Tangshan Earthquake

Author: Qian Gang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: Twenty-four thousand people are undoubtedly a tragic whole. They took away the complete vitality and emotions ten years ago, leaving Tangshan with a sense of incompleteness in both appearance and spirit to this day. Everything seems to have vanished, yet everything has been left behind. It is like suffering without pain, like grief without sorrow. I hope the "tragic history" of the Tangshan Earthquake will never be drowned out or forgotten. I also hope that one day, the National People's Congress will pass a resolution to have bells tolled simultaneously across China at dawn on "July 28th" to mourn the victims of the Tangshan Earthquake and all natural disasters, and to pray for the peace of the Chinese land and the entire Earth—Qian Gang.
A Voice of Life: All life has equal value! The Tangshan Earthquake of September 28, 1976, is the most important and tragic page in the four hundred-year history of earthquakes worldwide, causing the death of 240,000 people, 160,000 severe injuries, and reducing a major industrial city to ruins in an instant, with direct economic losses exceeding 10 billion yuan. The author once rushed to Tangshan to participate in disaster relief efforts and personally experienced the profound suffering of the region, which was as devastating as a war. Afterward, the author spent ten years tirelessly interviewing and tracking, meticulously organizing and analyzing, using sincere emotions and refined writing to comprehensively record the various responses of humanity to natural disasters at that time, tracing the mysterious facts and phenomena before and after the earthquake, and reflecting on the ultimate question of how humans should coexist with nature in the process of modernization.