Uniting as one

Sympathy and support came from every corner of China after the news of the Yushu earthquake. Although safety concerns born of worries that excessive human influx would impede the work of professional rescue crews made Qinghai Province urge volunteers to hold off, hundreds nonetheless made their way to Yushu, either individually or as members of non-governmental organizations. Among them were rescue workers and survivors of both the Wenchuan and the 1976 Tangshan earthquakes. Volunteers also came from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan.

The story of 46-year-old truck driver Wong Fook Wing from Hong Kong who had been working as a volunteer at a Yushu orphanage is well known in the SAR and throughout the mainland. He fled the building when the quake hit, but dashed back when he realized that there were still teachers and children inside. He was killed in a aftershock.

Wong's is just one example of the many heroic deeds of ordinary people. Six farmers from Maoxian County, Sichuan Province, each pooled RMB 3,000 to rent a car and travel to Yushu to help save lives. Five carpenters from Pengzhou, Sichuan, were in Nanqian County, Qinghai when they heard about the earthquake. They immediately headed out to join the rescue effort, arriving at the site only one hour after the national crew. Two restaurant owners in Yushu whose homes were in Wenchuan provided free meals to quake victims and rescue workers as a token of gratitude for the enormous help they and their fellow residents had received in May 2008.

The disaster sparked off a wave of donations from around the nation. Within 11 days funds received amounted to RMB 7.5 billion -- RMB 3.5 billion in cash and RMB 4 billion in aid materials. A charity performance on April 19 in Xining raised RMB 670 million in cash and RMB 200 million worth of supplies. The China Central Television-sponsored fund-raising event the next day chalked up another RMB 2.175 billion, easily exceeding the RMB 1.514 billion that had been mustered at the star-studded gathering in aid of Wenchuan two years earlier.

Besides writing big checks, the business sector also helped with the work in Yushu of restoring facilities and services critical in everyday life. When news of the earthquake first broke, telecommunications companies shipped mobile generators, cable repair vehicles, contingency communication facilities and satellite phones to Yushu. They also reset the local mobile phone network to give all users in the area, even subscribers whose payments were overdue, access to their services. Certain grocery chains opened outlets in Yushu to anchor prices and donated all their takings to quake victims.

Something else that differentiated public responses to the Yushu and Wenchuan earthquakes was the absence of online derision, in the form of a published "niggard's list," of social celebrities whose contributions they considered as meager.

The challenge of rebuilding

The April 14 earthquake destroyed 15,000 buildings, leaving 100,000 people homeless. Some villages were almost completely flattened, and infrastructures of all kinds sustained severe damage. The quake twisted highways, wrecked bridges and wiped out power and water supplies. Public service providers such as governments, hospitals and schools, all suffered severe losses.

"You will have new schools and new homes!" was the promise that President Hu Jintao wrote on a blackboard in the Yushu Prefecture Orphanage on April 18. The next day the national quake relief command set up a panel on rebuilding work.

Reconstruction was actually a part of relief work from the moment the quake hit. Immediate repaving of snarled roads enabled traffic and local flights to resume within a day of the disaster. The same was true of telecommunications in the county seat. Electricity was restored to relief command offices, victims' shelters and field hospitals, and water supply to part of the region on the second day. On the third day a group of local officials and experts went to Sichuan to learn from the Wenchuan experience of post-quake rebuilding. On the fourth day certain schools reopened, and on the fifth experts from out of the region made a field study of the impact of the earthquake on local buildings and eco-environment. The sixth day saw banks and post offices gradually begin to receive customers and commercial activities to recommence.

The state is all set to rebuild Yushu over a three-year period. A draft plan emphasizing that reconstruction should "be well designed, give priority to environmental protection, and put equal emphasis on preservation and development," awaits final approval.

Yushu is at the headwaters of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang (Mekong) rivers, which is why scrupulous research into the implications of rebuilding activities is essential before work can actually commence.

As rebuilding demands large amounts of cement and transportation on the plateau is difficult, suggestions were made about setting up a cement factory in the prefecture. Governor Wang Yuhu, however, rejected the idea without a second thought, saying "We believe that slower economic development and reconstruction of homes is preferable to fouling the environment."