In 1986, *The Great Tangshan Earthquake* Told Chinese Readers a Truth That Had Been Frozen for 10 Years | China in Bestsellers ⑥
In part this series looks back at the stories behind these legendary books; but the larger question, of course, is this: why did we end up with the society we have today, what have we lived through, what have we gained and lost, what wealth and what consensus have we accumulated, and how did we get here?
In part this series looks back at the stories behind these legendary books; but the larger question, of course, is this: why did we end up with the society we have today, what have we lived through, what have we gained and lost, what wealth and what consensus have we accumulated, and how did we get here?
A society gets the book market it deserves.
We have picked a number of books that had a major impact in China, tracked down the authors or editors involved at the time, and asked them to tell the story behind each one.
In part this series looks back at the stories behind these legendary books; but the larger question, of course, is this: why did we end up with the society we have today, what have we lived through, what have we gained and lost, what wealth and what consensus have we accumulated, and how did we get here?
This is the sixth book
"At the time, society as a whole was genuinely starved for the truth about anything at all. After the Cultural Revolution ended, people needed to know the many things that had been screened off and covered up. So of The Great Tangshan Earthquake, the writer Li You said, 'This is the thawing effect of frozen news.' It was news, but it was ten-year-old news, because it had been frozen — shut away in the freezer. Now it was taken out and thawed, and the thawing set off a thawing effect. The root of it was that propaganda in the past had never centered on the disaster victims, on ordinary people, on the fates of people caught in a catastrophe — it centered on relief work, on what was given from outside. What was given from outside could be inflated, could be raised higher. About the people who actually suffered, there had been almost no reporting at all, so simply doing it caused an enormous sensation."
What really happened in the Tangshan earthquake that killed 240,000 people — in the instant the quake struck, and afterwards, how did the million people of Tangshan and the surrounding disaster zone live through it?
Nearly ten years after the earthquake, Qian Gang, a reporter at the PLA Daily, wrote a long work of reportage that became one of the ten bestselling books of 1986. Many years later, in an interview with QDaily, Qian Gang talked about why he wrote the book that has since become the single most important label attached to his name.
It all began with "a bold decision" made 33 years ago by Tao Taizhong, an editor at the magazine PLA Literature and Art. In 1984, Tao Taizhong invited four military writers who had won the National Excellent Reportage Award to each write a book-length work of reportage, with the magazine giving each writer an entire issue.
That year Qian Gang was 31, the youngest of the four. Before this he had co-written two works of reportage with Jiang Yonghong, Commander of the Blue Army (《蓝军司令》) and The Surging Tide (《奔涌的潮头》). The first was about a commanding officer who told the truth; the second documented the reform of the military's cadre system then under way. The two works won the second (1982) and third (1984) National Excellent Reportage Awards respectively.
Tao Taizhong's suggestion was that, since two years later would fall exactly on the tenth anniversary of the Tangshan earthquake, Qian Gang might try writing a piece called A City's Destruction and Rebirth (《一座城市的毁灭和新生》). The theme was meant to match the spirit of the times — Tangshan's reconstruction, with reform in the foreground. The Handan No. 2 Construction Company, for instance, which was working on Tangshan's rebuilding, was in the middle of reforms introducing a responsibility system. That company, then, should be a central subject of the reporting.
By this point Qian Gang had left his post at the PLA Daily to study, and had only recently been admitted to the literature department of the PLA Art Academy. The department was headed by the well-known writer Xu Huaizhong, a gifted teacher. The class had 35 students and a free-spirited atmosphere. Besides Qian Gang, it included Mo Yan, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The works that made Mo Yan's name, Red Sorghum and The Transparent Radish (《透明的红萝卜》), were written while he was in this class. In his Nobel speech, Mo Yan singled out Xu Huaizhong for thanks.
As Qian Gang thought about his graduation project, the Tangshan earthquake naturally came into the running. Eight years earlier, just after the quake, the 23-year-old soldier Qian Gang had gone to the disaster zone to help with relief work — "in shearling boots, a hand-pump sprayer on my shoulder and the white coat of an epidemic-prevention team, rushing about all day across those ruins that had shocked the world." Back then Qian Gang was only an editor at the Shanghai magazine Morning Glow (《朝霞》), a literary young man entirely "raised under the red flag" and "both red and expert." Morning Glow was a literary journal that diligently carried out Cultural Revolution doctrine and propagated Mao Zedong's idea of all-round dictatorship.
