Last week Zhang Qiyu decided to take a break from her elite university in Beijing and volunteer at a refugee camp for survivors of the Sichuan earthquake.
Petite, pony-tailed and bespectacled, the 22-year-old swapped her urban dormitory for a tent in the Mianzhu countryside among thousands of the 5 million people made homeless by China’s most devastating natural disaster in more than 30 years.
While bulldozers, mechanical diggers and cement mixers dress wounds inflicted on the landscape, she is now helping to heal the psychological scars by caring for infants at a newly erected children’s center.
She and an army of 150,000 other volunteers — plus 130,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of construction workers — are part of a rebuilding effort that looks set to reshape not just Sichuan, but also the way the nation sees itself and relates to the outside world.
Like many of her generation, Zhang says she is now more patriotic and concerned about her country.
“I have grown up in 2008 because so many things have happened,” she says. “I used to look at events and think how they affected me. Now I consider whether they benefit my country.”
That nationalist ethos pervades the relief effort one month after the quake. Throughout the affected area China is doing what it has done most prolifically for the past decade: building.
The sights and sounds of reconstruction are everywhere. In Fuxin scavengers with bolt cutters, sledgehammers and blowtorches are picking through the rubble for pieces of iron and steel to take away for recycling.
Families are returning to half-damaged homes in Beichuan to salvage what belongings they can find for the years of migration that lie ahead of them. Concrete mixers are laying the foundations for thousands of prefab huts.
At the refugee camp in Mianyang gymnasium the formerly cramped conditions have eased as more than half the residents are relocated. Unlike in the first week after the disaster, residents are eating meat, shaving, playing table tennis, listening to radios and, in a few more cases, smiling.
PATRIOTISM
In Mianzhu’s tent towns makeshift high streets have sprung up by the roadside where vendors under tarpaulins sell stock recovered from ruined shops. Some of the briskest trade is done by a man who owns a tent that touts patriotic “I Love China” Olympic T-shirts.
“I’ve sold dozens today,” owner Feng Liping says.
Zhang is a proud wearer of the white T-shirt, which is emblazoned with a red map of China and the slogan Zhongguo jiayou (中國加油). Normally a chant used in sports, the phrase has become ubiquitous since the earthquake and was most loudly heard in Tiananmen Square on the day of mourning, when a three-minute silence was followed by a burst of nationalist chanting.
In the immediate aftermath of the quake many commentators expressed hope that a new and more open China would emerge from the rubble. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) won acclaim for the swift and empathetic way he responded to the needs of victims.
Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) played a key role, prompting unusual official cooperation with civil society, the leash on the media was loosened and, for the first time, the government held a period of national mourning for ordinary citizens rather than state leaders.
There is praise for the government among the vast majority of refugees in the quake zone. One month on the political fallout has been, if anything, positive for the government. Along with the turmoil in Tibet and the Olympic torch protests, the earthquake is part of a triptych of events this year that has taken nationalist sentiment to levels not seen in decades.
NEW GENERATION
Zhang exemplifies a change that has made China more internally sympathetic and externally assertive. Her generation was formerly criticized as selfish “little emperors” because they grew up in one-child families during a period of rising inequality. But now — in their patriotism and contributions to the quake relief effort — they are being lauded by parents and grandparents who lived through years that were materially tough and ideologically focused.
“My parents didn’t encourage me to volunteer for the Olympics because they wanted me to concentrate on my studies, but when I said I wanted to volunteer in the quake zone they just told me to take care. My dad said he would do the same if he were young,” she said.
She is based at a children’s center — a fenced-off cluster of large white tents and prefabricated huts that provide space for up to 500 refugee infants to play and study. In the morning Zhang and local teachers conduct classes. In the afternoon children and their mothers are free to play with books, toys, swings and slides donated by domestic firms.
It is run by the China Social Entrepreneur Foundation, an NGO set up last year with Cabinet approval that says it raised 30 million yuan (US$4.3 million) for the earthquake relief operation. The nascent NGO sector in China is still viewed with suspicion by the government, but the camp manager, Wang Xiang, says the earthquake has improved the relationship.
“The authorities thought of us as anarchists. That started to change in recent years, but the earthquake was a real breakthrough. The government now realizes how useful NGOs can be so they cooperate with us,” he said.
The center will soon be crammed. Volunteer workers from Jiangsu Province — which has been selected as a relief partner for Mianzhu under a system that twins provinces with affected counties — are erecting thousands of temporary shelters. By the end of next month the government promises that all the refugees will be able to move out of tents, and it has pledged permanent homes for all 5 million displaced people within five years.
REBUILDING SOCIETY
Long before then, possibly even within the month, Wang plans to hand the center over to the authorities. He is moving on to a bigger project — the reconstruction of an entire town in a combined operation with the authorities and other NGOs.
There is a limit to the government’s tolerance of a stronger civil society. While many major international aid organizations were initially allowed into the area, controls on their movements have been tightened. Media controls are also being tightened after a period of relative openness.
But the combination of propaganda, responsive government and a series of crises has transformed the thinking of young Chinese like Zhang. At the start of the year the law student was mainly concerned with applying to study overseas. But after the Tibet unrest in March she — like millions of other young Chinese — signed up to Internet sites that blamed the Western media for distorting what happened in Lhasa, projecting China in a negative light and setting the stage for the Olympic torch relay protests in London, Paris and San Francisco.
“We were angry not because of any threat to our material life but because we were not respected,” she said. “We want to show we are united together.”
Fang Ning (房寧), a political scientist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the events of this year had stirred up patriotism.
“The generation born after 1980 used to be considered selfish, irresponsible and Westernized, but they have grown up overnight. What they did this time is really beyond expectations,” Fang said.
Nationalism is evident even among the most disgruntled earthquake survivors: the parents of children killed in school collapses.
Amid the rubble of the Fuxin Number Two Elementary School, Zhang Yunlong complains bitterly about the poor construction that he blames for the death of his 10-year-old daughter.
“It makes me so angry that the teachers’ dormitories just over there are still standing,” he said, pointing to neighboring structures that appear unscathed.
Standing outside a shrine in the grounds, filled with photographs and toys of the 127 dead children, he says the families will sue the government if they are not satisfied by the results of an official inquiry, due to be released on Friday next week.
The earthquake has reminded China of its recent communist past, but the lure of capitalist economics has not gone away. In the meantime, the unifying force of nationalism is set to grow stronger ahead of the Olympics.
Zhang says she will stay at the children’s camp for as long as she is needed. She still plans to study overseas, but with a different mindset as a result of the events of this year.
“Now I want to go abroad not just to admire the West, but to tell them something,” she said. “Before I wanted to change myself. Now I want to change the way people in other countries think about China.”
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