists at the Geological Survey of Canada, they were startled to see the huge impact registering on their Richter scale. Resulting in utter disaster in the remote mountainous Sichuan province of south-western China. "You walk in the morning and you see something like this and you know somebody has been clobbered" according to one earthquake specialist in Victoria.
As he explained the manner in which waves from such large quakes travel around the planet two or three times before they dissipate. The immense force of the earthquake was felt across much of the vast geography of China, causing buildings to sway in Beijing and Shanghai, and as far away as Taipei, Bangkok and Hanoi. And hours, then days after the disaster hit there was no word from the epicentre of the quake, where 112,000 people live. China responded with anxious alacrity.
Unlike what has occurred in Burma, with the secretive, paranoidally brutal junta unwilling to release details, unwilling to admit the presence of international disaster relief teams, willing only to accept emergency food, shelter and medicines for its affected population. And deliberately taking no official steps to itself aid and assist the desperate survivors of the murderous cyclone that hit the country.
Whereas China has opened itself to international scrutiny and has dispatched emergency response teams whose professionalism can match those of any elsewhere.
"We are in urgent need of tents, food, medicine and satellite communications equipment" the Xinhua news agency reported, placing the initial death toll at 10,000. "We also need medical workers to save the injured people here", Xinhua reported, quoting Wang Bin, Communist Party secretary of the country. The government immediately rushed troops and medical teams to dig for survivors and to treat the injured.
Access to the worst-hit sites has been delayed by impassable roads, littered with huge boulders and debris. This was a 7.8 magnitude earthquake, its epicentre 80 kilometres north of a city of 11 million people. Where schools were destroyed, falling in on thousands of students, trapping them under huge slabs of building concrete. Construction cranes were brought to the scenes of collapse and frantic parents awaited rescue of those of their children still alive.
In another city of four million near the epicentre, more schools had collapsed, and two chemical plants were destroyed, releasing tonnes of highly corrosive liquid ammonia into the atmosphere. Immense landslides of mud and rubble have pushed over telephone lines and cellphone towers, blocking every road in the area. Vehicles full of rescue supplies sit helplessly in long lines awaiting road clearance.
The 50,000 troops that China's leadership has dispatched to the worst-hit areas are stranded far from the target areas, awaiting the opportunity to advance, once road clearance has been successful. In one factory alone in Suchuan province the initial tremor killed or buried "several thousand" people, according to Xinhua News Agency. In another town a steam turbine factory collapsed.
The landscape is littered with crumpled houses and landslides, with survivors desperately searching for family members.
Where Burma insisted on proceeding with a vote to extend their military junta's leadership, putting aside the clear necessity to dispatch the army in aid of survivors of the deadly cyclone, China has announced that coping with the devastating aftermath of the cyclone was foremost in mind, that ensuring social stability remained the government's top priority.
"Time is life", according to an official announcement from the Communist Party standing committee. "Make fighting the earthquake and rescue work the current top task." With the full knowledge that speeding food, water, medicine and other life-saving necessities to the quake area trumped all other concerns.
There is mounting fear for the fate of the survivors if they're not reached in a timely enough way to aid the badly injured. Yet recurring aftershocks continue to send people into the streets in fear of a repeat of the original horrendous upheaval. High winds and unrelenting rain are further hampering efforts.
Nature doesn't ask permission, doesn't give advice nor timely warnings. Shifting tectonic plates do what they must to release all that energy. There's no good time for such cataclysmic upheavals to occur, but mid-afternoon when children are in school and workers in factories might be the worst of all possible times.
"We are doing everything we can, but the roads are blanketed with rocks and boulders", said a local communist Party official, trying to lead a rescue team. Human ingenuity, desperate determination and the urgent response to rescue the helpless is simply no match for the weather, the environment, our fragile position on the skin of the earth.
Nature shrugs.
Labels: Environment, Nature, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Tuesday, May 13, 2008
<< Home