China’s quake aftershock — 5 million homeless

Kari Huus Reporter • Profile • E-mail

At the relief operations center in China’s mountainous Qingchuan county, government workers are still in emergency mode nearly a month after the devastating May 12 earthquake. Powerful aftershocks, heavy rains and dangerous “quake lakes” keep them from devoting all their attention to their primary task: getting the county’s residents into tents.

But even as they work to provide temporary shelter, officials are looking ahead to an even more formidable problem: When the ground stops shaking and the dust settles, this county alone will have 250,000 people who will need new homes.

It is not just a question of rebuilding what was here. Some towns lost not only their buildings but also the land they were standing on and scarce cropland when landslides hit from both sides, said Xiang Zhichun a young public affairs worker.

“A lot of crops were buried, polluted and spoiled,” said Xiang. “After the earthquake there is not enough flat area to live.”

Qingchuan is but one corner of a disaster area roughly the size of Kentucky. And its population accounts for just a fraction of an estimated 5.5 million people left homeless by the earthquake. The number of homes needed may go even higher, suggest some analysts, based on Beijing’s announcement last week that some 15.5 million people have been “relocated” because of the quake — a number that the official Xinhua News Agency published without elaboration.

Officials in Beijing have promised to rebuild the towns and villages that were destroyed within three years, but they have not yet addressed some critical questions:

• What will be done with those people whose land has literally disappeared?
• Will towns be rebuilt in areas that clearly are not safe?
• Will residents of villages that were impoverished before the quake be returned or resettled in cities?
• Will Beijing oversee mass relocations to far-away cities, as some officials are discussing?

In a country that is still in transition from communism to capitalism — less than 5 percent of the population has property insurance, for example — the responsibility for rebuilding falls squarely on the government. But it is a task of mammoth proportions, even for Beijing, with its history of megaprojects. And unlike other major projects, there is little time to plan.

“Part of the problem is the tension between long-term planning and a temporary solution,” says Oded Shenkar, a business professor at Ohio State University and author of “The Chinese Century.” “This is part of the discussion right now. What are you going to do, keep these people in tents for three years? What are you going to do when the winter comes?”

Scramble to temporary housing
Since the disaster, officials have scrambled to get displaced people into tents. The government hasn’t released the number of people who remain without shelter. Xinhua reported that as of June 3, 749,200 tents had been delivered to the region. Based on government figures released a week ago, this suggests about 3 million more are needed.

Even before that effort is complete, some cities began building villages of prefabricated housing units with capacity to house 10,000 to 20,000 people. Beijing has ordered that 1 million such temporary units be constructed by mid-August.

Even though the pace of building in these sprawling villages is impressive, it is a tall order to provide even short-term shelter for millions of homeless. Even upon completion, there will be an urgent need to start moving people out of these villages, which could otherwise become overcrowded slums. Up to five family members currently live in the unheated 10-by-12 units, which do not have individual kitchens. They share communal bathrooms with their equally crowded neighbors.

In some parts of the earthquake zone, there is no question of rebuilding at the same site. The town of Beichuan, county seat in an area that had a population of about 160,000 people, was crushed by landslides and has been written off as a ghost town. Now, officials are discussing relocating the town in a neighboring county, suggesting that Beichuan’s former site should be designated a memorial to the disaster victims.

But the fate of Beichuan residents is generally assumed to be in the hands of the central government in Beijing, which has overseen relief and rescue operations.

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