But those nearly three months in the disaster zone had left him with too many things he could not forget, the most unforgettable being his part in escorting several hundred orphans to Shijiazhuang and Xingtai. Qian Gang later wrote that story into the book's sixth chapter, "The Orphans." He had also kept the notebook from the relief effort, which recorded things people said at the time and threads of stories from those weeks. And Jiang Yichao, director of the Tangshan Civil Affairs Bureau and a friend of his parents, kept mailing him material over the following years, reminding him: "Don't forget the earthquake — write about it when you get the chance!"
"I don't remember whether it was him" — Tao Taizhong — "who told me to write it, or whether I brought up on my own that I was interested in the Tangshan subject," Qian Gang recalled to QDaily. In any case the two of them hit it off, and settled on the Tangshan earthquake, with the theme shifting from "destruction and rebirth" to destruction alone.
So Qian Gang reported while he studied. He used winter and summer breaks, National Day, New Year's and Spring Festival to go to Tangshan, checking the facts of what had happened and gathering new material. He was determined, for instance, to find people who had witnessed the moment the quake struck, at 3:42 a.m. on July 28, 1976. In the end, through persistence and luck, he found ten of them: a hospital nurse on the night shift, a doctor rushing to an emergency call, a night attendant at the railway station, a power-plant worker on night duty, a resident who had got up to bring in the laundry because she was worried about rain. These people brought the instant of the quake vividly back to life.
Of everything in the reporting, what stayed with Qian Gang most were these interviews with witnesses and survivors. "Survivors" here meant specifically those who had "stayed alive underground for many days." In the book Qian Gang calls them "those thirsting for life": "3 Days: A Newlywed Couple and a Kitchen Knife," "8 Days: 'The Little Girl' Wang Zilan," "13 Days: A Woman Who Far Exceeded the Limits of Life (Lu Guilan)," "15 Days: The Last Five Men." These people were, Qian Gang felt, "not only a miracle of life but a miracle in the spiritual history of humankind." In handling the material he also used forms that looked "unconventional" at the time — "notes only lightly tidied up," "incoherent talk taken down word for word, exactly as it was spoken." "Old Mother Lu Guilan's talk was incoherent, but I felt it caught better than anything how she felt down there underground," Qian Gang told QDaily.
"Journalistic professionalism" was, just then, becoming something Chinese journalists studied. After the Cultural Revolution ended, the press began importing foreign material in bulk. Qian Gang, still a reporter at the PLA Daily, received copies of Selected Foreign News Reports (《外国新闻通讯选》), compiled by the journalism department at Renmin University, along with American university journalism textbooks — and like his colleagues he devoured them.
"It's hard for later generations to picture the scene: in mess halls where people still had to eat their quota of coarse grain, young military journalists were eagerly debating American lead-writing at the dinner table — the 'bullet lead,' the 'clothesline lead,' the 'delayed lead' — and arguing hotly about the reporting style of Ernie Pyle, the 'GI's reporter.' We took up at great speed those brand-new and yet most basic ideas: tell the truth, don't tell lies; talk like a human being, not like a ghost; humanity; humanitarianism; the principle of factual accuracy marked by the 'Five W's'; and, above all, 'reform,'" Qian Gang wrote in his essay "The Great Tangshan Earthquake" and That Decade. The memoir ran in Caijing magazine in 2009.
As for the writing of The Great Tangshan Earthquake itself, Qian Gang says he was directly influenced by three books: the American writer Jack London's account of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, The Story of an Eyewitness; the American journalist John Hersey's Hiroshima, which recorded what six ordinary people experienced and remembered after the atomic bomb fell on Japan; and the Czech writer Egon Erwin Kisch's Selected Reportage of Kisch (《基希报告文学选》). Hiroshima had not yet been published in full in China at the time, so Qian Gang bought an excerpted pamphlet called The Hiroshima Catastrophe (《广岛浩劫》) on the street. While writing, he kept the Kisch volume beside him at all times. It was under the influence of this nourishment that Qian Gang settled on "destruction" as his theme. The Tangshan earthquake, he felt, belonged to all of humanity, and only a work about human nature could be understood by people of every country. He wanted to be China's Hersey, China's Kisch.
