Flood of aid reaches remote quake zone
Badly-needed aid finally arrived in a remote western Chinese town shattered by a massive earthquake, including enough food and shelter for tens of thousands of homeless people.
The surge in aid coincided with the arrival yesterday of Chinese president Hu Jintao, who cut short an official trip to South America to deal with the disaster in the remote Tibetan region of Jiego where residents have frequently chafed under Chinese rule.
Tibetan anger over political and religious restrictions and perceived economic exploitation by the majority Han Chinese have sometimes erupted in violence.
Wednesday’s quake killed 1,706 people and injured 12,128.
The president’s carefully-scripted trip included visits with displaced families living in tents and rescue teams as they dug through debris looking for the 256 still missing.
Mr Hu promised that the Communist Party and the government was doing everything they could.
China Central Television showed Mr Hu sitting with a Tibetan middle-school student at a field hospital and comforting her as she wept. Her right arm was bandaged and supported by a sling.
Hu and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who visited Jiegu on Thursday, have both cultivated compassionate, grandfatherly images to portray the leadership as putting people first.
From 1988 to 1992 Mr Hu was the party boss of Tibet, next to Qinghai province where the earthquake struck, and he has a mixed reputation among ethnic Tibetans.
As a hardline governor, he oversaw the imposition of martial law in Tibet in 1989 after anti-government violence erupted there and as the country’s leader, he has maintained a firm line on dissent while also championing policies that have funnelled billions in aid and investment to Tibetan areas.
Yesterday, after days of sleeping in makeshift shelters, with ice forming on blankets during the frigid nights, nearly all survivors finally had proper tents and enough food and clean water to last at least a few days.
The sudden bounty appeared to come in the nick of time. Relief workers had warned that Jiegu was teetering on the edge of unrest, with people fighting over tents and other limited goods. Bottlenecks on the winding mountain road that links Jiegu to the provincial capital of Xining – normally a 12-hour drive - were blamed for the earlier trickle of supplies.
Government-issued blue tents sparsely dotted around town in recent days popped up in abundance yesterday. Some families set them up next to the ruins of their flattened mud brick homes. Others pitched theirs on a horse racing track turned refugee camp, the largest of several tent cities in Jiegu.
But a 43-year-old Tibetan man who refused to give his name said he and 15 other relatives were still living under tarpaulins strung between wooden beams.
He said others were stockpiling tents to sell and intimidating people like him who lined up to get them free.
“We’re locals and we can’t even get a tent,” he said. “It’s people from out of town who are taking tents.”
To prevent such stockpiling and other problems, authorities were delivering aid to sites run by a specific county or town in the region and residents originally from those places could register and get supplies there.
But that system meant that some people, particularly migrants, had no fixed aid station to go to.
