Last Friday a huge mudslide in rural Yunnan province hit two villages, killing 46 people. Hundreds of disaster workers were rushed to the site. Mr. Wu, at the Zhenxiong county propaganda office, told a reporter from the Daily Telegraph, “All the leaders are at the scene giving instructions on the rescue work. Right now the rescue work is the priority, trying to save more lives is the priority,”
Another priority seems to have been cremating all the dead before their relatives could get there.
Officials got right to that. By Sunday night, survivors who had planned to bury their dead had learned that the cremations had taken place, and were protesting outside the disaster relief headquarters. (The village tradition is of elaborate funerals followed by burial.)
Leaping Tiger Gorge in Yunnan, in spring. The tiger leaped across the gorge to escape a hunter.
Luo Yuanju, a migrant worker who had rushed back to her home town, and learned that 29 of her relatives had been killed, asked “Why can’t I see my child for the last time?”
Because it would upset you, officials explained. The bodies didn’t look that nice. “Many parts of the bodies were missing while the buried were dug out,” said Lei Chuying, deputy head of Zhenxiong county. “The painful scene might cause trauma among relatives.”
Also, we don’t have a big refrigerator to keep all those bodies in, and we wouldn’t want any epidemics. “We were afraid that the bodies would start to decay,” said Hu Jianpu, another county deputy head. (It’s January, and there’s snow on the ground in the villages.)
These assertions were so outrageous that the officials apologized. Such apologies are so unusual in China that headline writers took notice. “Rare apology for rapid cremations after Zhenxiong landslide” wrote the South China Morning Post, adding, “Stability-obsessed local Chinese authorities sometimes seize the bodies of accident victims to prevent emotional scenes that could develop into protests against them, as well as to persuade relatives to quickly agree to compensation offers.”
They have steep mountains in Japan too. This is a work (ca. 1700) of the Kyōto Kanō School, titled “Mountain Landscape,” not “Planned Site, Coal Mine #788.”
Oh, but good news! By Monday, authorities had already concluded their investigation into the causes of the landslide, and determined that it had nothing to do with the nearby mining activity. Nope! It was weather, weather, weather all the way.
It might have been. That’s steep country and there had been a lot of snow and rain. (People’s Daily is indignant that there weren’t landslide warnings in effect after all that precipitation.) But somehow the survivors don’t have a lot of faith in this particular investigation, and they want another one.
As so often with apologies in other countries, it’s hard to get details. I couldn’t find the text of the apology, or which officials uttered it, and if they spoke in person to the families to whom the apology was addressed. But it looks as if the rare, amazing, apology came with excuses (we didn’t want to upset you! we can’t stand the thought of you crying! we didn’t want you to get sick!). If anyone took responsibility, it didn’t get into the news stories I found. Not very helpful. Bad apology.
I don’t want to be a China basher. The steep Yunnan mountains look a bit like West Virginia mountains, and I can easily imagine a West Virginia landslide being followed by a quick announcement that mining had nothing to do with it, we did a big investigation last night, case closed! Although I admit speedy cremations would surprise me.
