The Study On Collective Monitoring And Collective Defense Movement In Xingtai(1966-1978)

On March 8 and 22,1966,an earthquake measuring 6·8 and 7·2 on the Richter scale hit Xingtai,Hebei province.This was the first major earthquake to hit a densely populated area since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.The earthquake had a complex and profound impact on Chinese society.The loss and panic of the people in the earthquake area once occupied an important aspect of their lives.Dispelling people’s panic and developing antiearthquake undertakings had become an important part of testing state behavior,governance capacity,national image and legitimacy construction.At that time,the "Cultural Revolution"was about to begin,and the development of the revolutionary situation all affected the development of scientific work to a certain extent.In this context,"preparing for famine"extended into a new meaning of "preparing for earthquakes",making the earthquake prevention cause once tended to be "politicized",that is,earthquake science work and politics were linked together.After the Xingtai Earthquake in 1966,the cause of seismic monitoring and prevention began in the People’s Republic of China.With the advantage of keenly discovering abnormal phenomena in daily life,the people actively "moved",effectively alleviating the embarrassment of earthquake work in China,which had previously been blank,and becoming a new force on the earthquake work.The collective monitoring and collective defense work had been developing day by day,and it had developed into a mass movement in the 1970s.This is the result of the Communist Party of China’s implementation of the mass line in the era of socialist revolution,and it is also a concentrated manifestation of the politicization of earthquake prevention.During the movement,seismic science and politics were closely integrated.On the one hand,the idea that seismic work was a "political task" was instilled from top to bottom by the state through meetings at different levels.On the other hand,it was the reception and personalized treatment of the "political task" by the masses and the units of observation points.This interactive form constituted the basic daily pattern of the collective monitoring and collective defense movement in Xingtai city in the post-earthquake era.The collective monitoring and collective defense movement was born and developed in the period of "Cultural Revolution",so it was inevitably affected by the changes of domestic and foreign political situation at that time.Under the influence of the revolutionary situation,the movement of Xingtai was sometimes aggressive,and also had a side that tended to be rational and realistic.In the process,the revolutionary situation not only promoted the development of the movement,but also gradually exposed the shortcomings of its lack of guarantee of time,personnel and security.In addition,when China’s diplomacy achieved a new breakthrough in the 1970s,the collective monitoring and collective defense movement,as the"representative" of "earthquake diplomacy",made outstanding achievements in foreign exchanges,which directly fed back to the development of the movement in China,including Xingtai.The connection between the movement and the political situation at home and abroad revealed the characteristics of the externalization of seismic scientific work and politics.The collective monitoring and collective defense movement in the 1970s seemed to be a mass movement that gradually spread across the country.The collective monitoring and collective defense movement in different regions was affected by administrative forces in many aspects.And the operation and management mechanism of the pest control movement,which was also a monitoring mass movement,was actually the same as the combination of earthquake work and politics in the collective monitoring and collective defense movement.It shows that the combination of scientific work and politics was a common occurrence in monitoring mass movements at that time.The affirmation of the mode by scholars in the United States,Japan and other countries in different periods shows that the mass movement formed under this model has a certain rationality in a specific period.However,the shortcomings of the collective monitoring and collective defense movement and the fact of its decline prompt us to reflect on the tension existing in the combination of the scientific way and the political campaign way,so as to provide us reference.