Word: sichuan
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...that hasn't happened. The Chinese government has cracked down on activists just as aggressively during the first few weeks of 2010 as it did last year. In the past week, a court in Sichuan sentenced an activist investigating the deaths of children in schools that collapsed in the 2008 earthquake, a court in Beijing confirmed a lengthy jail term for the author of a 2008 pro-democracy manifesto, and the family of a trailblazing defense lawyer marked the one-year anniversary of his disappearance, which was presumably at the hands of state security officers. "This series of repression against...
...Tuesday a Sichuan court sentenced Tan Zuoren, a 55-year-old environmentalist and literary editor, to a five-year jail term for subversion in connection with his writings on the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. Tan was also active in documenting the lives of the schoolchildren who died in the May 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which many parents blamed on school buildings that were built shoddily because of official corruption. While the subversion charges against Tan included his earthquake activism, he was convicted only for his commentary on the Tiananmen crackdown. Pu Zhiqiang, a lawyer for Tan, says the issue...
China has several advantages over Haiti when it comes to reconstruction. While China's disaster affected millions of people, the destruction was concentrated in rural areas and smaller towns, not a dense city. The mountainous parts of Sichuan and surrounding provinces hit by the 2008 quake are poor, not destitute, and they all had a basic level of food and water supplies, access to medicine and health care, and transportation and communications infrastructure. When much of that was wiped out by the quake, China's central government responded quickly, sending tens of thousands of soldiers and paramilitary troops...
...went back to Sichuan six months after the catastrophe and was amazed at the speed of physical and economic recovery. In Dujiangyan, the largest city in the quake zone, the rubble and tent cities had disappeared. The jumble of debris was replaced by piles of new bricks, lumber and other construction materials. There was a building boom across the region, and dozens of temporary villages were erected to house the 5 million people who were rendered homeless by the quake. The prefab housing was made out of blue aluminum siding lined with Styrofoam insulation. It had concrete floors...
...total recovery cost is estimated at $250 billion.) As of last June it had already spent more than $50 billion. Some of the expenses have been shouldered by other parts of China. Twenty provinces have set aside 1% of fiscal revenues for two years to help rebuild Sichuan. That's another advantage that China has over Haiti. As a large nation with a rapidly growing economy, it can divert money from more prosperous areas to aid one devastated region...