Something else that differentiated public responses to the Yushu and Wenchuan earthquakes was the absence of online derision, in the form of a published "niggard's list," of social celebrities whose contributions they considered as meager.

The Challenge of Rebuilding

The April 14 earthquake destroyed 15,000 buildings, leaving 100,000 people homeless. Some villages were almost completely flattened, and infrastructures of all kinds sustained severe damage. The quake twisted highways, wrecked bridges and wiped out power and water supplies. Public service providers such as governments, hospitals and schools, all suffered severe losses.

"You will have new schools and new homes!" was the promise that President Hu Jintao wrote on a blackboard in the Yushu Prefecture Orphanage on April 18. The next day the national quake relief command set up a panel on rebuilding work.

Reconstruction was actually a part of relief work from the moment the quake hit. Immediate repaving of snarled roads enabled traffic and local flights to resume within a day of the disaster. The same was true of telecommunications in the county seat. Electricity was restored to relief command offices, victims' shelters and field hospitals, and water supply to part of the region on the second day. On the third day a group of local officials and experts went to Sichuan to learn from the Wenchuan experience of post-quake rebuilding. On the fourth day several schools reopened, and on the fifth experts from out of the region made a field study of the impact of the earthquake on local buildings and eco-environment. The sixth day saw banks and post offices gradually begin to receive customers and commercial activities to recommence.

The state is all set to rebuild Yushu over a three-year period. A draft plan emphasizing that reconstruction should "be well designed, give priority to environmental protection, and put equal emphasis on conservation and development," awaits final approval.

Yushu is at the headwaters of the Yangtze, Yellow and Lancang (Mekong) rivers, which is why scrupulous research into the implications of rebuilding activities is essential before work can actually commence.

As rebuilding demands large amounts of cement and transportation on the plateau is difficult, suggestions were made about setting up a cement factory in the prefecture. Governor Wang Yuhu, however, rejected the idea without a second thought, saying, "We believe that slower economic development and reconstruction of homes is preferable to fouling the environment."