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Qingchuan County was one of the places hard hit by the May 12 monster earthquake in Sichuan Province. And Dongyang, a prosperous city in central Zhejiang, is now part of a partnership of Zhejiang and Qingchuan for Qingchuan reconstruction. In order to see the progress of reconstruction, we from Dongyang visited Qingchuan recently. The delegation was headed by Zhang Zhongcan, the party chief of Dongyang.

Memorial Park

The Donghekou Earthquake Ruins Park is a witness to the calamitous blow at 2:28 pm that afternoon in May 12, 2008. The park reserves a full range of geological changes an earthquake could possibly generate. The earth collapsed here, the earth opened up here, the earth moved up here, the earth launched landslide and mud-rock flows, and the earth moved to form faults and folds. And the county has the largest group of earthquake-induced lakes. Douhengkou, or East River Estuary, was a picturesque and peaceful place before the quake. Under the huge impact of the earthquake, the mountains on both sides of the valley crashed down on a village and instantly buried 780 villagers and some passersby under rocks and earth more than 100 meters deep. The Qingzhu River was blocked, forming an 18-meter-deep lake. The village school, originally standing on a slope half way up a mountain, is gone too. Only a lonely pear tree stands where the school used to be.

Reconstruction Projects

Since the massive national relief project started, Zhejiang as a province has hooked up with Qingchuan County for reconstruction. Thirty-eight counties and cities in Zhejiang have teamed with respective areas of the county. Each city or county of the 38 has a reconstruction chief executive on the spot responsible for the coordination of reconstruction work.

In 2009, the reconstruction work in Qingchuan focused on four aspects: the reconstruction of 39 schools must be finished before September 1; six thousand new jobs are to be created for local residents; A Sichuan-Zhejiang Industrial Park will become operational so that some local industries will have a chance to start and take off again; more investment will come from Zhejiang: 3 billion investment is scheduled, 100 projects will be finished and another 200 will start within the year.

Post-quake Life in Qingchuan

We experience three after-quake tremors at five in the first morning we are in Qingchuan. It is a scary experience for us. As dusk falls, we take a stroll around the county capital. We see signs of earthquake damages everywhere. Some collapsed houses are still there. Some street-side buildings standing precariously are empty, but small businesses are now on the ground floors and enjoy flourishing business. There are many tourists. Shops teem with shopping crowds and restaurants are filled up with diners. On the riverside square, food stalls have people dining and wining and some couples dance to the accompaniment of music wafting from a music player.

Dongyang and Guanyindian Town

At the average 1,400 meters above sea level, Guanyindian is a typical landlocked mountainous town. With extreme difficulty access to the outside world, the town has 67 small villages with a total population of 4,900. Dongyang is partnered with the town for reconstruction. We ride SUVs to the town seat. Some parts of the road to the town are extremely dangerous, with cliffs dropping hundreds of meters down on one side and mountains rising toward the sky on the other and threatening to throw down tons of rocks on us at any time. Motorbikes are the only reliable transportation vehicles for villagers in the mountain.

Reconstruction work is well under way across the town. Dongyang set up a reconstruction headquarters in Qingchuan in August 2008. Its first job then was to provide the basic infrastructure so that students could go to school, people could travel and have drinking water and medical services. Now a 3-million-yuan infrastructure project is under way for the town capital. A 7.6-million-yuan project for a school and a hospital is in full swing to meet the August 1 deadline. Five demonstration villages have been built. The major cash crops of the town used to be walnut, black fungus, herbs, tea, and wild mushroom. Within a month in 2008, Dongyang helped local people plant 14,000 mu of walnut trees. It is expected that within 3 to 5 years, the per capita income of local rural residents will rise to 8,000 yuan, from a merely 2,216 yuan before the earthquake.□