Earthquake in China

Fault lines

Earthquakes in China's Qinghai province kill hundreds of people

POWERFUL earthquakes on the Tibetan plateau have killed hundreds of people and injured many thousands of others. The disaster presents the Chinese authorities with the challenge of another large-scale relief effort following an earthquake in neighbouring Sichuan province in May 2008 that killed more than 80,000 people. The remoteness of the affected area will make it all the harder.

The earthquakes, the strongest of which been reported as magnitude 6.9 or 7.1, began to strike early in the morning of Wednesday April 14th. They were centred on Yushu county in Qinghai province near the border of the Tibet Autonomous Region. Most of the buildings in the county seat, Jiegu, were damaged or destroyed. Yushu has a population of around 100,000, many of them Tibetan herders. A teacher in the adjacent county of Golog some 350 km (220m) to the north-east says he has been trying to console his weeping students since they learned that relatives in Yushu had been buried in rubble. He says Tibetan monks in Golog have been praying for the dead.

“The biggest problem now is that we lack tents, we lack medical equipment, medicine and medical workers” a local spokesman was quoted as saying by China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua. Overnight temperatures in the area are below freezing. Xinhua said three military transport aircraft had been deployed to ferry supplies and relief workers. Hundreds of troops have been mobilised.

In 2008 the authorities won praise from around the world for their quick response to the Sichuan earthquake and their unusual decision to give journalists free rein to visit the affected area. Foreign assistance helped to defuse tensions between China and Western countries caused by the government’s handling of widespread unrest in Tibetan areas in March that year.

The authorities are likely this time to pull out all the stops again, not least in order to show their concern for the welfare of Tibetans despite continuing harsh repression of Tibetan dissent. They will be somewhat relieved that the disaster did not happen in the Tibet Autonomous Region, given that this would have hugely complicated their handling of press coverage. Unlike Qinghai (most of which is regarded as part of traditional Tibet by the Dalai Lama and his followers), the autonomous region is off-limits to foreign journalists except for rare, supervised visits.

The government will be nervous of any news from Qinghai’s disaster that could give further ammunition to domestic critics of the shoddy construction of schools in Sichuan that was widely blamed for the deaths of thousands of children in the 2008 earthquake. Since late last year two activists who campaigned on behalf of the children’s parents have been jailed for three and five years respectively. The sentences sent a clear message that the government, for all its openness in the immediate aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, still lashes out at those who cause it embarrassment.