The Man Who Documented the Wenchuan Earthquake: “If I Didn't Get to the Bottom of These Questions, I'd Think About Them for the Rest of My Life” | “Ten Years” ⑩

He worked it out. He could not change it.

Zhang Liang was once deputy editor-in-chief of South Reviews (《南风窗》), covering business and current affairs. In 2006, after ten years as a journalist, he and a friend founded a public relations firm, where he ran the Shanghai office as CEO.

2008 was Zhang Liang's second year in the transition to PR work — “I was getting the hang of it,” he said.

On May 12, 2008, Zhang Liang was in a meeting with a client in a cramped office beside Raffles City, on People's Square in the busiest part of Shanghai. At 2:28 that afternoon he felt nothing at all. Whatever was happening two thousand kilometers away seemed very far off.

His link to the earthquake came through that client. Zhang Liang suggested the company fund a book documenting the quake — “It would balance the conscience, show a sense of responsibility, and raise the company's profile too,” he said.

But the client had no interest. The potential authors he approached also thought it had “not much value.”

On May 19, 2008, the national day of mourning, Zhang Liang bought a copy of Eyewitness Accounts of the Tangshan Earthquake (《唐山大地震亲历记》) and a road atlas of Sichuan before going to People's Square for the moment of silence. “When they decided not to do it, I decided to do it myself,” he said.

For a year, from 2008 to 2009, Zhang Liang spent his weekends traveling back and forth between Shanghai and Yingxiu to interview people. Often he boarded a Friday evening flight in a suit and leather shoes, then changed into hiking boots and outdoor gear the moment he landed.

Eventually he simply quit as CEO of the PR firm and wrote full time.

The books he measured himself against were The Longest Day, the classic account of the Second World War, and The Looming Tower, which reconstructed what lay behind 9/11. The first took ten years to write, the second five.

In 2011, less than three years in, Zhang Liang handed the manuscript of 168 Hours of the Wenchuan Earthquake (《汶川地震 168 小时》) to a publisher.

But it was only half-finished.

He had planned to document the whole disaster zone across Sichuan; in the end he covered only the town of Yingxiu.

He had planned to record a longer span of time; in the end he recorded only the seven days after the quake.

He had planned to interview 300 people; in the end there were just over 170.

Zhang Liang's explanation sounded reasonable enough: “If I had kept interviewing, or interviewed a different 170 people, I'd have got roughly the same stories.”

168 Hours of the Wenchuan Earthquake came out at a shrewdly chosen moment: May 2013, one month after the magnitude-7.0 earthquake in Lushan County, Ya'an, Sichuan, and the fifth anniversary of Wenchuan.

The book won Zhang Liang a place among Tencent's 2013 “Thinkers and Doers of Our Time”; that year's honorees also included Wang Shi, Zi Zhongyun and Shen Zhihua.

That year, Zhang Liang was 44.

What brought him more attention afterward was the Quanyuan experimental high school class he founded.

In 2012, after collecting more than 800 cases of educational innovation from around the country, Zhang Liang rented a house in Maoshan village, Jiangsu, enrolled six students, and taught them in a small class using what he considered a more “correct” way of running high school. CCTV sent a crew to film him for six months.

His account of the switch is almost too tidy: “What finally decides whether you live through an earthquake comes down mostly to psychological factors, to what people call ‘inner strength' carrying you through … I began wondering whether there was a method — education, say — to systematically build and draw out a person's inner strength. That was a big push behind my choosing education in the end,” Zhang Liang said.

Zhang Liang's first cohort graduated in 2015. That same year the school, idealistic as it was, stopped abruptly: it could not obtain an independent license to operate.

After it closed, Zhang Liang turned to selling curriculum design to high schools around the country and building an online education platform. News stories about him over the past two years identify him either as “founder of the Quanyuan experimental high school class” or as “CEO of Academy Education Co., Ltd.”

Ten years on, Zhang Liang has nothing to do with the Wenchuan earthquake.

2013, the year 168 Hours of the Wenchuan Earthquake was published, was also the last time in ten years that he went back to Yingxiu.

“Two or three days after the earthquake I felt that this was far beyond anything I'd run into in ten years of journalism.

The 2008 coverage worked in ways Chinese media never had before. Reporting on small and medium disasters had always been tightly disciplined. This time, for the first time, coverage was opened up to the media on a large scale and completely. Possibly the authorities simply hadn't caught up yet, because it was beyond everyone's experience too.

