Where 242,000 Died : A New City Rises Around Quake Ruins

For a few moments on the morning of July 28, 1976, when the earth shook, the air filled with light and noise and roofs and walls began falling, Fu Qinglan thought that China’s worst nightmare had been realized.

“At first, we thought it was an invasion by the Soviet Union, a nuclear bomb,” she recalled.

What had happened was that Fu’s home city of Tangshan had been struck by the most deadly earthquake the world had seen in more than two centuries, one of the four worst in recorded history.

By official Chinese count, about 242,000 people out of a population of about 1 million lost their lives in the Tangshan quake--nearly 30 times as many as died in the Mexico City earthquakes last year, more than twice as many as were killed in the atomic blast at Hiroshima.

Authorities Plan Declaration

This summer will mark the 10th anniversary of the Tangshan disaster, and authorities here and in Peking are planning to declare the city completely rebuilt.

“A completely new city has risen from the ruins, and . . . its people are building hopefully for the future,” the official monthly magazine China Reconstructs said earlier this year.

But a visitor to this northeastern industrial center discovers a reality that is either omitted or cropped out of the official photographs. After nearly a decade, and despite China’s efforts to rebuild, a section of downtown Tangshan that is several blocks long and wide, is still filled with debris from the disaster.

Young Chinese continue to pick through the rubble, occasionally finding gold and silver bracelets and necklaces that can be quietly sold in the markets of Peking and Canton. And families continue to live amid the rubble, either waiting for new housing to open up or, in the cases of some older people like 60-year-old Fu Qinglan, refusing to move away from the spirits of dead loved ones.

Can’t Leave Memories

“It was my husband who built this house,” Fu, a retired textile worker, said of her present home, rebuilt after the quake. “We felt that if we left this area, we would leave him.”

After a decade, Tangshan exemplifies the Chinese capacity to bear intense suffering and to keep going. The people here apparently have managed to convince themselves that the rubble around them is not there or does not matter.

At the time of the earthquake, which registered 7.8 on the Richter scale, China was in the final two months of Mao Tse-tung’s leadership. It turned down all offers of foreign help, even by international relief organizations. And for seven years after the earthquake, Tangshan was closed entirely to the outside world.

Only recently, through interviews with survivors in Tangshan and through new details being published in the Chinese press, has it been possible to grasp the extent of the disaster and its aftereffects.

The quake flattened an entire industrial city, one of the biggest in northern China. Officials now confirm that it started fires and ignited explosives and poisonous gases being produced by Tangshan factories.

All water and electricity were cut off, and all bridges and rail and road communications to the city were destroyed. Vice Mayor Long Jajun said in an interview that many of the 100,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army who were sent to take part in the relief effort were forced to move on foot--often at a run--from Jinzhou, a distance of more than 180 miles.

Dug by Hand

No rescue equipment was available. “They didn’t have cranes or big machines, so they had to use their hands,” Long said of the troops. “Lots of people were buried.”

Army officials acknowledged recently that no cranes, rock drills or electric saws arrived in Tangshan until 10 days after the quake, too late to help the people buried beneath the rubble.

At first there was no medical equipment, either. “Some people were rescued, but because of the shortage of equipment and medicine, they died,” said Gao Yuzhang, deputy director of the Workers’ Hospital of Tangshan. Planes and helicopters began dropping food and medicine into the city within a day after the quake.

The dead were wrapped in sheets and buried in makeshift fashion by friends and relatives. A few days later, under the army’s direction, the bodies were dug up and reburied in mass graves outside the city. The bodies were transported on army trucks, guarded by soldiers wearing gas masks.

Naked Survivors

Because the quake occurred at 3:42 a.m., in the heat of mid-summer, those who were lucky enough to survive say they suddenly found themselves outside, naked or near-naked and covered only with dust, groping for scraps of bedding to cover themselves.

“We had very little clothing on,” recalled Liu Ming, the head of a neighborhood committee. “There was so much blood, so many bodies all around.”

Soon there was a headlong rush for the property of the dead. Last month an article in the monthly magazine Liberation Army Literature and Art, by an army reporter named Qian Gang who was in Tangshan for the three months after the quake, provided the first details of how pervasive the looting was.

According to army figures never before published, the army recovered from looters 1,149 watches, more than 600,000 pounds of food, 68,000 articles of clothing, about 2,300 pounds of dried scallops--an expensive delicacy--and 16,600 yuan (about $5,000) in currency. About 1,800 looters were arrested.

“Rapacious desires hidden deeply in some people’s hearts were revealed,” Qian Gang reported. “They dragged home as much as possible. They returned to a place once, twice. . . .

City Hysterical

“The whole city was in a hysterical atmosphere. . . . An old woman was seen standing over the corpse of a young man, wailing, ‘My son, my son!’ And then she took the watch from the dead man’s wrist. Shortly afterward, she was found kneeling in front of another man’s body, crying and saying the same thing as she took his watch. She did this in a dozen places before she was caught.”

