Rising from The Rubble

Piles of red brick clutter the roadsides. Stacks of concrete drainage pipes fill parking lots. Newly resurfaced roads snake past rows of temporary housing, while stores do a brisk trade in paint and window frames. Like countless places in China, this corner of central Sichuan province is undergoing a building boom. But this is no typical growth story. When I was here six months ago, bodies jutted from the pancaked floors of collapsed buildings and lined rubble-strewn streets. Tens of thousands of homeless crowded into sports stadiums, and millions more slept in tents. The highway was riven with cracks, and smashed vehicles crowded the shoulders. Grim-faced survivors trudged past on foot. The surface of the Zipingba Reservoir was covered with a brackish film from the tons of boulders and soil loosed into it.

Now the water has returned to its normal milky jade hue. Even some of the gashes caused by landslides have begun to green over as nature struggles to match man's furious pace of recovery. The reconstruction campaign following the May 12 earthquake, which killed 87,000 people and left 10 million homeless, rates as one of China's most astonishing endeavors. Even for a country that likes to think big, the numbers are staggering: over the next three years, Beijing has pledged to spend $176 billion on rebuilding, roughly $50 billion more than the U.S. has devoted to post-Katrina work. By early July three-quarters of the Sichuan homeless had been moved into prefabricated shelters, with all the displaced promised permanent housing by 2010. Much of the recovery effort is expressed in the vocabulary of Chinese socialism — a popular government slogan printed on giant red banners reads "Sweat Today for a Beautiful Home Tomorrow." The exhortation echoes China's 30-year economic expansion, which lifted millions of peasants out of poverty. But it also carries with it an implied coda: earthquake survivors can expect a better future, as long as they don't delve too deeply into the mistakes of the past. "I think Sichuan is very much like China as a whole right now," says Russell Leigh Moses, a Beijing-based scholar. "You can't help but be impressed at how far it's come and you can't help but be worried about how far it has to go."

If there is a theme to the reconstruction effort, it is "Don't look back." Despite pledges to punish those responsible for the substandard construction of dozens of schools that crumbled during the earthquake and resulted in the deaths of thousands of students, no one has been prosecuted for it. After nearly four months of investigation, the central government announced what any parent could have told you on May 13 — that an act of God may have triggered the schools' collapse, but that shoddy construction and dangerous locations near fault lines left them unnecessarily vulnerable. Even as the rebuilding reaches frenetic levels, the political pressure for accountability has dissipated. Parents of dead students, who once promised to take vengeance if justice wasn't served, have largely been silenced by intimidation and payoffs. In early September, local authorities blocked a group of more than 100 parents from voicing their complaints to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao when he visited the site of a destroyed school.

In the aftermath of disaster, a need to put aside painful memories and move on is natural. But in the mountains of Sichuan, the impulse to look forward is also a political decision. Too open an examination of the collapsed schools would expose deep flaws in regional governance and could unleash a flood of discontent that might be difficult for the government to control. Yet even among those who are pushing ahead, the memories of the horror are unshakable. Here are four survivors' stories.