Word: beichuan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...television. The focal point of the room is a pencil drawing of the family he lost on May 12. An art student drew it from the ID cards of his wife, Wu Shanshan, 33, and their daughter Zhang Duo, 6. All other photos were lost in the rubble of Beichuan, a mountain town where 15,000 perished. An 8-ft.-tall (2.4 m) fence topped with barbed wire now surrounds the town to keep people out, lest they be harmed by still frequent landslides. Former residents gather on the hills overlooking their destroyed homes, lighting incense and firecrackers for their...
...Zhang, 36, has little time for such expressions of grief. As a Communist Party cadre from Beichuan, he was working in a village in nearby Xuanping prefecture when the tremors hit. The hamlet's 2,000 survivors were cut off from the outside world. For days there was no news from Beichuan. Finally, Zhang learned that his hometown had been flattened. "Everybody cried, but I couldn't cry," he says. "What would people think?" The next day Zhang trekked six hours to a rescue command center to get help for the villagers. People's Liberation Army helicopters arrived...
...local government tentatively plans to turn the remains of the city into a memorial park and build a new downtown 12 miles (20 km) to the south. Zhang now heads the Beichuan Department of Commerce, working to attract new businesses and industrial development. He hopes to bring in building-material companies that will develop earthquake-resistant products. Once Beichuan is rebuilt, a process that is estimated to take three years, Zhang hopes that the firms can then produce materials for seismic hazard zones elsewhere in China and abroad. The strain on Zhang and other local bureaucrats is severe. A quarter...
...takes many forms: beef trucked in from Inner Mongolia, sleeping bags shipped from Shenzhen, building materials from Chongqing, millions of bottles of water and packets of instant noodles. Volunteers are working in areas overlooked by government relief efforts. In the village of Yongan, south of the devastated city of Beichuan, quake victims, from the very young to the very old, line the road waiting for the citizen cavalry to arrive. "We're counting on volunteers to bring us food," says Wang Shaoqing, 82. As he speaks children run up to the cars of volunteers who stop and hand them food...
...takes many forms--beef trucked from Inner Mongolia, sleeping bags shipped from Shenzhen, building materials from Chongqing, millions of bottles of water and packets of instant noodles. Volunteers are working in areas overlooked by government relief efforts. In the village of Yongan, south of the devastated city of Beichuan, quake victims, from the very young to the very old, line the road, waiting for the citizen cavalry to arrive. "We're counting on volunteers to bring us food," says Wang Shaoqing, 82. As he speaks, children run up to the cars of volunteers, who stop and hand them food...