MCLC: Yushu after the quake

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Yushu after the quake
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (5/21/14):
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/world/asia/4-years-after-quake-some-see-a
-resurrected-chinese-city-others-dashed-dreams.html

4 Years After Quake, Some See a Resurrected Chinese City, Others Dashed
Dreams
By ANDREW JACOBS

YUSHU, China — Gazing out over the gleaming heart of this resurrected
city, the young Buddhist monk marveled at how quickly the Chinese
government had rebuilt his hometown just four years after a calamitous
earthquake shattered every last building, killing at least 3,000 people
and leaving more than 100,000 others homeless.

In addition to thousands of new homes, dozens of schools and handsome,
granite-faced government offices, the city is graced by an exuberantly
modern performing arts center and a hulking Tibetan art museum fit for the
cover of Architectural Digest.

But behind him, hugging a dusky hillside, the collection of unfinished
temples and dormitories of Jiegu Monastery told a different story. The
monk, who like many Tibetans goes by a single name, Jamyang, said Chinese
construction crews disappeared one day last September after money for the
monastery’s reconstruction dried up. With the authorities largely
unresponsive, hundreds of monks and nuns resigned themselves to living in
the bright blue disaster relief tents that arrived in the weeks after the
quake struck on April 14, 2010.

“The government solved the immediate needs of sleeping and eating, but we
hope they can finish the job they started,” said Jamyang, 27, who has
lived at the hilltop monastery since he was a boy. “There are some people
feeling neglected.”

Natural disasters can challenge even the most capable and affluent of
nations, but the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that flattened this
geographically isolated trading hub has tested the Chinese government’s
ability to marshal labor and construction supplies in one of the world’s
most inhospitable places. Perched at more than 12,000 feet on the Tibetan
plateau and battered by long, punishing winters, Yushu is a 17-hour drive
from the nearest city of any significance, Xining, the provincial capital
of Qinghai. Those not felled by altitude sickness en route are often
incapacitated, albeit briefly, soon after they arrive.

Beijing has spent $7.2 billion on the city’s reconstruction so far,
according to the state news media, relying on 100,000 contract workers to
clear debris, lay waterlines and build new houses and high-rise apartment
blocks that have been trimmed with colorful Tibetan flourishes. Given that
most of the victims were ethnic Tibetans — Yushu Prefecture is 97 percent
Tibetan — the disaster provided Chinese leaders an opportunity to show its
munificent side to a citizenry often at odds with its Han-dominated
government.

But the largess has inadvertently aggravated the animosities that have
long bedeviled Han-Tibetan relations, and the reconstruction’s systemic
corruption has favored the well connected over the disenfranchised.

In interviews over four days last month, many Yushu residents were
especially vocal about inequities in the distribution of new housing.
Government employees and Communist Party members, many said, had ended up
with several new apartments each, while ordinary households with up to a
dozen family members were squeezed into cramped, three-room apartments.

“The tragedy of the earthquake became an opportunity for the powerful and
the greedy,” said Kunchen Norbu, 52, a trader of semiprecious gemstones,
whose neck was ringed with turquoise, amber and red coral beads, a
traditional form of Tibetan currency.

An elderly Tibetan couple said the government had confiscated their plot
of land, including 13 quake-damaged rental properties, and provided them
with a single 850-square-foot home for their two children and a
10-year-old granddaughter orphaned by the disaster. “We relied on the
income from those homes to support our family,” said Beizan, a retired
government employee originally from Sichuan Province, adding that he
lacked the political connections to fight back. “I guess we are out of
luck.”

Late last month, the authorities bulldozed several Tibetan-owned brick
factories in Yushu at the behest of Han kiln owners who were reportedly
unhappy with the competition, according to Radio Free Asia, the
American-financed news service.

Tibetans are not the only ones who feel shortchanged. Han business owners
complain about skyrocketing rents, erratic power supplies and a dearth of
customers. The tourists and businesses that residents hoped would
materialize after the rebuilding have not appeared. The difficulty in
luring qualified professionals to the city means that the new 400-bed
Yushu Prefecture People’s Hospital is struggling to fill 600 job
vacancies, according to the state-run Xinhua news service.

Financing for rebuilding has run out.CreditGilles Sabrie for The New York
TimesAnother common complaint, especially among downtown merchants, is the
lack of public bathrooms, a planning oversight they said had turned parts
of the city into open-air toilets.

In interviews, many Han business owners did not hide their animus for the
city’s Tibetan residents, who they described as lazy, unhygienic and ill
mannered.

Nie Yun, 34, a Han restaurant owner from Sichuan who moved here before the
quake, complained that locals had little money to spend and were largely
unappreciative of the government’s actions. “They get a free apartment but
are never satisfied,” he said. “They think the Communist Party owes them.”

Then there are the hundreds of laborers, plumbers and construction
managers who were lured here by substantial government subsidies but were
marooned after the promised money failed to materialize. The co-owner of a
construction company that rebuilt 80 housing units and a Buddhist temple
in Yushu said she was still waiting for more than $480,000 from the
government, more than 20 percent of the cost of the construction. Local
officials, she said, told her they had already distributed all the funds
sent by the central government.

With more than 100 of her former employees and scores of suppliers still
unpaid, she lives in fear of being attacked by creditors and rarely goes
outside. Having spent her savings, she works at the front desk of a newly
opened hotel hoping the money will one day come through. “We answered the
government’s call to come here and help the victims of the earthquake,”
said the woman, who moved here from Chengdu, the provincial capital of
Sichuan, and who would only give her surname, Yu. “So many people arrived
wearing brand-new suits and shiny shoes, but they went home in tears and
wearing rags.”

An official at the prefectural propaganda department said he could not
talk to the foreign news media.

Before the earthquake, the city was a thriving trading hub for the
region’s Tibetan pastoralists, but government planners have reimagined
Yushu as a tourist attraction for Chinese seeking to experience the
fetishized mystique of Tibetan culture. The new city is flecked with
museums, although none have opened yet.

On the edge of the city, past banners and billboards hailing the central
government’s rebuilding effort, is an earthquake memorial that features a
crumpled building preserved under a glass canopy, and a Socialist-style
sculpture of muscled rescue workers and grief-stricken victims. “Challenge
the limits,” an inscription says. “Be grateful and strive forward.”

Back at the Jiegu Monastery, parts of which are thought to date from the
14th century, the monks were hesitant to criticize the government and
preferred to highlight prospects for hope amid so much loss. Tenzen, one
of the monastery’s chief lamas, said many city residents had become more
devout and more generous to the monastery. In the hours after the
quake,the crimson-robed monks were among the first to claw through the
rubble looking for survivors. As hundreds of bodies were delivered to an
open pavilion at the base of the monastery, the monks offered prayers for
the dead and comforted the living. “People are more kind to each other
now,” Tenzen said, as a group of young nuns dragged construction debris to
a raging bonfire.

Jamyang, the young monk, agreed. “Having seen so much death, they realize
everything they know of this earthly life will come to an end,” he said.
As he stood outside the only prayer hall to survive unscathed, a Tibetan
man bounded out of a Land Rover, cash in hand, to make a donation —
evidence, Jamyang said, that local Tibetans were embracing Buddhism with
more zeal.

“It would be nice,” he said, “if the government could feel that way, too.”