by James Palmer
One of the most common phenomena after natural disasters is panic, not among ordinary people, but among leaders, soldiers and police. Disasters bring out the worst beliefs and fears of the elite, the fear that the mob is one step away from chaos, looting and murder. In reality, destructive panic among ordinary people is rare, and scavenging generally aimed at the necessities of survival rather than a greedy picking-over of corpses.
In other catastrophes, elite panic has been linked with racism and scapegoating, such as the shooting of black ‘looters’ by white vigilantes and New Orleans police during Hurricane Katrina, or the murder of Korean workers accused of pillaging the dead after the 1923 Kanto earthquake in Japan. (Kanto was an unusually thorough case of politicised murder linked to disaster; not only did vigilantes set up roadblocks and lynch any unfortunate soul who couldn’t pronounce a Japanese shibboleth, but the Japanese military seized the chance to dispose of inconvenient leftists who, they claimed afterwards, might have used the disaster to overthrow the government. Since their victims included a six-year-old boy, this was unconvincing.3)
There was no convenient minority group to blame the Tangshan earthquake on, but that wasn’t a problem. Over the last seventeen years, after all, it had been possible to brand just about anybody a saboteur, a traitor or a ‘bad element’.4 Fearing your fellow countrymen was not only common, but positively encouraged.
The aftermath of the quake turned many of the militia into petty tyrants. They swaggered around bare-chested, rifles strapped across their backs. Anybody they didn’t know, or who they found holding valuable equipment, or whose family had a bad reputation, was likely to be interrogated, beaten up or shot on the spot. They were trigger-happy, cheered on by slogans like ‘Fire with hate in your heart, and you cannot miss!’
He Jianguo saw two militiamen hitting a young man found going through a ruined shop, beating him with the butts of their rifles even after he was on the ground. At first, most militiamen fired warning shots, but soon switched to killing on sight. Like bad police everywhere, they took running as a sign of guilt; one survivor recalled being told a few months later, in conversation with a doctor, that the majority of victims had been shot in the back.
There were genuine cases of looting. Watches were particularly common targets, being portable and expensive. But pre-existing prejudices played a strong role in picking out ‘looters’. The division of city and countryside was still strong, and Tangshan residents set up roadblocks to interrogate and search peasants from nearby villages, who they suspected of wanting to pillage the rich ruins of the town.
Looters caught by angry neighbours, or by the more restrained militia units, were tied with steel wire or rope to whatever was still standing, or harnessed together and made to kneel in the gutters until they could be handed over to higher authorities. Families or individuals suspected of hoarding food were sometimes pulled out of their paltry shelters and roughed up.
Some forms of collective justice were far more brutal. Military commissar Chi Haotian came across a mob beating a man to death. He couldn’t see the victim, who was buried amidst a mass of rising and falling cudgels and bricks, but he was told by onlookers that the man had been caught with no fewer than thirty-seven watches, scavenged from the ruins of a hotel. It was a cunning choice, since anybody who could afford to stay in the hotel would be far more likely to own a watch. (But not as clever as the old woman seen going through the streets, collapsing over bodies, and wailing ‘My son! My son!’ as she removed the watch from the corpse’s arm, a trick she pulled off several times before being caught.) When Chi reported it to his superiors, he was told not to investigate any further cases of the same nature – the people were maintaining their own form of order.
Looting and the role of the militia has always been a deeply sensitive subject in Tangshan. Although several people boasted of having protected their neighbourhoods from ‘looters’, and talked about beating up or imprisoning suspects, they rapidly clammed up when asked about actual killings.
In his book on Tangshan, written in the mid-1980s, Qian Gang displays a mastery of irony, allusion and suggestion, in which he goes along with claims of looting on the surface while simultaneously demonstrating the violence of the militias, and then concludes:
There had been no mention of such incidents [in previous earthquakes]. Even though the records of natural disasters do frequently mention things like ‘robbers rising up in swarms’, people always considered them abuse directed by the ruling classes against resistance shown by the common people [my italics]. I struggled to understand it all. Then it suddenly occurred to me: if the Tangshan earthquake had taken place in 1956 or 1965, would there have been this outbreak of criminal activity?