"Back then other people influenced me enormously, and I turned that influence into my own ability very fast," Qian Gang told QDaily. That speed, of course, had to be "credited" to the spiritual poverty of the Cultural Revolution's ten years, which left most Chinese people intellectually famished.
People were starved not only for ideas but for the truth. In July 1976, when the earthquake struck, the Cultural Revolution had not yet ended. Almost no reporting then was free of propaganda, still less concerned with the fates and the humanity of people caught in the disaster; people were still in the grip of political fervor. Qian Gang wrote that sort of thing himself at the time. He wrote a lyric poem called The Old Woman Making Flatbread (《烙饼的大娘》), about an old woman cooking over a pot at the roadside at sunset — which province had sent the pot, and which province the flour and the oil.
The disaster zone, moreover, was sealed off, international aid was refused, and slogans appeared such as "An earthquake is a lesson in communism," "Tangshan may have been struck by disaster, but Daqing's red flowers bloom on!" and "They send us an earthquake, we make a revolution!" Cameras were not allowed in; photography was banned. To this day, most photographs of the Tangshan earthquake show smashed buildings and the like, with almost no people in them — because they were taken by researchers to collect scientific data about the quake, not for news.
In March 1986, ten years after the earthquake, The Great Tangshan Earthquake ran in PLA Literature and Art. A month later the book of the same title came out. Together the two set the market alight. Qian Gang, now 64, remembers how it took off at Beijing's newsstands, and how everyone was talking about it. When the Xinhua Bookstore in Wangfujing put the book on sale, the queue reached out onto Wangfujing Street. It went on to win the National Excellent Reportage Award, the 1986 National Top Ten Bestseller Award and the 1987 National Golden Key Book Award, among others. Magazine and book together sold 700,000 to 800,000 copies.
Radio stations in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and elsewhere all broadcast The Great Tangshan Earthquake as a long-form serial. It was among the first works of reportage ever broadcast that way. In the 1980s, before the internet and in a time of material scarcity, radio did the work of a major medium. "Pretty much every good novel back then got broadcast. Huge numbers of people listened to serialized novels — it was a way of life," Qian Gang told QDaily.
People's hunger for the truth is a large part of why The Great Tangshan Earthquake sold the way it did. The reportage writer Li You's verdict: "This is the thawing effect of frozen news." Xu Huaizhong, the well-known writer and Qian Gang's teacher, wrote in the preface to the 1986 edition: "Here the landscape of nature and the landscape of the human soul are laid over each other and light each other up; the broad ink wash of the macroscopic and the fine brushwork of the microscopic merge into one; the warped thinking of a warped age and the propositions of serious science stand opposed and yet unified — together painting a lifelike 'holographic photograph' of the '7·28' day of catastrophe, a picture that belongs to Tangshan and also to humankind."
Most earlier reporting, too, had been about relief work and about propaganda; The Great Tangshan Earthquake was about the people who suffered, about human nature inside a catastrophe. The writing genuinely came back to people and to human nature, and that is what moved most readers. Qian Gang wrote the fates of all kinds of people in the quake: orphans, survivors, blind people, psychiatric patients and their doctors, inmates of a detention center and the police guarding them, foreign visitors to China.
Alongside the nobility of human nature, Qian Gang wrote its meanness too. Some people made money out of the disaster, looting supplies; the militia arrested more than 1,800 of them. One old woman wailed "My son! My son!" over one dead man after another, and stripped the watches off them — more than a dozen in the end. There is the coming together and falling apart of extended families in "Anecdotes of the Ark," and the twisted thinking and mood of the era in "The Politics of 1976."
The final chapter, Qian Gang's "investigative report" on "the State Seismological Bureau before and after the great earthquake," answered readers' questions about the sensitive matter of imminent-earthquake prediction — though even now the question has not been fully answered.
And so "The Great Tangshan Earthquake has become a historical document. The book records 1976, but it also bears the imprint of 1986. The fate of the people of Tangshan, indeed of all Chinese people, in 1976 is one kind of truth; the state of a Chinese journalist's thinking and writing in 1986 is another," Qian Gang wrote in the preface to this year's new edition.
