HONG
KONG - Now that China's worst winter in 50 years
has eased, officials are breathing easier as
millions of migrant workers return to their jobs
following riotous scenes at rail and bus stations
during the weeklong Lunar New Year holiday.
Traditionally, this is one time of year
when workers can go home to visit their families
in often distant provinces, yet severe storms
crippled large segments of the nation's transport
system, making it impossible for many to travel.
For those lucky enough to find a seat on a train
or bus, the annual pilgrimage home turned into a
grueling epic of breakdowns and delays.
A
month of snow and ice storms, beginning January
10, left 107 people dead, killed 69 million head
of livestock and destroyed
354,000 homes and nearly 62
million acres of farmland, according to state
media. Widespread damage was caused to China's
fisheries, with an estimated 2,300 acres of
aquaculture affected across 13 provinces.
The effect will be to further drive up
already rising food prices, likely pushing
inflation even above last month's 11-year-high of
7.1%. In total, the severe weather caused 111.1
billion yuan (US$15.5 billion) in direct economic
losses to the country.
Blame the weather,
right? That's what Chinese meteorologists, no
doubt prompted by officialdom, would like the
world to believe. According to them, the weather
phenomenon known as La Nina is the chief culprit
in this winter's disaster. La Nina creates
unusually low temperatures across the eastern and
central Pacific Ocean, bringing extreme weather.
Indeed, this winter has been uncommonly bad, and
there is nothing the Chinese leadership could have
done to prevent that.
The government
response to the weather emergency, however - from
President Hu Jintao to Premier Wen Jiabao at the
top all the way down to local officials in the 19
provinces affected by the storms - proved woefully
inadequate, revealing critical weaknesses in
China's ability to deal with future crises.
Just as the country is burnishing its
image in preparation to host this summer's Olympic
Games, the prolonged bout of nasty weather served
to point out that the nation still has a long way
to go when facing pressing problems that require a
coordinated national response. In hindsight, it is
clear the severity of the storms could have been
anticipated by weather forecasters and the
disastrous effects considerably mitigated by a
better disaster management plan - which in this
case seemed to consist mostly of handing snow
shovels to legions of People's Liberation Army
soldiers.
Moreover, the national
infrastructure failed a big test, and the wanton
environmental degradation that has accompanied
China's breakneck growth over the last 30 years no
doubt contributed to the weather catastrophe.
The storms also served to point up flaws
in economic policy as the central government's
system of price controls on electricity led power
companies to cut their fuel stockpiles, creating
an energy crunch in a time of extreme need. In
many ways, then, the severe winter weather
amounted to a perfect storm for revealing how far
China still has to go to join the first tier of
nations.
Consider the continuing
consequences of the storms. Power supplies in
parts of the eastern province of Zhejiang and in
southern Guangdong, a key industrial area, will
not be restored until next month. In Zhejiang,
more than 600 villages still have no electricity.
Food prices continue to rise because of
crop damage and transport hitches, and the
nation's coal supply is dangerously low because of
a price-control system that discourages
production. But there is good news - spring is
coming, along with its warmer weather, and all of
these concerns can then recede into the background
as Olympic hysteria builds.
The lessons of
this winter's disaster, however, should not be
ignored - similar catastrophes are likely to occur
again. One encouraging development was the
openness and speed with which Beijing provided
information on the economic costs of the storms.
Unlike in so many other situations - coal-mining
disasters, bird flu outbreaks, the SARS epidemic -
there has been no cover-up this time. Officials
have been frank, straightforward and expeditious
in reporting the bad news.
That said,
however, the government was ill-prepared from top
to bottom for such a disaster. That lack of
preparation greatly exacerbated the damage wrought
by the severe weather. By this time next year,
let's hope that the central government has a
legitimate disaster management plan in place that
goes far beyond handing out shovels and
dispatching Wen, the so-called "people's premier",
to particularly hard-hit areas with messages of
cold comfort and empty encouragement.
In
the end, the central government committed 2.7
billion yuan (US$376 million) to disaster relief,
but the lack of any effective disaster management
plan was a glaring omission in central-government
planning.
Another obvious area for
improvement is meteorology. The storms were a
natural, forecastable phenomenon, but Chinese
weather forecasters clearly were looking out the
wrong windows. In consequence, a series of other
calamities kicked in. Key roads and rail lines
were blocked, without any coordinated plan to
clear them. As a result, tens of millions of
migrant workers were stranded or painfully delayed
in their quest to return home for the new year.
The roads and railways on which they will journey
again next year are in dire need of an upgrade.
The policy of price controls on
electricity also needs a rethink because it
discouraged power companies from keeping adequate
stockpiles of fuel for emergencies such as the one
China has just passed through.
Finally,
there is no question that the environmental
degradation caused by China's meteoric economic
rise has contributed to extreme weather in the
country. This winter of devastation and discontent
should also serve as a painful reminder that it is
past time to balance economic growth with
environmental protection. And, of course, the
choking pollution likely to greet Olympic athletes
in Beijing this summer will be yet another
reminder.
Kent Ewing is a
teacher and writer at Hong Kong International
School. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk.
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