Rising From the Rubble of the Sichuan Quake

ENLARGE PHOTO+

A survivor from the May quake walks near Guangyuan Handicapped Hospital, where the injured receive physical therapy.

Ian Teh for TIME

• Share

Piles of red bricks clutter the roadsides. Stacks of concrete drainage pipes fill parking lots, while stores do a brisk trade in paint and window frames. Like countless other 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 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: Beijing has pledged to spend $176 billion on rebuilding over the next three years. 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 long economic expansion, which lifted millions out of poverty. But it also carries with it a 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." (See pictures of the earthquake in China.)

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, no one has been prosecuted for the deaths of thousands of students. 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 shoddy construction and dangerous locations near fault lines left them vulnerable. Parents of dead students, who once promised to take vengeance if justice wasn't served, have largely been silenced by intimidation and payoffs.

In the wake of disaster, the need to 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 popular discontent. Yet even among those who are pushing ahead, the memories of the horror are unshakable. Here are four survivors' stories.

The Official
Zhang Kangqi lives in his office. Five feet from his desk sit a single bed, a small table and a television. The focal point of the room is a pencil drawing of the family he lost on May 12. An art student drew it from the ID cards of Zhang's wife Wu Shanshan, 33, and their daughter Zhang Duo, 6. All other photos were lost in the rubble of Beichuan, a mountain town where 15,000 perished. An 8-ft.-tall (2.5 m) fence now surrounds the town to keep people out, lest they be harmed by still frequent landslides. Former residents gather on the hills, lighting incense and firecrackers for their kin entombed in the collapsed buildings and mud below.

Zhang, 36, has little time for such expressions of grief. As a Communist Party cadre from Beichuan, he was working in a village nearby when the tremors hit. The hamlet's 2,000 survivors were cut off from the outside world. Finally Zhang learned that his hometown had been flattened. "Everybody cried, but I couldn't cry," he says. "What would people think?" The next day Zhang trekked six hours to get help. It would be more than a month until he was able to visit the remains of his home. His wife's and daughter's bodies were never found. "Now I put all of myself into my work," he says. "The dead, there's nothing you can do for them. All we can do is make Beichuan better."

The local government tentatively plans to turn the remains of the city into a memorial park. Zhang now heads the Beichuan department of commerce, working to attract new businesses and industrial development. But the strain on him and other local bureaucrats is severe. A quarter of government officials died in the quake. Zhang says his job keeps him from remembering what happened to his wife and daughter. "When I'm buried in my work, I think they are still alive," he says. "But when I look up and see that drawing, I remember they are not."

See pictures of Pakistan's powerful earthquake.

See TIME's Pictures of the Week.