The worst conflicts were near the state-run granaries. It might seem strange that people were so desperate for food so soon after the quake, but many people were living on the brink of starvation even in ordinary times. The Banqiao disaster, where tens of thousands had perished within a couple of weeks as a result of the government’s inability to deliver food aid, demonstrated the fragility of a malnourished population.
Memories of the Great Leap Forward, when the government had failed utterly to deliver on its promises of food security, were still strong among anyone over thirty. The survivors had gone less than a day without food, but they had no trust in the ability of the government to provide help. Instead, they set out to seize the means of survival themselves.
The state was used to protecting its precious food from the people. Mobs of starving farmers had frequently attacked granaries during the Great Leap Forward, sometimes successfully. In a single county, for instance, thirty out of 500 state granaries had been attacked over two months. The army and specially raised militias had to be deployed to protect granaries, as well as guard railway lines where hungry gangs would blockade the track and overturn rail cars transporting food.
Now, as crowds threatened the granaries, the militia mounted machine guns and menaced the survivors in turn. Surviving local Party leaders instructed them that not a single grain should be given out; weakness would only spark more ‘looting’. But raids on purchasing depots and elsewhere led to the ‘loss’, according to official records, of over 335 tons of grain. They did not report the number of people shot while trying to get it, but hundreds were arrested.
People who did believe in the government were looking to the sky. Tangshan had one of the biggest military air bases in the north-east. In ordinary times, jets zooming overhead were common enough that local children made a game of trying to name the type of plane. Now the air base was the city’s only lifeline. The first plane from Beijing landed there at 10:00 a.m., carrying an advance group from the Beijing military command, and then, throughout the afternoon, planes began to trickle in, carrying military medical groups and mine rescue teams. The latter were barely needed, thanks to the sterling work of the Tangshan miners, and so they used their skills above ground.
Long before they saw planes, a vast procession of survivors trudged along the 9 kilometres to the airfield, pilgrims seeking miracles. Word had quickly spread that the airfield had the only functioning medical centre in the city. The injured were slung in improvised hammocks made from bedsheets and screen doors, carted in wheelbarrows, or leant on crutches formed from broken tree branches. Dozens died on the road, unceremoniously rolled into the ditches. People paused to help those who had fallen from exhaustion or shock, bearing strangers for long miles on their backs. Some drove cars half-wrecked by the quake, and with windows gone. These were soon flagged down and crammed with the severely wounded.
The airport’s medical team was utterly overwhelmed. The airport buildings were solid, single-storey affairs, built with Russian aid in the 1950s, and very few of them had collapsed. At first, the staff had no idea of the scale of the earthquake, and so they dispatched their only ambulance into the city bearing more severely wounded patients, sending them to hospital. It came back a short while later, loaded with wounded picked up a
long the road and bearing the grim news that every other hospital in the city was flattened.
With forty nursing staff and two doctors, the air base medical team was used to treating countryside injuries and sick airmen. Before long, there were hundreds of wounded dotted around the airfield, blood pooling underneath them in the rain. The doctors were forced to perform ruthless triage. ‘He’s too far gone, put him outside.’ Mothers, crazy with grief, brought in children who had died hours before.