And the writing that may now look "unrestrained," "too sentimental," "too impassioned" had its own logic then. "Because it was a move away from that false, blindly loyal, coerced emotion of the Cultural Revolution toward genuine feeling. For a lot of people, that genuine feeling, that release, was what most people felt was right," Qian Gang told QDaily.
The magazine version did also draw criticism. Hu Keshi, a former director of the State Seismological Bureau and then deputy director of the Education, Science, Culture and Public Health Committee of the National People's Congress Standing Committee, wrote to the military to say that The Great Tangshan Earthquake had not done enough to expose how the "Gang of Four" had used the campaign to "criticize Deng and beat back the right-deviationist wind to reverse verdicts" to wreck earthquake prediction and relief work. The director of the General Political Department then wrote an instruction on the letter: Comrade Qian Gang may do further reporting. So compared with the magazine version, the book added an interview with Hu Keshi and more material on Qinglong County, which had taken precautions before the quake and lost only one person in the whole county.
The chapter on "the State Seismological Bureau before and after the great earthquake" also displeased the bureau. People there, Qian Gang says, complained to the PLA Daily and PLA Literature and Art that the book had problems. His superiors treated it as an academic dispute and simply sent him to the bureau to talk it over and explain himself to the colleagues who disagreed. Even so, the bureau sent an official letter to China National Radio, which was then broadcasting the book, demanding that it stop broadcasting Chapter Seven. The station complied, and the serial ended with Chapter Six.
On the whole, though, this was an age of intellectual liberation, after ten years of Cultural Revolution and the "setting things right" that followed. People held one overriding consensus: "We must never go backward." "We must never return to that benighted, dark age." The magazine publication and the book both benefited from the era's "tolerant, relaxed, generous" atmosphere. That window of time, Qian Gang feels, was rare and precious. Any earlier would not have worked — the campaign to "clean out spiritual pollution" (1983) was still on; any later would not have worked either — a new round of "opposing liberalization" (1987) had begun.
The loosening of thought in the 1980s loosened the press as well, bringing more reporting that was actually factual, and even some critical reporting. In 1979, for instance, the PLA Daily reprinted a poem based on a true story, General, You Mustn't Do This (《将军，不能这样做》), criticizing a general who had torn down a kindergarten and used foreign currency to build himself an apartment block. In 1980 China Youth Daily ran an article titled The Man Who Dared to Challenge Privilege (《敢于向特权挑战的人》), naming and criticizing Wang Lei, then the State Council's Minister of Commerce, for trying to enjoy privileges — paying only a token "soup charge" for restaurant meals — and reported in the end to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection by a restaurant cook, Chen Aiwu.
But scattered breakthroughs in critical reporting did not change where the news business as a whole was going, and some journalists began turning to reportage instead. "Journalists' way of reporting the news was hemmed in too much, so some of what they understood, observed and thought about society had nowhere to be said — that's why they turned to reportage," Mai Tianshu, a well-known reportage writer of the 1980s, told The Economic Observer.
So the 1980s saw a reportage boom. The people writing it were no longer mainly writers but mainly journalists. Xu Chi's Goldbach's Conjecture (《哥德巴赫猜想》), Mai Tianshu's The West Is Migrating (《西部在移民》) and The Land and Its Petty Emperors (《土地与土皇帝》), Lu Yuegang's The Three Gorges of the Yangtze: China's Epic (《长江三峡：中国的史诗》), Meng Xiaoyun's Tears of the Desert Poplar (《胡杨泪》), Huang Zongying's Feelings of the Wild Goose (《大雁情》) and Li Yanguo's On This Land (《在这片国土上》) all appeared in these years. Most carried a strong strain of critical realism, championed democracy and freedom, and were more truthful than the news of the day. Qian Gang, for one, first wrote a piece of reportage called Fission (《裂变》); his superiors then took it and ran it in the newspaper again, this time straight as news.
"Reportage became a platform that carried the function of news, a certain academic function, and also part of the function of political commentary within the news," Qian Gang told QDaily. Mai Tianshu, for his part, thought reportage had become "a tool of social and cultural enlightenment," "a barometer of China's intellectual currents." Hence the vogue for what was called "social-problem reportage," which borrowed heavily from sociology's analysis of social problems to report on the present — the college entrance exam, marriage, the environment. Readers took to the new form too, reading one piece of reportage after another with appetite.
