CHINA: Official and grassroots relief groups rally in wake of China earthquake

China earthquake: Tibetan monks help search for students believed to be trapped at a school which collapsed after an earthquake in northwest China's Qinghai Province.  Andy Wong/AP

The official death toll from 6.9-magnitude earthquake in China rose above 1,100 Friday. Thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monks joined Chinese soldiers to distribute food and clothes in the devastated town of Jiegu.

April 16, 2010

By Jonathan Landreth, Correspondent

Chinese, Tibetan, and international aid groups rallied in both official and grass-roots relief efforts Friday to help the 100,000 people left homeless in western China by a devastating earthquake.

The official death toll from the quake that leveled the high mountain town of Jiegu in Qinghai Province rose to 1,194, with more than 11,000 people seriously injured, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Survivors of the quake, which struck Yushu County just after dawn on Wednesday, spent a second night outdoors in below-freezing temperatures at 13,000 feet.

IN PICTURES: Earthquake in China's Qinghai Province

The Yushu quake was recorded at 6.9 on the Richter scale by the US Geological Survey, less powerful than the 8.0 seismic event that rocked neighboring Sichuan Province in May 2008, killing 90,000 people in and around Wenchuan County.

On Friday, thousands of Tibetan Buddhist monks wearing traditional crimson robes joined Chinese soldiers to distribute food and clothes in Jiegu. Medical rescue teams gathered in a makeshift center to treat the nearly 1,000 people who were seriously injured.

Chinese state television broadcast a few live rescues throughout the day, including that of a 13-year-old girl from a collapsed hotel. Premier Wen Jiabao, in Yushu late Thursday, pledged continued rescue efforts in remarks translated into the local Tibetan language.

Most of Yushu County's 100,000 people live in Jiegu, home to the Tibetan Buddhist Gyegu Monastery, loyal to the exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who Beijing deems a "splittist."

Lijia, director of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) Friends of Rural Communities, based in the provincial capital of Xining, 600 miles away, said that his group would travel to Yushu to work with five other NGOs serving Tibetans.

With money raised via an English-language e-mail campaign, Lijia, himself a Tibetan who goes by only one name, said the NGOs would purchase food and water, tents, clothes, and medicine for delivery to numerous small communities outside Jiegu over the next three weeks.

"Then we will shape a long-term plan to help locals reconstruct their homes," he says. "The local government has its own plan, but we also believe in individual action. We will focus on those not served by the government. If we can fill that gap, we are doing our job."

A spokesman for the Chinese Red Cross who gave only his surname, Yang, said rescue teams had arrived in Yushu to investigate the disaster and deliver money, food, and supplies.

"Rescue work at Yushu is different from our work in Wenchuan two years ago. The government responded very quickly. We learned from our experiences and worked our best in Yushu," Yang said.

US Ambassador Jon Huntsman on Thursday donated $100,000 to the Chinese Red Cross on behalf of the US Embassy in Beijing.

Ramsey Rayyis, Beijing-based regional representative for the American Red Cross, said the Chinese government and the Chinese Red Cross had done a "commendable job in Sichuan," and "appear swifter in their response in Yushu due to lessons learned and contingencies put in place."

"The challenge in any disaster zone around the world is to maintain momentum once the cameras have gone away," Mr. Rayyis says.

Two years after the Sichuan quake, much of the outpouring of aid has yet to have its intended effect, says Francis Markus, information officer for the American Red Cross.

Speaking on Friday by cellphone from earthquake-hit Guangyuan, in Sichuan, Mr. Markus says: "It's a mixed picture here, because a lot is rebuilt and up and running, but many of the students we're talking to today are still living in tents."

Funds for rebuilding collapsed Sichuan homes have come partly from government grants, supplemented by low-interest bank loans, usually of about 20,000 yuan ($3,000), Markus says.

"The rest came from the Chinese Red Cross," he adds. "Their assistance, capped at about 15,000 yuan, is helping to bridge the gap, reducing the amount of debt people take on, letting them get back to their lives."

Zhang Yajun contributed to this report.

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CHINA: Quake sees Tibetan Buddhist monks assert roles

Reuters

Fri Apr 16, 2010 12:44am EDT

By Chris Buckley

YUSHU, China (Reuters) - The earthquake that devastated northwest China's Yushu has unleashed a quiet contest for influence between the government and Tibetan Buddhist monks who say they speak for the people of this arid mountain region.

The Chinese government, which is run by the Communist Party, has responded to Wednesday's disaster with a heavily-publicized rescue effort. Beijing is eager to show that its growing wealth and strength give it the means to surmount natural disasters that would paralyze other developing nations.

The thousands of soldiers and rescue workers in orange jump suits carrying out the government rescue and relief effort are joined by hundreds, if not thousands, of Tibetan Buddhist monks in crimson cloaks and jackets.

"We're organizing ourselves. We don't need the government to take care of everything," said Cairang Putso, a 28-year-old local monk who was helping to look for survivors in the mud-and-brick homes that crumpled in the earthquake.

"It's easier for us to help Tibetan people."

The monks are part of an unofficial relief effort that has underscored the ethnic and religious politics of this mainly Tibetan area, where many locals resent the central Chinese government and Han Chinese presence.

"We monks were the first ones on the scene to help people after the earthquake, not the officials and soldiers," said Duojia, a 25-year-old monk from the Gyegu monastery in Yushu.

"We've done more than the government, because we know our people so well."

He and hundreds of other monks from the monastery were helping locals identify kin among hundreds of corpses that the monks had helped assemble on a covered platform, while monks seated in front recited Buddhist prayers for the dead.

Other Tibetans have flocked online, posting mournful poems, calls for solidarity, and images of traditional Tibetan butter lamps on Tibetan-language websites in China. One China portal oriented to Tibetans is publishing only in black and white, to mourn the dead.

Reuters

ENDURING POWER OF LAMAS

Yushu is in a part of Qinghai province, bordering the Tibet Autonomous Region, historically known to Tibetans as Amdo. Many of its inhabitants say they are loyal to the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual leader who Beijing reviles as a "separatist" for demanding autonomy for his homeland.

In March 2008, Tibetan areas of Qinghai were among the swathe of western China struck by protests and riots, sometimes involving monks, angry at religious controls and economic policies that they believe are skewed against Tibetan people.

Many Tibetans are devoted Buddhists, while traditional regional rivalries have given way to a shared sense of culture among younger Tibetans, especially after 2008.

Some monks have journeyed hundreds of kilometers in buses or crammed on the back of trucks, to help search for bodies, cook food and tend to the dead in Yushu county's ruined main town, Gyegu.

Reuters

Some came with shovels and wooden stakes, which were of little help in searching the ruins of larger concrete buildings.

The volunteer monks avoided any forthrightly political comment, but many said they wanted to show Tibetans and the Chinese government the enduring power of the Tibetan Buddhism and its "lamas," or clergy.

"This shows that we lamas are not, as the rumors say we are, rioters and troublemakers," Jiumi Jiangcuo, head abbot at the main monastery above town, told Reuters.

"It's our duty to help people and we must set aside all our own concerns," he told an assembly of monks, many of them in tears.

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