The doctors were working at the most basic level of battlefield medicine, at which the PLA excelled. They amputated thousands of limbs, throwing severed arms and legs into a pit outside. The reed mats underneath their feet became splattered with blood. They rapidly ran out of morphine, sawing off limbs and cleaning bloodied flaps of skin with no anaesthetic for the patient other than a rag to bite on and a hand to hold. With no normal water supply, surgical instruments and gloves were cleaned in water taken from the air base’s swimming pool and boiled.5 With blood supplies destroyed in the quake, doctors drew it for immediate use from volunteers, and in some cases, even from themselves.6
On 29 July, the airfield got hold of a large truck, and sent the worst injured over to an army hospital in another county, which they’d heard was still operating. Zhao Fu, a male nurse from the No. 255 hospital who had broken his arm in the quake, was among them:
There was one man who had lost his foot [he told Qian Gang]. The skin had curled back and you could see the bone; a sickening white colour . . . He was crying out piteously the whole way; his throat sounded as if it had been ripped out. Then there was a girl in her twenties, who had something wrong with her abdomen. I think her spleen was ruptured, and every time the truck jolted a bit she would cry out . . . She clutched at my hand and said, ‘Please, comrade, I beg you. Please knock me out, please, please, knock me out. It hurts. I can’t bear it. Really, I can’t.’7
When they arrived at the hospital, the courtyard was thick with bodies, festering in the heat. Zhao begged a doctor to operate on him. ‘Operate? How can we operate here? Just yesterday we lost 1,400 people. We can’t manage, we just can’t manage.’ Across Tangshan and its surrounding counties, 86 per cent of medical facilities had been utterly destroyed, and the rest badly damaged. Zhao lay in the courtyard, surrounded by the dead, for two more days before being treated.
As aid converged on Tangshan from the rest of China over the next three days, the airport grew busier, and there was some relief from the chaos in the hospital. All manner of aircraft, from bulky transporters to tiny two-man props, most of them Russian gifts from the fifties and sixties, had been commandeered. In total 1,364 landings were made between 28 July and 2 August. Other airborne relief efforts were less successful; helicopters dropped crates of food and medicine among the ruins of the city, but so many people gathered as the packages were dropped that they became something of a safety hazard. At least one man was killed when a crate fell on him.
The most common planes used were the Tu-104 and the Il-18, two sturdy Soviet passenger jets, but the airport lacked proper boarding equipment for such large aircraft and so the wounded had to be hauled up into the hold by rope and pulley, a difficult and slow operation that meant it could take an hour to load 200 wounded. Medical teams from elsewhere arrived, setting up their own hospital tents, and from 30 July the worst injured were evacuated, 2,000 a day flown to other Hebei cities. At one point, the slew of planes was so thick that the time between one taking off and another landing was 26 seconds.
The air control team, working with little more than hand signals and a few radios, coordinated a miraculous aerial ballet, without a single accident. Young soldiers ran up and down the length of the runway, sweating profusely as they waved planes in, some of them covering the equivalent of 50 km in a day. Chang Qing photographed them. ‘They were astonishing,’ he said, ‘That small airport saved so many lives. I believe it saved a hundred thousand lives.’
Zhang Daguang spent a week drifting in and out of consciousness in one of the new hospital tents. It took her some days to realise exactly what had happened, and that her parents were dead. ‘I never knew who pulled me out of the rubble,’ she said. ‘I never knew who saved me. Everybody saved me.’
As the skies started to buzz with planes, a vast army of rescuers was tramping across land to Tangshan. China had no professional earthquake rescue teams. Instead, it had the People’s Liberation Army. The PLA had a long history of dealing with rural catastrophes, having started as an insurgent force for which the trust of the people was absolutely essential to survive. Taking in the harvest, digging wells and saving people from floods became a regular part of their work. Even after the foundation of the PRC, PLA units often helped with the harvest, and in rural areas military doctors were often the only help available for those with serious injuries.
The PLA took its own name seriously. In contrast to the traditionally low status of soldiers in Chinese culture, the PLA saw itself as the embodiment of popular strength and national will, a guardian against foreign invaders constantly looking to divide China, and against ‘tigers and wolves’ who would gnaw away at it from the inside. PLA officers had a strong idealistic streak. ‘Our job was to protect the people,’ one of them told me. ‘We weren’t like Western armies, used to invade and conquer others.’ (Tibetans, Mongolians and Uighur might differ on this particular point.)
The PLA never conscripted, but it didn’t lack for volunteers. A military career was one of the few ways a bright young boy – or girl, as the PLA had many female soldiers – from the countryside could make a name for him or herself. It helped recruitment that children’s toys and books were massively militarised,8 something the PLA played up with posters showing adorable infants clutching assault rifles.
