Opportunity In Ruins:Research On Reconstruction Of The Wenchuan Earthquake Disaster

Wenchuan earthquake in2008have caused intense damage to some areas in China, including Sichuan, Shanxi and Gansu provinces. The three years recovery and reconstruction movement, which dominated by the state, on the one hand got a rapid accumulation of a large number of investment and construction projects to improve the infrastructure, public services and production facilities systems in the affected areas, and on the other hand integrated almost all the national development strategy of industrialization, urbanization and new socialist countryside. State-directed reconstruction and development-directed reconstruction become two prominent feature of Wenchuan earthquake restoration and reconstruction, and which also indicates that a mature disaster response mechanism has been emerged in China. Comply with rules of this mechanism, disaster is treat to be a opportunity of development, and development is regard to be a antidote of response to disasters. Based on the fieldwork in Shifang City, one of the extremely affected areas, located in the hinderland province of Sichuan province, this study described and analyzed the disaster response mode on the development era.Firstly, disaster recovery and reconstruction movement represent a multiple process. It began with the reconstruction planning from the center government, and put into effect by the local government in such a way that translating every planning guidelines into specific projects, and then mainly undertook as land acquisition and resettlement at the grass-roots level in the interaction between the government and rural society. The earthquake disaster reconstruction is not limited to the recovery of damaged fragments, but concerned with much broader development process, to stimulate economic growth, industrial restructuring, the integration of urban and rural construction, social management reform, and so on. Secondly, the Wenchuan earthquake reconstruction movement led to dramatic social change of rural society, this effect even more than the earthquake affected themselves. On account of the diversify function division designed by the reconstruction plan, and the classification on implementation of the rebuilding measures, villages were divided into different parts with different destiny. Some villages disappeared, and some ones transformed. While the rural population enjoying more modern conveniences, they also be more firmly locked into a social system which only ask them to play role of pure producer and consumer. The social relationships hold rural community together were also destroyed by the sudden input of developmental resources, and were superseded by new management and control relations between the modern state and citizens. Finaly, the promotion of reconstruction movement depends on the prosperity of the resource mobilization, the operation of emergent mechanism and the digestion capabilities to resistances. By framing disaster discourse and practice in respond to disasters narrative, they strapped the disaster reconstruction together with the development meta-narrative, give support to the legitimacy of the state-directed and development-directed reconstruction.Wenchuan earthquake reconstruction movement presented a profound case of disaster response in the development era. To be extended to examine both in the context of the background of China’s development and in the context of global disaster response practice, we can found that, succeed poverty and environment, disaster response has become another frontier of development apparatus. During its colonizing process, the state power and market forces also formed hegemony to the affected rural areas. Therefore, re-examine the practice of disaster response from the perspective of the post-development study, reconstruct society should probably be the corrected road decentering hegemony of state power and market forces.