As the death toll from the mammoth earthquake rises by the minute, MSN UK News brings you an insight into how the tragic developments are affecting people living in China. Writing from Shanghai, where tremors from the quake were felt, Dan Bignold (pictured left), managing editor of SH Magazine, gives us a feel for the region where the quake struck and reveals how the populations of the big cities of Shanghai and Beijing are reacting to the devastating news as it unfolds. "In the office on Monday afternoon instant messages started flying between friends. “Did you feel something?” Minutes later it was possible to see employees evacuating nearby tower blocks. I hadn’t noticed any movement, 21 floors up in Shanghai’s French Concession, but confirmation soon got round that there had indeed been an earthquake in Sichuan, over 900 miles to the west.
"Excitable story swapping of swaying skyscrapers on Monday afternoon quickly became trivial by Monday evening, with reports putting the death toll at 8,000 near the epicentre. By midnight local time Xinhua, the state news agency, were upping that to 9,000, and so it continued. In some quarters, experts are today suggesting as many as 60,000 are missing.
It’s not hard to see why. Although by the time you read this the typically well organized People’s Liberation Army have started to penetrate some of the stricken areas, from my experience of travel in this mountainous region, north west of the province’s capital Chengdu, access is a major issue. Roads here are often one of only perhaps two routes up to remote villages, which have settled in barely protected valleys surrounded by huge and rugged mountains.
To give you an idea of the terrain, a 60-mile journey from Wolong in Wenchuan county, home of the panda reserve where 15 Britons are now missing, up to Rilong, the base for scaling the 6,250m peak at Siguniangshan, takes five hours by bus. The roads cling to the sides of craggy slopes; at the best of times fallen boulders routinely block one’s passage. After a severe quake, landslides and broken bridges will have cut the roads off completely.
In some ways the remoteness of the region’s villages will have limited the earthquake’s already massive destruction. This is one of Sichuan’s least populated areas, part of region that leads up into Tibet. Wenchuan has a population of only 110,000, and nearby Beichuan county, further east from the epicentre, 160,000. Casualties are going to be high, but had the quake hit closer to Chengdu, home to 12 million, they could have been unthinkable.
However, even in these remote areas development is fast arriving. The 15 British holidaymakers at Wolong would have been staying at one of the several new hotels that have sprung up in the area in recent years, as part of the government’s plan to turn the Wolong nature reserve into a tourist destination. Worryingly, whereas before most buildings in the area were simple single or at most two storey dwellings, now there are four- and five-storey hotels going up, even up at Rilong. I have no idea of how many would have been occupied right now – they are more part of a vision for future tourist numbers, rather than reflecting the present – or where the British guests would be staying, but a quake measuring 7.8 would certainly bring many of them down.
Back in the eastern urban centres of Shanghai and Beijing the sense of concern is palpable. Shanghai itself was jittery after a bus caught fire last week killing 12, in what some initial reports had suggested was a terrorist attack. In Beijing, yesterday’s tremors were felt much harder, giving residents a much more tangible idea of what had happened halfway across the country. So, although these centrepieces of the new China often seem detached from the rest of the nation, an emergency on this scale is not going ignored. Indeed, as well as the massive international donations, there are already small-scale benefit concerts being planned in both cities to raise money for victims. People are looking at their computer screens not for anecdotes of wobbling buildings, but for the latest information on just how bad the situation has got."
By Dan Bignold - managing editor of SH Magazine
May 13, 2008.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not those of MSN or Microsoft.