That “wide latitude” meant reporters could reach any point in the disaster zone and file, even on sensitive matters like troop movements — much of it in real time, almost live, showing everything.

When the quake hit I was working in PR. Three or four days later I proposed a project to a client, the now well-known 7 Days Inn chain. In 2008 the chain was only a few years old, and with little money it could donate only a few hundred thousand yuan for the earthquake. In that atmosphere even a 10-million-yuan donation drew no coverage, so a few hundred thousand from them clearly wasn't going to attract anyone.

What I suggested was that they fund the publication of a book recording the earthquake.

But they looked at it and concluded it wasn't worth much. They also approached several journalists as possible authors of the book, and the journalists thought the same. Their reasoning had everything to do with the kind of coverage I just described: people felt the earthquake had already been reported from every angle, so what was left to put in a book?

When they decided not to do it, I decided to do it myself. My plan then was that it would take at least five years to write this book. Reporting had poured out after the quake, but I felt that under time pressure, with the urgency of getting news out fast, the media had not dug into a lot of things. That was what I found a pity about the coverage at the time.

Looking back, most of it was fragmentary, piecemeal — one victim, one individual, one small corner of the situation. It was hard to see the whole.

I felt an event of that size needed a text to match it.

History offers plenty of reference points. Abroad, the big events that win journalism prizes are not single articles or even series of articles; they are still books, because only at that scale can a work match the weight of the news.

But China had very little of that. Here, however big a piece of news is, few people leave behind a record with real weight.”

Before he started writing, Zhang Liang tried several organizations for money to support the book.

His proposal said: “Precise narration and rich feeling will be its basic requirements, so this is not a book written for quick gain. It is not a compilation of news reports, nor a collection of retellings, excerpts or reflections; it will be made of countless firsthand stories from the people who lived through it … I hope this book can tell people how these ordinary people managed it.”

Nearly every reply was a version of: “There's already so much news coverage of the earthquake — what more is there for you to write?”

Zhang Liang paid for it himself and began.

To keep his distance from the news cycle, he did not enter the disaster zone until three months after the Wenchuan earthquake. With no institution behind him, he had a friend arrange credentials as a contributing correspondent for China Weekly (《中国周刊》) so that interviewing would be easier.

Half a year in, he had already thought about giving up. “All this information piled up like a mountain left me demoralized. I even began to wonder whether I'd gone a little crazy, insisting on carrying such a heavy load.”

“In 2008 I was still CEO of the PR firm, so for about a year I used my weekends: after work on Friday I'd rush to the airport, fly to Chengdu, then go on to Yingxiu. I'd finish my interviews over the two days and be back at the office Monday morning. I interviewed that way for nearly a year.

That only covered Yingxiu residents. More than half the book is about rescue workers who came from all over the country, which is why by 2010 I was preparing to leave the company — tracking those people down across China was simply not something you could do on weekends.

Nobody had talked to me about publishing then, and publishing wasn't my main aim. And by the later stages my starting point and my state of mind had changed from when I launched the project. At the beginning I said I wanted to leave a text of value in the history of journalism. Later, especially around the middle of 2009, when the workload got so heavy that I stopped for a while before starting again, my motive for doing the book had changed.

It had become a matter of settling something for myself. There were many things about the earthquake I badly wanted to understand. I felt that if I didn't get to the bottom of these questions, I'd think about them for the rest of my life.

I was mainly after two things. First, in the days right after the quake, how did the residents of Yingxiu actually get by? We saw scraps of this in scattered reporting, but never the whole picture — never what happened to a community's social structure after it took such a huge external blow. Quick, short news can never show that fully.

I also wanted very much to know what an ordinary person actually does when a situation this sudden and this large lands on them. That was my central interest. I was sure a great deal we don't normally see would be exposed and shown.

I interviewed quite a few people who had been buried a long time, generally three or four days or more before being pulled out. What interested me most was why they came out alive in the end. I found it had a great deal to do with their everyday state of mind, their character, things we don't usually pay attention to.

There was a young man from Guizhou named Jiang Yuhang, now living in Shanghai; at the time he was a toll collector at the Yingxiu tollbooth. He was buried five days before he came out. Two others were buried with him: when the quake hit they were napping in their dorm room and all three were pinned in it. They could still reach out and hold each other's hands, and none of them was badly hurt. But the one on the top bunk stayed extremely agitated and could never settle down.

