BEIJING — President Hu Jintao cut short his trip to South America on Thursday and Premier Wen Jiabao flew to a far-flung corner of the Tibetan plateau, pulling out all stops to portray a compassionate Chinese government helping the victims of the 6.9-magnitude earthquake and large aftershocks.
At last count, the quakes Wednesday killed 617 people, injured 9,110 and made more than 100,000 homeless. The earthquakes took place in a politically tense region where many Tibetans have long chafed under Chinese rule.
After flying Thursday night to Qinghai province’s Yushu county, close to the epicenter of the largest quake, Wen pledged to “build a good life for all ethnic people after the earthquake.”
The speech was translated simultaneously into Tibetan.
Almost since the moment the big quake struck at 7:49 a.m. Wednesday, Chinese state television has been filled with images of Chinese soldiers and paramilitary working hand-in-hand with local Tibetans — some of them Buddhist monks — in common cause to rescue victims.
“I think the Chinese already are looking at the larger implications of this earthquake. They see it as an opportunity for the Communist Party to win sympathy through its generosity,” Robbie Barnett, a Tibet scholar at New York’s Columbia University, said Thursday. He said he thinks the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, might see it “as an opportunity to find some common ground.”
In Beijing on Thursday, Zou Ming, disaster relief director for the Ministry of Civil Affairs, said that nearly 10,000 rescuers were on the scene in Yushu county but that supplies remained scarce.
“What we urgently need are tents, quilts, cotton-padded clothing and instant food,” he said. “The most urgently needed material will be sent by air, the rest by train or road.”
The earthquake has raised great logistical challenges because Yushu county is 500 miles from the nearest major airport, through winding mountain passes at elevations of more than 12,000 feet.
