Jake Hooker ((The Times doesn’t link to Mr. Hooker’s work via his byline, as it usually does; we think this may denote that the byline belongs to a freelancer. In any case, it’s worth noting that he’s been nominated for the Pulitzer three or four times, depending on whether it counts when one’s name isn’t in the byline as such, and received it for one of those nominations, all for reporting from/about China. In 2008, with Walt Bogdanich for their series about tainted medicines and medicinal chemicals (nominated in two categories); “Chinese Chemicals Flow Unchecked to Market ,” from the same series)) in his “Memo From Beijing/Quake Revealed Deficiencies of China’s Military,” has done an impressive job showing planning and preparation failures on the part of the Chinese – or, in the best of all possible worlds, the beginning of the “lessons learned” process for China’s disaster planners. (( See Donahue and Tuohy, Lessons We Don’t Learn
, published in Homeland Security Affairs, a journal published by the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Homeland Defense and Security
.))
“In order to save people buried under rubble, many soldiers’ hands were cut and bloodied, and they kept their hands moving,” Hu Changming, a Defense Ministry spokesman, said at news conference in May.
After the May earthquake in southwestern Sichuan Province, China sent about 130,000 troops from the army, navy, air force and the Second Artillery Corps scrambling into the mountains in China’s broadest deployment of its armed forces since it fought a border war with Vietnam in 1979.
It was a gritty, hands-on effort, unfolding under the clear view of the public and the news media, and it offered analysts the best chance to assess the performance of the People’s Liberation Army in a crisis since the nation’s rising economy started pumping tens of billions of dollars into the military. It got good marks for public relations domestically, but the effort left some veteran P.L.A.-watchers underwhelmed.
James C. Mulvenon, a specialist on the Chinese military at the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, a government contractor in Washington that performs classified analyses on overseas military programs, said the earthquake showed the army’s best and worst sides. It mobilized quickly, but the troops were unprepared to save lives in the first 72 hours, when thousands were buried under toppled masonry and every minute mattered.
“You basically had a bunch of guys humping through the mountains on foot and digging out people with their hands,” Mr. Mulvenon said. “It was not a stellar example of a modern military.”
In an online forum hosted by the state-run People’s Daily, Zhang Zhaozhong, a prominent defense analyst, said that specialized units like the Marine Corps, the 38th Army Corps of Engineers and the engineering division of the Second Artillery Corps understood how to rescue survivors from beneath collapsed buildings. But he acknowledged that the overwhelming majority of the deployed forces, ordinary combat troops, had little if any rescue training. The army had about 100 helicopters ferrying food, supplies and medical teams into the remote mountain areas and rescuing the injured, said Dennis J. Blasko, a former American Army attaché in Beijing. “The management of aircraft and helicopters operating in the area is probably the largest extended operation of its kind the P.L.A. has ever conducted,” he said.
But Mr. Blasko and other experts said that because the military did not have heavy-lift helicopters, vital equipment like excavators and cranes had to be brought in on roads obstructed by landslides, slowing the pace of the rescue operations.
Shen Dingli, a leading security expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, said the military’s response did not reflect well on the military’s preparedness for a potential war with, say, Taiwan, the independently governed island that China claims as its sovereign territory. China’s air force deployed 6,500 paratroopers to Sichuan, but only 15 ended up dropping into the disaster zone, military officials said, because of bad weather and forbidding mountain terrain. Mr. Shen called the effort too little and too late.
“The air force should have been able to get troops into Wenchuan in two hours,” he said, referring to a county near the quake’s epicenter. “It took 44 hours. If it took them 10 hours, that’s understandable. But 44 hours is shameful.”
Allan Behm, a former official in Australia’s Defense Ministry, said the Chinese military was evidently still focused on conventional warfare rather than engineering skills. In spite of its efforts to modernize, Mr. Behm said, “the P.L.A. is still built on the idea of bringing hundreds of thousands of troops into the battle area.”
We urge our readers to read Hooker’s entire piece – and we’d like to hear more about these events. However, we take the following to be the critical points (from the perspective of the disaster-preparedness community):
- Generators – and emergency lighting
- extrication equipment, from specialized cutting tools to shovels
- heavy-lift helicopters
- Training: if the PLA are the designated first responders in disasters, then it appears that their training has to be expanded beyond infantry skills;
- Transportation: heavy-lift helicopters to move heavy equipment in, and sufficient heli and other resources to move responders past blocked roads. This last – getting responders and gear in place – may be a deficiency in planning and coordination, a shortage of helicopters and off-road vehicles, or a combination of both.
- Government action to avoid transparency and resultant embarassment.
This last is critical. The Chinese have already internalized government willingness to suppress embarassing information. From Mr. Hooker’s piece:
So far, the official death toll is almost 70,000. One Chinese reporter, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, gave an indication of how many more might have been saved.
He said he traveled overland with a group of P.L.A. soldiers to the town of Yingxiu, near the earthquake’s epicenter. He said that they got there at dusk, about 48 hours after the quake had hit, and that thousands of victims remained buried under collapsed buildings, including more than 200 students at the local elementary school.
Eight hundred injured people had been brought to a clearing, waiting to be evacuated by helicopter. But by noon the next day, only about 10 had been evacuated by air, the reporter said. Many died there in the clearing, waiting to be rescued.
The town had only one electrical generator, and the troops had no power tools. At the Yingxiu Primary School, the soldiers dug with their hands. Some children could be heard singing under the rubble, the reporter said, presumably to keep their spirits up.
A day later, he said, the singing stopped.
Last, we note that none of these shortages or problems are unique to China – or absent in the United States, other than the regular use of state violence to suppress journalists, lawyers and others who embarass the government. But the planning and preparedness deficiencies are present in the United States. Examples of each can easily be found in accounts of the Katrina episode. ((See, e.g.,
various Katrina resources at the NPS Center for Hastily Formed Networks; Douglas Brinkley’s The Great Deluge; Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water; and Christopher Cooper’s Disaster: Hurricane Katrina and the Failure of Homeland Security.))
China’s failures should be instructional in the United States rather than cause for complacency.