At first Jiang Yuhang tried to calm them. His roommate went quiet for a moment, then stayed agitated, struggling desperately to get out, shouting for help the whole time. By the second day he was gone; there was no more sound.

Both roommates were alive at the start, but fear, tension and frantic agitation meant neither of them lasted until the rescue team arrived. That interested me.

At a moment like that, what is it that holds a person up?

In Jiang Yuhang you could see very clearly the strength that comes from character. He was quiet and knew his own mind. He was young then, only 20. Because of that steadiness, the Shanghai fire department, which never normally recruits in Guizhou, went there in December 2008 specifically to sign him up. He is now a firefighter in the very Shanghai fire brigade that rescued him.

The second thing I looked at was the rescue effort, and there was even less reporting on that. How was the whole rescue force moved into place? How did the power of the state actually work and do its job? Earlier coverage rarely did that kind of full investigation.

When the book was finished, a friend of mine happened to be at Dook Books. I handed them the manuscript at the end of 2011, and by then I had already moved on entirely to other things. The book didn't come out until 2013; even getting it through review took a long time.

To this day I don't want to look at this book again. I don't think it reached the standard I had in mind, because it ended too early. I'd planned to spend more than five years doing all the interviews thoroughly, but by 2011, after more than three years, I really felt worn out. And if it had run past five years, money would probably have become a problem too. So there's a lot about it I'm not happy with.”

Asked about the book's influence, Zhang Liang was offhand, as if he wanted distance from it.

“Did the book really have that big an effect? I never paid attention. I still don't know how many tens of thousands of copies it's sold in China,” he said. “And how the industry rates it, I really don't know.”

Apart from a few promotional events when it came out in 2013, he stressed, he has had nothing to do with the book since.

168 Hours of the Wenchuan Earthquake brought him nothing substantial.

He would rather talk about what his education business has produced: “two funding rounds,” “a 40-person company,” “more than a hundred schools working with us this year” …

“Choosing education as my direction now was absolutely the right call, and I love doing it.”

“When the book was done I had to decide what to do next. There were three options: turn to the nonprofit sector, go back to the PR firm, or keep writing full time as an author. All three were ruled out in the end. I didn't want to go back to PR; I couldn't find the right way into nonprofit work; and I wasn't sure writing books could be something sustainable.

In the end I chose education.

That has a lot to do with the book, because what struck me most about the earthquake was that while recording other people's lives I met several hundred people and heard a great many life stories. It also gave me a chance to reflect, to think about questions I rarely think about in ordinary life: “What are we living for? What is the most important thing in your life? When do you need to start doing the most important thing?” Many people say, “I'm not in a position yet, let me make money first,” or wait for some other condition to be met before doing what they want to do.

One thing stayed with me. When I interviewed villagers in Yingxiu I asked almost everyone the same question: “Before the earthquake, what was your life like, and what plans did you have?”

After the sudden event cut their plans short, many of them had a new view of life. Among the many Yingxiu residents I met, one thing came up again and again without prompting: whatever you think matters in life, don't put it off, do it now. New views of life like this affected me too.

Before the earthquake they all talked about a business they wanted to start, a new venture; their whole lives were built around getting more.

After going through the earthquake they felt many other things mattered just as much — relations between people, their own mental balance — things they had never paid attention to before.

So when I was planning my career, on one hand I'd always liked education and wanted to work in it but had never made up my mind; on the other hand it came out of the earthquake interviews. The first thing I looked at was how residents responded to a disaster like that, and in the process I kept hearing the same thing across many stories, especially from the last people pulled out alive from under the rubble.

Many said that what finally decided whether you lived was absolutely not where you were pinned or how badly you were hurt; in the end it came down mostly to psychological factors, to what people call “inner strength” carrying you through. Especially those buried five, six, seven days. They would mention that others buried with them were alive at first too, some of them in better shape, and in the end couldn't hold on.

So I began asking where a person's inner strength actually comes from. Was there some method — education, say — to systematically cultivate and draw out that strength? That was a big push behind my choosing education in the end.

