Making sense of
disaster

McGill experts and students discuss
the effects and implications of last
month’s earthquake

APPEALING FOR SICHUAN: Julian Xue

by MATT JONES

Six weeks after the earthquake that killed over 60,000 in China’s Sichuan province, Montreal’s Chinese community is finding ways to pick up the pieces together. The past weeks have seen numerous relief collections and fundraisers spanning the city’s heterogeneous community, from Tibetans to ethnic Chinese from mainland China and Taiwan. Now a group of McGill students and professors is organizing a conference that hopes to find out what we can learn from such a cataclysm.

“I’ve never seen the Montreal Chinese community get together like this,” says conference organizer Julian Z. Xue. But collecting money only goes so far. “Such passion and generosity is great, but ultimately it’s not sufficient. You need a lot of knowledge, information, thought and reflection to understand what happened,” he says.

The conference hopes to touch on issues that went unnoticed in the few weeks of media frenzy that followed the disaster. A good place to start might be what caused it, a question seismologist Dr. John Stix, chair of McGill’s Earth and Planetary Sciences department, hopes to shed light on in his talk about the natural history of the earthquake.

Other panels will look at the politics behind what happened. “There will be a panel that looks at how the earthquake will affect the Olympics and vice versa. And how the question of Tibet affects the earthquake and vice versa,” Xue says.

Although the Chinese government’s response to the catastrophe was generally applauded for its quickness and efficiency, there are those who say it wasn’t enough.

“Some parents held a protest asking why schools had collapsed while government buildings remained,” Xue says. “The earthquake happened during school time, so there were a lot of casualties. People were asking why they had been so badly built and are accusing the government of corruption.”

China is no stranger to natural disasters, having experienced some of the world’s deadliest earthquakes, floods and droughts. McGill’s Dr. Griet Vankeerberghen will look at how disaster response this time compares with China’s history of dealing with disasters, while Dr. Erik Kuhonta from the Department of East Asian Studies will contrast it to the crisis that followed Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, when the military junta that rules the country initially rejected international aid.

The conference won’t limit itself to looking at how things happen on the other side of the world. Dr. Peter Button from McGill’s Department of Media and Communication will take a critical look at how the Western media covered the earthquake. “People in the West have a grand narrative about China and like to feed every fact they have into it,” says Xue. “What’s important is that stories have to come out in context.”

Finally, a panel of medical professionals will look at the psychiatric disorders that may ensue from the disaster and how the five million made homeless can be reabsorbed into Chinese society.

Proceeds from the collection at the event will go to Tzu Chi, a Taiwanese non-governmental organization that Xue says was the first to arrive in Sichuan after the earthquake. “Tzu Chi was also the first group to send psychiatrists, which is difficult because psychiatry is not recognized in China. Before that, there were only about 10 psychiatrists serving [a population where] half a million may have post-traumatic stress disorder.”