Confusion hamstrings Chinese authorities' storm response by Howard French

Police officers try to control the crowd during a stampede outside a railway station in China's southern city of Guangzhou. (Bobby Yip/Reuters)


Confusion hamstrings Chinese authorities' storm response
By Howard W. French
Sunday, February 3, 2008

SHANGHAI: For two weeks, much of China, which was long known for its capacity for mass mobilization, has been tied in knots by a series of major snowstorms. Although large, in most places the snowfall - described as having been the worst in 50 years - has been nothing like the deep cover that other parts of the world often experience in winter.

Instead, its massively crippling effects - which have included knocking out electricity and water supplies, threatening the coal supply that fuels the country's power plants and stranding millions of Chinese on the eve of the year's most important holiday - seem due mostly to surprise.

Many of the worst effects have been seen in parts of east-central and southern China, which are largely unaccustomed to serious snowfall. For the victims, however - and as many as 100 million people have been directly affected - surprise on such a massive scale equates with lack of preparation.

To migrant workers unable to take their annual leave for the Chinese New Year, and to others who have been stuck in their homes without electricity, water, regular supplies of food and even reliable news, the government, as much as any unpredictable weather system, increasingly appears to be the culprit.

In the last week, the Chinese government has worked as hard at public relations as at crisis management, with both of the country's top leaders traveling to some of the worst-affected areas. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who has moved about China almost nonstop during this period, traveled early last week to the southern city of Guangzhou, where as many as 800,000 people had gathered at the train station at one point seeking to begin their annual leaves.

President Hu Jintao traveled later in the week to a coal mine in northern Shaanxi Province to encourage miners to redouble their efforts, including forgoing New Year's celebrations, in order to spare the country's power grid from further brownouts. Hu, known for his circumspection in public, was quoted as saying he was unable to sleep because of the scale of the emergency.

But in many badly affected areas, the government appears to have almost disappeared, so overwhelmed has it been by the demand for emergency services. In other areas, poor coordination between different levels of government and between various agencies has seriously complicated matters.

In Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, which has the largest concentration of migrant labor in the country, these crossed signals may have narrowly missed causing a disaster among the desperate crowds stranded at the train station.

Provincial authorities have worked hard for days to persuade would-be travelers to abandon their plans of spending the holidays with family members in faraway provinces. They have arranged refunds for train tickets, set up shelter facilities in public buildings and issued nonstop propaganda about the money-saving virtues of staying put in Guangdong.

The efforts appeared to be paying off, as several hundred thousand people were gradually persuaded to leave the area of the train station. Despite this, on Thursday, a spokesman for the Railway Ministry announced its promise that anyone wishing to travel home by train from Guangdong Province would be able to do so within five days. With that came a new surge of would-be passengers, again worsening the potentially explosive scene at the station. One migrant worker did die Saturday, crushed as a crowd surged to board a train.

"The Railway Ministry has a tone that is different from that of Guangdong, whose attitude had been clear," said a report in Caijing magazine.

The crisis in Guangdong has been made worse by other contradictions as well. Although the provincial government has tried to encourage workers to remain at their dormitories, nobody seems to have coordinated this effort with the factories themselves.

"Many factories in the Pearl Delta are already closed or have laid off workers" because of the impending holiday, wrote Wen Yunchao, a freelance Internet journalist. "The workers at those places have to go home, and they have brought all of their belongings and a few days' cash out with them. They don't want to go back to the factories and don't have a way back, and we've seen no government arrangements directed at this group."

Wen said that while the government's efforts remained confused and sometimes contradictory, because of its top-down nature it was also squandering the help and good will of many volunteers. "Numerous friends want to join me as volunteers, but there is no formal channel that will accept them," he wrote.

Transportation is far from the only important sector to have been hit hard by the crisis. China's entire power system, from its extensive reliance on coal-based generation to its transmission over a high-tension grid spanning the country, has proven surprisingly vulnerable. Agriculture, too, has been badly affected.

With train service hit hard, authorities have faced the awkward choice of using the locomotives still in service to ferry passengers or to ferry coal to power plants. The impact on coal supplies has been such that according to some estimates, the country's coal reserves at power plants had dwindled to a historic low, with only a two-day supply remaining in many places.

Liu Xinfang, a spokesman for the national grid, said that 2,000 transmission towers and 39,000 kilometers, or 24,000 miles, of transmission cables were still down in central and eastern China.

"The wires have been frozen into huge ice sticks, as thick as 60 millimeters in diameter," he said, the equivalent of about two inches. "Some towers are bearing four times their weight." Others said the high number of collapsed towers was due to the fact that in southern China they are spaced far apart, largely for economic reasons.

One of the worst-hit areas of the power emergency has been Chenzhou, a city of four million on Guangdong Province's northern border, where many have gone without water, electricity, heating or commercial food supplies for 10 days.

"Our power grid system was seriously damaged, in fact torn to pieces, and it is very hard to repair," said Li Yufang, head of the emergency operations center for the city. "When one part of the grid is fixed, another suddenly collapses, so power can only be transmitted intermittently."

In southeastern Guizhou Province, another hard-hit area, officials said there had been extensive loss of winter crops, like wheat and rapeseed. Power there, too, has been out for days.

"In towns and villages, life now depends on primitive means," said Lu Jiang, a spokesman for Southeast Qian Prefecture. "We get light from burning pine, and families grind grains with stone mortars. It's not difficult to survive, but to live the way we did before the snow began we will have to wait until the next season."