In 2012 I started looking into what actually happens every day on the front line of the “Chinese education” we all talk about — in the schools and the classrooms. Was there really nothing to be glad about besides students jumping off buildings, students stabbing teachers, and the announcement of the top gaokao scorer?

So through the first half of 2012 I went around the country frantically collecting cases of educational innovation of every kind. If I could bring all the good practices I'd seen together on a single education platform, I thought, this dream of mine might be possible. That is where the Quanyuan high school training camp began.

Then I set up an experimental high school in Maoshan, Jiangsu, a small full-time school. Every day I split my time between repairing the old house and looking for students. In the first week of classes I spread all 120-odd textbooks for nine high school subjects over three years across a table, printed out the contents of all three years of study, and papered the classroom walls with them. I said we were going to do something: tear the books up!

Then we edited them again. I had the students string together whatever knowledge they thought was related into new learning modules — modules on world political thought and institutions, genetic engineering, global civilizational history, architecture and cities …

I think the structure of the existing textbooks is badly flawed. Required Politics Module 1 is all about economics; required History Module 2 in high school is also all about economics; and in high school Geography we see plenty of economics too — regional economic planning, tourism geography and so on. I don't understand why material that is entirely about economics has to be scattered across three subjects.

Our first cohort had only six students, the second twelve, and by the third we had two classes and nearly 90. We ran the whole thing for three years and saw one class graduate.

The Quanyuan experimental class was covered a great deal, far more than my book, and is much better known. In 2014 a CCTV crew filmed us for more than half a year, because in China it was a completely new model of educational innovation.

Most of the students in our first two cohorts were sent by charities: Miao children from the mountains of Guizhou who had been supported for years by nonprofits and were starting from a very low base. Others were students the regular high schools wouldn't take, who had gone to vocational schools. By the usual measures none of them had any chance of university. They are all doing well now, at universities around the country, and a number of them are studying abroad.

The goal we've now set for education is “drawing out inner strength.” And settling on that goal is tied directly to what I went through and felt over the course of the earthquake interviews.

If there had been no earthquake I'd probably still be in PR, and I'd certainly be living much better than I do now — the firm I co-founded back then is already listed on the New Third Board.

But these six years in education have changed me a great deal. For the first time I found something I can honestly call a lifelong pleasure. Second, education is a subject everyone cares about; people complain constantly and act rarely, and I feel I now have a chance to make real, concrete changes. That is a very strong reason to keep going. Our teaching system has reached schools all over the country, from remote villages to schools nationally known for curriculum reform. This year more than a hundred schools will be working with us.”

In 2013, when the magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck Lushan County in Ya'an, Sichuan, Zhang Liang told the talk show Behind the Headlines with Wentao (《锵锵三人行》): “Five years ago we paid such a huge price — more than 80,000 people died — and we should have gathered a great deal of experience, which we never properly dug into, summed up or built on, including our understanding of earthquakes themselves, which is in fact still quite shallow.”

Compared with 2008, he argued, Chinese thinking about earthquakes and disaster in 2013 had not merely failed to change much; it had gone backwards. “The falling attention paid to the people caught in the Lushan earthquake is one example,” he said on the program.

That same year, when Zhang Liang went back to Yingxiu, he found the place desolate and its residents scraping by.

He said he had once used the media to call for more attention to how the “people” of post-quake Yingxiu were living.

It made little difference.

Five more years have now passed since Zhang Liang's last visit to Yingxiu, and the place is almost exactly as he left it — if anything, more desolate.

But Zhang Liang doesn't even know that the symbol-laden Love Cube Museum has closed.

“What stayed with me is that when I went back in 2013 it happened to be the May 12 anniversary, and there was hardly anyone in Yingxiu. Many local residents were deeply worried about their future.

As a town, a living body, you could clearly feel the life in it slowly shrinking.

Plenty of people had moved away; plenty of others had bought homes and settled nearby. Many houses in Yingxiu were shut and locked.

The biggest problem with Yingxiu's planning at the time was this. Neighboring towns, Shuimo for one, used post-quake reconstruction to build very successful themed towns. When Shuimo designed its plan, it built in a lot of commercial functions from the start in order to bring the local economy back to life, and it had a clear idea of the kind of people it might attract later.

But in Yingxiu, as far as I know, once all the plans came out, residents envied the neighboring towns for finding new sources of growth, while they could feel nothing of the kind themselves.

