Word: haicheng
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Watching the lawyer Chen Bulei argue his case, it was easy to forget that he was almost certain to lose. Pacing confidently before a packed courtroom in the northeastern Chinese city of Haicheng earlier this year, he scored rhetorical points so deftly that sympathetic onlookers pumped their fists like fans at a sporting event. Chen's client, a 56-year-old talc miner named Zhao Jitian, was on trial for "assembling a mob to disrupt social order"-a politically charged criminal offense often invoked to silence Chinese citizens who band together to air grievances against their employers or the government...
...bitterly cold day in February 1975, the Communist Party chiefs in Haicheng, a city in northeastern China, convened in emergency session. They had just learned from seismologists that various signs, including changes in the water level of wells, pointed to an imminent earthquake. Convinced the threat was real, they issued an order to evacuate all homes and hospitals, close down shops and factories and turn off gas mains and furnaces...
That night, while thousands huddled in open fields or watched special film showings in the city square, the earth began to rumble. A quake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale devastated Haicheng, collapsing buildings, turning bridges into grotesquely twisted heaps and tearing up roads. The death toll could easily have run into six figures. Thanks to the forewarning, it was probably fewer than...
...reliable as weather forecasting. Such optimism has proved premature. True, other quakes have been predicted in China and elsewhere. But more often than not they have struck without specific warning, as in Italy last week, and in Algeria last October. Only a year and a half after the Haicheng temblor, an 8.2 quake near Tangshan, 90 miles southeast of Peking, caught seismologists by surprise and killed as many as 650,000. Says Polish-born Volcanologist Haroun Tazieff: "At the present level of research, nature almost always surprises...
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