Related Articles
Article Tools
By all standards, it will be the toughest reconstruction task since 1976 when the northeastern coastal Chinese city of Tangshan was leveled by a 7.8-magnitude quake, which claimed over 240,000 lives.
But in comparison with the reconstruction in the wake of the Tangshan earthquake, the mission this time is blessed with a strong economy, which has been growing annually at nearly 10 percent on average since 1978 when China began its reform-and-opening-up drive.
Economic toll and loss of private properties
Zhu Jing, in her 30s, could have never imagined she would become what she is today -- a refugee in debt and with nothing valuable.
Following the May 12 earthquake, she was forced to flee her hometown Dujiangyan, one of the hardest-hit city, to neighboring Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan.
In Dujiangyan, the devastating earthquake had turned her home -- a flat which she bought on mortgage two years ago -- into a dilapidated building unsuitable to live in, said Zhu, an employee of a local power supply company.
"I still owe the bank nearly 100,000 yuan (about 14,300 U.S. dollars). I have spent almost the same sum to renovate my house and buy home appliances," she said.
"Because of the disaster, my house has gone. My hardworking over the last several years has gone down the drain," said the heartbroken woman.
Zhu was not alone. In Sichuan some 2.9 million houses were flattened and nearly 14 million others damaged, according to a rough estimate.
Among them, only a small number was covered by house insurance. As of Sunday, China insurance companies had received just 28,400 house-insurance claims, said the China Insurance Regulatory Commission.
These houses were just the tip of an iceberg of the damaged or ruined properties in Sichuan.
Zhuang Jian, a senior economist of the Asian Development Bank (ADB), said that the disaster had caused huge loss to property and wealth overnight, which is a challenging problem for reconstruction.
Clearly, the quake had ruined the economy of dozens of counties hit hard by the quake, Zhuang said.
A preliminary investigation showed that 14,207 industrial enterprises suffered 67 billion yuan of direct economic loss in the calamity, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said Monday.
Wang Bin, Communist Party secretary of the epicenter Wenchuan County, said the quake had flattened or greatly damaged nearly all Wenchuan's buildings and ruined factories and infrastructure.
"Undoubtedly, Wenchuan's economy sustained a fatal blow. The infrastructure built in the last decades was destroyed suddenly," Wang said.
As the Chinese governments at all levels is still focused on quake relief and disease prevention work, there is no official figure of overall economic loss arising from the disaster.
Some economists had estimated that the Chinese economy suffered a loss of over 500 billion yuan from the earthquake, more than three times that caused by the snow and ice storm in February, which swept across central China and disrupted transportation and the energy supply and pushed up commodities prices.
Zhuang, of the ADB, maintained that the earthquake's impact on the Chinese economy will be quite limited since Sichuan's GDP accounted for no more than five percent of the country's total.