The Great Tangshan Earthquake was not only a domestic bestseller; its reach extended abroad. Translations appeared in English, French, Japanese and Korean, and American universities including Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania listed it as a teaching reference for news writing. Not long after the book came out, curiously, Qian Gang received a letter in Beijing from the Hong Kong Education Department. The department, it said, was compiling Hong Kong secondary-school Chinese-language textbooks intended to stay in use past 1997, and wanted to include the book's preface, My Tangshan and I (《我和我的唐山》); it hoped to obtain permission.
From 1988, then, the preface entered Hong Kong secondary-school textbooks. Later it became one of three recommended titles for the Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination. Apart from the international schools, Qian Gang says, 80 percent of Hong Kong's schools listed The Great Tangshan Earthquake as a candidate book for reading reports. Search for the book online and you will probably turn up a great many reading reports and reflections. Questions like "How does Qian Gang regard life? How does he regard death?" have become questions that one cohort of Hong Kong students after another has had to answer. Someone even wrote an online parody of the preface, My College Entrance Exam and I (《我和我的高考》). Because most of the authors in the textbook were long dead, when Qian Gang took up a post at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre in 2003, "people were startled — how is he still alive?" Qian Gang said.
Qian Gang went on to write more reportage: Nuclear Fire: Deng Jiaxian, Director of the Ninth Academy of the Ministry of Nuclear Industry, and His Life's Work (1987), Reform: Autumn 1987 in the Soviet Union (1988), Burial at Sea: A Requiem on the Centenary of the Great Qing's Beiyang Navy (1989). Most of them addressed the most pressing question facing China then — reform — whether by learning from abroad, as with Soviet reform, or from history, as with the Beiyang Navy.
"Reform had us tremendously stirred up at the time, and everyone wanted to press the deeper questions — why couldn't China's reform get anywhere?" Qian Gang told QDaily. So in writing Burial at Sea, a work of reportage on a historical subject, he worked the news in as well. The book has two chapters both called "'88": the first is 1888, the second 1988. The 1988 chapter covers many of that year's major news events in China.
In 1990 Qian Gang left the PLA Daily. He helped found China Earthquake News (later renamed China Disaster Reduction News), Sanlian Lifeweek and CCTV's News Investigation, and served as executive deputy editor-in-chief of Southern Weekly between 1998 and 2001. In the autumn of 2003 he came to the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre as director of its China Media Project, working mainly on the history of Chinese journalism and on discourse analysis of the People's Daily and the PLA Daily.
In 1999 Qian Gang compiled A Hundred Records of China's Great Disasters in the 20th Century (《20 世纪中国重灾百录》), commissioning more than 70 journalists to document the 100 largest natural disasters in China since 1900. Among them, the magnitude 7.8 Tangshan earthquake was as if 400 Hiroshima atomic bombs had gone off at once in the crust 16 kilometers below the surface. It killed 242,000 people, left 160,000 severely injured, caused more than 10 billion yuan in direct economic losses, and destroyed a heavy-industry city of a million people in a single stroke. It was also the deadliest earthquake anywhere in the world in the 20th century: its death toll was 2.4 times that of the Tokyo earthquake (1923, magnitude 8.2), 35 times that of the Chile earthquake (1960, magnitude 8.5), and more than 1,300 times that of the Alaska earthquake (1964, magnitude 8.4). "To keep disaster at a distance, we draw close to it," Qian Gang wrote in the preface.
Looking back at the book he wrote 31 years ago, Qian Gang, now 64, told QDaily that what strikes him most is that "this book could only have been written then." "There's the atmosphere of the whole period, and then there's your own frame of mind, your physical stamina, your youth. For people at the time, material conditions were far poorer than now, but the streak of optimism inside them, that sense of hope, seems to have been greater than it is now. As far as writing itself goes, the difference between freedom and its absence is enormous."
Books planned for this series:
The Ugly Chinaman (1986)
Jack: Straight from the Gut (2001)
The Wild Fire Collection (1988)
The Birth of Tragedy (1986)
The Great Tangshan Earthquake (1986)
The Path of Beauty (1981), and others
Cover image: a still from the film Aftershock (《唐山大地震》), source: Douban
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.