According to Qian’s article, the looting reached a peak on Aug. 3, six days after the quake, when peasants from the surrounding countryside arrived in the city carrying spades and hoes and shouting, “The reservoir has broken. . . . Water is coming.” Residents began to flee, and the peasants began rummaging for treasure in the rubble.”

Police and security forces were unable to stop the looting. Qian said, “The Ministry of Public Security sent experts to Tangshan right after the earthquake, and several emergency meetings were held, but all in vain.”

A kind of people’s militia was organized, and these people began shooting looters.

“The noise of guns became greater and greater,” Qian said. “People understood now that the shooting did not simply indicate a warning.”

Capital Offense

Finally, the authorities issued a public notice saying that looters could be punished by death but also prohibiting those in the militia from using firearms.

By official count, the earthquake left in its wake more than 4,200 orphaned children and 1,000 elderly people with no family to care for them.

It also left at least 2,000 paraplegics, some of whom can now be seen riding makeshift carts or wheelchairs, or working in a special hospital for the disabled outside of town.

“I was buried under three houses,” said Jin Jiaru, 35, who is paralyzed below the waist and now spends her days assembling metal watchbands on a hospital bed. Jin, who was sent from Tianjin to the countryside outside Tangshan during the Cultural Revolution of the middle and late 1960s, lost her husband and her child in the quake.

Far-Reaching Affects

The quake had far-reaching social and psychological effects on the people of Tangshan. Some Chinese sources report that there was a huge upsurge in prostitution afterward. Many women, in some cases recently widowed, were said to have found customers among the tens of thousands of relief workers that were rushed into the city. Asked about the reports of prostitution, however, Vice Mayor Long said, “No such thing ever happened.”

Authorities have acknowledged that Tangshan’s divorce rate increased after the quake. By 1982, according to the official magazine Peking Review, most of the 15,000 people who lost their spouses in the quake had remarried--but 30% of these marriages ended in divorce. The magazine said the divorced couples had been “brought together merely by mutual sympathy and a desire to lean on each other in a time of crisis.”

Army reporter Qian reported that he had several recent interviews with Tangshan residents apparently suffering from psychological trauma as a result of the quake.

“Whoever escaped the quake has a kind of disease,” a woman was quoted as saying. “Like me. Whenever it happens to be cloudy, I feel terribly smothered and want to run out of the house. All I can remember is the damp, the dark, the smothering, and the feeling of being close to death. For 10 years I have not been able to believe I am still alive.”

2 Days Under Rubble

Another woman in Tangshan said she is still unable to eat sweets, because after the quake she spent two days under the rubble before she was rescued, and the first thing she was offered was a bottle of glucose.

The effort to rebuild Tangshan began in 1977 with formation of the Municipal Urban and Rural Area Reconstruction Commission, and officials say the reconstruction began in earnest two years later.

The way the city has approached the reconstruction work provides further insight into the scope of the disaster. Long said the officials have made sure that this time Tangshan’s buildings are not placed too closely together, that the buildings are earthquake-proof, that there are numerous roads leading into the city, that there is more than one water station, and that factories making explosives and gases are located far from the downtown area.

In 1980, in a report on Tangshan, the government’s New China News Agency said that “all reconstruction is expected to be completed by the end of 1982.” But this turned out to be wildly optimistic. In 1983, the date for completion was moved back to the end of 1985, and this goal also proved to be unattainable.

Now the authorities say the reconstruction of Tangshan will be declared officially complete by July 28 of this year, the 10th anniversary of the quake. According to one official, some portion of the blocks-long pile of debris in the center of the city may be declared a memorial.

Vice Mayor Long maintains that the delay in completing reconstruction was caused by an increase in housing demand because people sent to Tangshan for the rebuilding have decided to stay on here.

“In 1976, there were 163,000 families that needed housing,” he said. “If it was only these original numbers, we could have solved the problem by 1982.”

In all, officials say, 215,000 families have been moved into new apartments since the quake. But there were still 20,000 in temporary housing amid the rubble at the end of 1985. Officials say the number is now 10,000 or fewer, and they say these people will be moved out by the time of the anniversary.

Homes Far From Work

Not everyone is pleased with the new housing. Much of it is located outside the downtown area, at a considerable distance from factories and offices.

Further, the new apartments are in multistory buildings, and some people have been reluctant to move into them for safety reasons. Wang Huili, a spokesman for the city government, said people feared that “the buildings would collapse, and that they could not run away.”

Amid the rubble, Fu Qinglan offered another reason for refusing to move. She has lived in this section of the city since before the Communist takeover in 1949, she said. Her house was destroyed by the quake but her family, after a month as refugees at the airport, returned to the old district.

Her husband built a two-room brick house amid the debris, giving some comrades cigarettes and food to help him finish the job. He died a few years ago, and the house is Fu’s most tangible memory of him. The government offered her a new apartment, she said, but she turned it over to in-laws.

She knows she may eventually be required to move out, but noted that “two years ago, in the middle of May, they were saying the same thing,” and she is still here.