Officers usually rose through the ranks, in stark contrast to the practice in Western and Western-inspired post-colonial armies, and were then sent for advanced training, rather than being picked out from the start. Many soldiers’ motivations were not as ambitious or as idealistic, naturally; they were in the PLA for three square meals a day and a roof over their heads. (Recruitment slogans in the 1930s were blunt about this. ‘Do you want to eat rice every day? Do you want to kill Japanese? Do you want to sleep with the landlord’s little wife? Then join the Red Army!’)
The Cultural Revolution had left the PLA deeply entangled in politics and the economy. The dual command structure had been copied from the Soviet Union, with each commanding officer matched by a commissar. In practice, though, the commissars tended to be military leaders rather than, as in the Soviet Army, mere political mouthpieces, and they usually worked well with their counterparts. Mao had deliberately held the PLA back during the worst periods of civil war in the late sixties, though it had inevitably been drawn into fighting in various areas.
After 1969, when it was deployed to clean up the Red Guards, the PLA moved to take control of vast swathes of administrative and economic duties, seconding hundreds of thousands of men to civilian tasks. The Lin Biao affair had dealt the military a serious political blow, since Lin was the country’s foremost general, and the subsequent purge of his supporters implicated senior military figures.
In general, the PLA tended mildly to favour political pragmatists, rather than ideologues, but provincial commanders had a wide range of loyalties. The removal of Ye Jianying from the Central Military Commission as part of the anti-Deng campaign had put the bulk of regional military power into the hands of Chen Xilian, the commander of the Beijing Military Region. Chen had come up as a commissar in the 1930s, proved himself in heroic small-scale actions against both Muslim warlords and the Japanese (Deng was his commander at one stage, and had praised him as ‘The only one of us who really knows how to fight!’), and continued his military rise after Liberation, growing comfortably fat.
The start of the Cultural Revolution had seen him attacked by students, but not severely, and by 1976, at the age of 61, he was surprisingly cosy with the leftist faction, despite being to some
degree a protégé of Deng’s. Mao’s high opinion of him helped; even before Ye was removed he’d been talking about giving Chen a higher command role. Now he was coordinating the rescue efforts at Tangshan – he’d been among those who’d seen the three miners arrive that morning.
As soon as the earthquake’s epicentre was pinpointed, over a hundred thousand troops began to converge on Tangshan, some coming from the Beijing military group, and others from Shenyang to the north. With the rails destroyed, the vast majority of them came by foot, undergoing a gruelling twenty-four-hour march across the broken countryside to reach the city. There were trucks, cars and jeeps with them, but the obstacle course created by the quake was easier for men on foot to cross.
It was blazing hot, and the men were already exhausted. Their sleep the night before had been shaken by the earthquake, and some had worn themselves out in other rescue efforts. Forced marches were a regular part of PLA training, thanks to the army’s background as a guerrilla force and its lack of mechanisation, but this was a harder and longer one than most.
They marched across a landscape remade overnight. Fields had flooded, water bubbling up from underground to drown crops. Sand boils and craters had erupted, leaving the ground scarred like an adolescent’s face. Sandbanks had slid into rivers, silting the water. Cornfields had been knocked flat, as though a hurricane had blown them down. Wells were choked with sand, new lakes made from sunken ground and fresh islands formed in rivers. Highways were lifted up, one side now nearly a metre above the other. Three-metre-deep sinkholes caught careless marchers, while some giant pits reached thirty metres deep and ten metres across.
Everywhere the soldiers looked there were cracks in the earth, like struck glass. Telegraph poles had blown down, blocking vehicles and leaving tangles of wire along the side of the roads. Some areas looked as if a giant worm had slithered across them, breaking the earth as it went. Others seemed to have been ploughed up by artillery, creating swathes of no-man’s land broken by quake-formed trenches. ‘One of our officers had been a volunteer in the Korean War,’ a soldier recalled, ‘He said it looked just like a battlefield that had been bombed by the Americans.’