Because Yingxiu was the epicenter, it obviously could not be built as an ordinary town. The tone set at the time was that Yingxiu would be the display platform for the entire epicenter. Everything was raised to the national level: it was to carry the role of “national earthquake memorial site,” “national earthquake museum,” model of post-disaster reconstruction. Rather little thought went into residents' daily lives.

The earliest plans treated Yingxiu as a kind of living specimen, without allowing that it was itself a living district, a community, with things of its own that had to grow.

Yingxiu's town government had almost no say in the direction. The plan for the town had to be discussed at an executive meeting of the State Council; Sichuan province wasn't even qualified to decide. Once the major policy was fixed, it was carried out exactly as written. By the rules of officialdom, nobody dared change it lightly.

That's why most of the main earthquake memorial facilities are in Yingxiu, all concentrated in this one area.

Why bring in so many world-class architects to design all these venues? Paul Andreu, who designed the National Centre for the Performing Arts, and He Jingtang, one of China's top academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering — even they each got only one small building. Any public facility of any size went to global tender, designed by a famous name, at enormous cost.

Why put up a chaotic, bizarre box like the one at the Love Cube? A lot of these large public buildings really are style over substance; they take up a lot of land and a lot of investment. Take a small plot instead and use it for planning and design that serve people's livelihoods, and the effect would be entirely different.

In fact, for the epicenter, Yingxiu's most valuable resources were preserved very poorly. Walk down the streets of Yingxiu now and the traces of the earthquake are extremely faint. The only thing left to see is Xuankou Middle School, and even there much of the signage is full of holes; nobody planned any of it seriously.

Of Yingxiu Elementary School only a small playground and a flagpole remain; visitors have no idea what they are looking at.

The many ruins of the Yingxiu Bay Power Plant, if they had really been kept intact, would have drawn plenty of people who want to understand what happened during the earthquake. They would have been the best physical evidence.

But now Yingxiu has become a brand-new so-called “residential compound.” People come and there is nothing to see.

Yingxiu's reconstruction was slower even than Beichuan's; it took the longest of all. Because Yingxiu was special, being the epicenter, its plan had to be approved at an executive meeting of the State Council, and could only pass after the premier had read it himself. So it dragged on a long time before the reconstruction plan was settled.

Residents naturally wanted to go back and start over as soon as possible, but the construction period in between was long and touched on so much that for a while every resident was moved out and the place became one big building site. Later Yingxiu was hit by secondary disasters several times: the very severe August 14 mudslide washed it all away again. That was an enormous blow.

I remember that early morning, when the water came in, villagers were already calling me, including the head of the Yingxiu health clinic. They all felt: why is this happening again? It hit morale very hard.

It shows that for all the time spent on the construction plan, it still left serious hidden dangers.

When everything was finally built and people moved back, most villagers were at a loss, because the whole way they made a living had changed. The biggest landowner in Yingxiu used to be the Yingxiu Bay Power Plant; more than half the buildings and the land were its. After the earthquake the government requisitioned all of it for reconstruction and the state gave the plant another plot to rebuild on.

I interviewed the plant a great deal, and I knew its party secretary well. They badly wanted to stay in Yingxiu; they were attached to the place and felt it had to be rebuilt where it stood. But the plan left them no room, because Yingxiu's whole positioning was as a shop window for post-disaster reconstruction, so no space was set aside for enterprises.

The plant's old site is now all residential blocks, or public facilities and so-called park greenbelts.

The big enterprises are gone, so the jobs are gone; the land is gone, so people's basic living is gone; there aren't enough tourists, so there isn't enough business for their own small trades either …

For now there is no good way out of this.

Besides land, Yingxiu residents used to have several other important sources of income. Hauling freight was one, but after the reconstruction boom passed there wasn't much business in that either. There were also many sand works panning river sand, and people running their own fish ponds. A lot of these side livelihoods are gone now, cut off completely, because the riverbed had to be regulated and fish farming was banned outright.

2013 was extremely bleak. When I went back then I made a point of appealing through the media. Many villagers told me life had become impossible; it was hard. There was no income, because their land was gone too. All they had was this small trade, and the flow of visitors could not possibly support a town of several thousand people.

Yingxiu ended up carrying many responsibilities it should never have had to carry, national responsibilities — but at heart it was still a town of a few thousand residents. It really could not bear that much.”

Cover image: Unsplash