The photo taken on March 28 by an unmanned aerial vehicle shows the rebuilt Beichuan County in Sichuan Province. Great changes have taken place in the county 10 years after it was hit by the Wenchuan earthquake. 

After a decade of arduous reconstruction, the earthquake-affected area in Wenchuan, Sichuan Province, has undergone tremendous changes. On May 4, a series of academic activities, including the Sichuan Earthquake Disaster and the Academic Conference on Rehabilitation and Reconstruction, the 10th Anniversary of the Wenchuan Earthquake and the fourth International Symposium on Earthquake in China, were held in Chengdu.

Scientific reconstruction has effectively improved the living standards of the local people. Shuimo Town, built with the assistance of Guangdong Province, was rated by the United Nations as “the world’s best example of post-disaster reconstruction.” The Beichuan new county built with the help of Shandong Province has become one of the most beautiful counties in Sichuan Province and even in China.

“Ten years have passed. Time has brought a great change to Wenchuan’s urban and rural areas. The villages have been rebuilt, and the people in the disaster-affected areas are striving to become stronger. Almost everyone says that the post-disaster reconstruction has made the overall development of Wenchuan at least 30 years ahead of schedule,” said Xu Ping, a Wenchuan scholar and professor from the CPC Central Party School.

In the past 10 years, the reconstruction work has interacted with academic research. The academic community recently released a series of research results, such as Academic Thoughts on Disaster. In addition, a number of research institutes have been set up, including the Earthquake Disaster Research Center established by the Sichuan Academy of Social Sciences as well as the Sichuan Earthquake Reconstruction, Support and Research Center jointly set up by Sichuan University and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, all of which have made tangible contributions to disaster relief work. At the same time, disasterology has developed into a new discipline with a certain amount of international influence.

Academia has made collective efforts to improve response to earthquakes, thus contributing experience and wisdom on how to tackle disasters. Scholars also have strived to promote academic exchanges on the Wenchuan earthquake and global cooperation in this field. Fan Wenbin, chief professor from the Western Yunnan University for Science and Technology, said that his university called on scholars to hold the first Forum on Disaster Anthropology in Chengdu after the Wenchuan earthquake. Chengdu has become a major academic location for the discipline in the past decade. Plenty of applied anthropological studies have paid attention to disaster response. Future work should introduce cross-border studies to disaster anthropology, Fan said.

“We are vigorous to establish an emerging discipline by integrating social sciences with natural sciences to aid disaster prevention, governance and reconstruction. As witnesses, we should never forget the trauma brought by the disaster. As scholars, we should contribute to the prevention and relief of disasters,” said Li Mingquan, director of the Earthquake Research Centre at the Sichuan Provincial Academy of Social Sciences. The center has published 12 books about disastrology, including Road of Reconstruction: Theories and Practices in the Reconstruction of Lushan Earthquake and History of Disastrology Literature in Modern China.

In the past decade, research institutes across the country have utilized their advantages to promote research on disaster reduction and prevention. After the Wenchuan earthquake, Southwest Jiaotong University opened China’s first lab for disaster-prevention engineering. Students from its Department of Marxism went deep into the disaster-affected areas to investigate and interview.

(edited by SUI JINGJING)