Andrew Jacobs
The New York Times
May 21, 2014
Gazing out over the gleaming heart of this resurrected city, the young Buddhist monk marveled at how quickly the Chinese government had rebuilt his hometown just four years after a calamitous earthquake shattered every last building, killing at least 3,000 people and leaving more than 100,000 others homeless.
In addition to thousands of new homes, dozens of schools and handsome, granite-faced government offices, the city is graced by an exuberantly modern performing arts center and a hulking Tibetan art museum fit for the cover of Architectural Digest. But behind him, hugging a dusky hillside, the collection of unfinished temples and dormitories of the Jiegu Monastery told a different story.
The monk, who like many Tibetans goes by a single name, Jamyang, said Chinese construction crews disappeared one day last September after money for the monastery’s reconstruction dried up. With the authorities largely unresponsive, hundreds of monks and nuns resigned themselves to living in the bright blue disaster relief tents that arrived in the weeks after the quake struck on April 14, 2010. ‘‘The government solved the immediate needs of sleeping and eating, but we hope they can finish the job they started,’’ said Jamyang, 27, who has lived at the hilltop monastery since he was a boy. ‘‘There are some people feeling neglected.’’ Natural disasters can challenge even the most capable and affluent of nations, but the 7.1-magnitude earthquake that flattened this geographically isolated trading hub has tested the Chinese government’s ability to marshal labor and construction supplies in one of the world’s most inhospitable places.
Perched at more than 12,000 feet on the Tibetan Plateau and battered by long, punishing winters, Yushu is a 17-hour drive from the nearest city of any significance, Xining, the provincial capital of Qinghai. Those not felled by altitude sickness en route are often incapacitated, albeit briefly, soon after they arrive. Beijing has spent $7.2 billion on the city’s reconstruction so far, according to the state news media, relying on 100,000 contract workers to clear debris, lay waterlines and build new houses and high-rise apartment blocks that have been trimmed with colorful Tibetan flourishes. Given that most of the victims were ethnic Tibetans — Yushu Prefecture is 97 percent Tibetan — the disaster provided Chinese leaders an opportunity to show its munificent side to a citizenry often at odds with its Han-dominated government. But the largess has inadvertently aggravated the animosities that have long bedeviled Han-Tibetan relations, and the reconstruction’s systemic corruption has favored the well connected over the disenfranchised. In interviews over four days last month, many Yushu residents were especially vocal about inequities in the distribution of new housing.
Government employees and Communist Party members, many said, had ended up with several new apartments each, while ordinary households with up to a dozen family members were squeezed into cramped, three-room apartments. ‘‘The tragedy of the earthquake became an opportunity for the powerful and the greedy,’’ said Kunchen Norbu, 52, a trader of semiprecious gemstones, whose neck was ringed with turquoise, amber and red coral beads, a traditional form of Tibetan currency. In interviews, many Han business owners did not hide their animus for the city’s Tibetan residents, who they described as lazy, unhygienic and ill mannered. Nie Yun, 34, a Han restaurant owner from Sichuan who moved here before the quake, complained that locals had little money to spend and were largely unappreciative of the government’s actions. ‘‘They get a free apartment but are never satisfied,’’ he said. ‘‘They think the Communist Party owes them.’’
Then there are the hundreds of laborers, plumbers and construction managers who were lured here by substantial government subsidies but were marooned after the promised money failed to materialize. The co-owner of a construction company that rebuilt 80 housing units and a Buddhist temple in Yushu said she was still waiting for more than $480,000 from the government, more than 20 percent of the cost of the construction. Local officials, she said, told her they had already distributed all the funds sent by the central government.
With more than 100 of her former employees and scores of suppliers still unpaid, she lives in fear of being attacked by creditors and rarely goes outside. Back at the Jiegu Monastery, parts of which are thought to date from the 14th century, the monks were hesitant to criticize the government and preferred to highlight prospects for hope amid so much loss. Tenzen, one of the monastery’s chief lamas, said many city residents had become more devout and more generous to the monastery. In the hours after the quake, the crimson-robed monks were among the first to claw through the rubble looking for survivors. As hundreds of bodies were delivered to an open pavilion at the base of the monastery, the monks offered prayers for the dead and comforted the living. ‘‘People are more kind to each other now,’’ Tenzen said, as a group of young nuns dragged construction debris to a raging bonfire. Jamyang, the young monk, agreed.
‘‘Having seen so much death, they realize everything they know of this earthly life will come to an end,’’ he said. As he stood outside the only prayer hall to survive unscathed, a Tibetan man bounded out of a Land Rover, cash in hand, to make a donation — evidence, Jamyang said, that local Tibetans were embracing Buddhism with more zeal. ‘‘It would be nice,’’ he said, ‘‘if the government could feel that way, too.’’
