Sichuan

At the 700 year-old Er'wang Temple in the Dujiangyan World Heritage Site.

Six weeks and one day since the massive 8.0 earthquake hit Wenchuan County in Sichuan Province and I am participating in the first World Bank mission to the earthquake-affected area.  In the last six weeks the relief effort conducted by the Chinese government and citizens has been widely applauded.  Now the attention is turning to the future – damage assessments are under way and reconstruction planning has commenced.  The purpose of our mission this week is to better understand the impact of the earthquake and to see how the Bank could best provide assistance during the reconstruction period.
   
Today’s site visit took us to Dujiangyan, a city that I first visited almost exactly 12 years ago.  The city sits beside one of China’s greatest engineering achievements – the Dujiangyan Irrigation System – a massive water diversion project built in the 3rd Century BC on a scale that only the Chinese, ancient and modern, could conceive. 

Two massive natural disasters in two East Asian countries – Myanmar and China – over the past five weeks have brought home just how quickly and dramatically life and livelihoods can be destroyed. Our experts in natural disaster recovery and reconstruction know this only too well. These are people who specialize in assessing the extent of damage that a cyclone, an earthquake or a tsunami can wreak and what to do to get the basics of life back up and running.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao has joined the ranks of politicians in Facebook, the social networking site --and has quickly jumped to the 8th position in number of followers (almost 30,000), as of early Friday in the US Eastern time zone. The legitimacy of the profile is not yet clear (the Chinese Foreign Ministry told news agencies it was unaware of the site and would look into it), and it could have been set up by a fan. The profile was created a couple of days after the Sichuan earthquake. Fans can add messages, videos and photos to the profile.

In Qingshen village, with some of the grandparents taking care of left-behind children and the NGO members who help them out.

One of the heart-breaking stories that I read in the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake was of a grandfather who rushed to the village school only to find that its three stories had collapsed.  After tugging futilely at the giant concrete slabs for a while he realized that his grandchild and all the classmates were lost.  A careful reader looking through similar stories of personal loss would have realized that often it was a grandparent who rushed to the school.  The reason for this is that in rural Sichuan, as in much of rural China, there are many households in which both parents have gone as migrant laborers to the coast leaving children in the care of grandparents. These kids are known in Chinese as “left-behind children.”

World Bank Group President Robert B. Zoellick said the institution was ready to help the victims of China’s earthquake as he expressed his condolences following the disaster that hit the central province of Sichuan on May 12, killing about 15,000 people.

“The World Bank stands ready to support the Chinese Government in any way it may find useful in the recovery and reconstruction process,” Mr. Zoellick wrote in a May 12 letter to Chinese Premier Mr. Wen Jiabao. “Our thoughts are with the Chinese people at this tragic and sorrowful time,” he wrote.

Mr. Zoellick said the Bank Group would draw on its considerable expertise in catastrophe management and reconstruction.

World Bank representatives on Tuesday held detailed discussions on possible technical support for the recovery effort with representatives of the Chinese Ministry of Finance and the National Reform and Development Commission.

The Web is abuzz with the role of Twitter (which I wrote about last week) in spreading news about the China earthquake. A reminder and an update: Twitter is the site where users post messages of no more than 140 characters to say what they're doing at any certain moment. This is kind of... limited, and users of Twitter are coming up with other applications. But yesterday, the first news about the earthquake in Sichuan were made known to the world not through CNN or BBC, but through Twitter, when Robert Scoble started reporting accounts from residents in China just as the earthquake was happening. He was ahead of even the USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) by three minutes.  Does this mean Twitter has "come of age" and proved itself to fill a niche that other media can't?