DEFUSING SOCIAL UPSET

As the challenge shifts from rescuing people to home rebuilding, quake zone government employees say they have felt an ever-mounting pressure to satisfying public demand.

Cai Xiaoling, secretary of the Huagai Township Committee of the CPC, always has her office's door open for residents to make an inquiry.

"People have diversified demands. Some of them didn't match with existing policies and thus could not be satisfied. What I could do is to stick to the regulations and give them a good explanation," she said."Otherwise, trivial misunderstandings might turn into grievances."

Cai didn't elaborate on the specific demands of residents. Yang Yong, from Qingxi Town, said that disputes might rise from anywhere, the allocation of stipends and relief materials, land requisition and evaluation of housing damages.

"An effective way to defuse problems is to use some foresight and think ahead of the public," said Su Zhiguang, secretary of the Zhuanwan Village Branch Committee of the CPC in Longnan City of Gansu Province.

In the early stage when everyone was busy surviving, Su who ran a construction company expected upcoming home rebuilding to drive up the prices of construction materials.

He immediately withdrew more than one million yuan from his own bank accounts, placing orders for 1.7 million bricks and 1,500 tonnes of cement and mobilized his own engineering equipment to help farmers level ruins and rubble for free.

When the price of bricks more than doubled later from 0.3 yuan each to 0.8 yuan, and that of cement rose from 400 yuan per tonne to 600 yuan, local households found themselves spared at least 5,000 yuan each.

"Our village is a small world. Everyone of us knows how things stand. Su wholeheartedly took care of the village. He had our trust," said villager Gong Zhengdong.

Another "time-tested" method to prevent disputes, many officers say, is transparency. Niu Junping, chief of Paosha Town in Longnan City, even likened home rebuilding to "a test of rural democracy".

"Without listening to the opinions of the people concerned, government officials should not make final decisions. Only after each rural household voiced their concerns could their individual interests be respected," he said.

In the first month after the earthquake, Zhuanwan Village held 30 meetings with representatives from each surviving household to discuss the distribution of relief materials, rebuilding planning and other village affairs. Meetings of the same scale were held only twice or three times each year in the past.

Researcher Shan Guangnai with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said that when it came to addressing public disputes, "so long as no state secrets are involved, explanation is better than silence while transparency is always the best explanation".

In an effort to ease the hardships of the quake survivors, China's central government has set a goal to shorten the rebuilding from three years to two years. Many quake zone officers admitted they faced even tougher days ahead.

Jiang Mingzhong, deputy mayor of Shifang in Sichuan, said that many problems exposed by the earthquake were "chronic", for instance, insufficient local finance had bottle-necked investment in people's livelihoods in the past.

"Complex as it is, quake zone governance also gives us a chance to examine what we missed in the past and to make our best efforts to bring the people a brighter future," he said.

(Xinhua News Agency May 12, 2009)