Word: sichuan
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...nearly every day since the May 12 earthquake that devastated China's Sichuan province, Liu Li came to the site again where her 15-year-old daughter perished. Today was different, though. As a lone bulldozer slowly worked to clear the rubble from the collapsed Juyuan Middle School, Liu stood in silent protest, along with nine other parents who also lost their only children when the schoolhouse crumbled in the quake. For more than an hour, as tears streamed down her face, Liu, 40, displayed a large photograph of Hui Shan, her daughter. It was a mock magazine cover, done...
...time, then, has come for the one-child policy to be phased out, and the Sichuan quake, and its grieving families, could be the catalyst. As with other transformative measures, like the open-door initiative launched in Shenzhen, the one-child policy's abolition could be handled slowly, studied, then rolled out nationally. Clearly, a rising birth rate would place an enormous burden on China's social and medical infrastructure, which is far less developed than physical infrastructure like roads and rail. A change in emphasis will be essential. Hospitals will need vast new infusions of money and other resources...
...this must begin now, while China's demographic and gender imbalances remain mild, and while the state has a vast reserve of wealth. If Beijing does nothing about the one-child policy, the results could be even more catastrophic than the Sichuan quake...
...disappointed that in your story on the Sichuan earthquake you found it necessary to refer to the recent unrest in Tibet and suggest that Beijing's rapid response to the disaster was calculated to "show the country and the world that the government can cope with nature's worst." The Chinese government merely wanted to rescue as many people as possible and give support and assurance to traumatized survivors and the devastated families of those killed. The death toll as I write is 60,000 and rising. Many urgent problems remain, and many touching stories of bravery, sacrifice and mateship...
...Mianzhu on May 25, as a local official pleaded with them to stop (above). The parents demanded that the government investigate why thousands of schools crumbled in the quake, amid claims that government corruption and shoddy construction left such "tofu dregs" buildings prone to collapse. Powerful aftershocks struck Sichuan and Shaanxi provinces on May 27, toppling 420,000 more houses...