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DUJIANGYAN, China: From the heart of Beijing to the
devastated southwest, China came to a standstill Monday to mourn its
earthquake victims as the number of dead, missing or buried soared
past 71,000.
Air sirens wailed across the
country as most motorists stopped and blared their horns, bringing
an eerie halt to China’s usually bustling big cities for three
minutes from 2:28 p.m. (0628 GMT), the moment the quake struck a
week earlier.
Thousands of people, many
university students, converged on Beijing’s Tiananmen Square,
holding up flags and chanting slogans of support for the victims,
while trading was halted on China’s stock markets.
The crowd at Tiananmen shouted:
“Jia you! Jia you!,” an exhortation loosely translated as “Go!
Go!,” while punching the air with their fists.
In the devastated town of
Dujiangyan, 60 relatives of dead children held candles and incense
at one of the thousands of flattened schools.
In solemn scenes on state
television, Chinese soldiers earlier raised the national flag at
Tiananmen Square and then lowered it to half-mast.
The official grieving came as
mudslides and a fresh aftershock hampered the relief efforts, even
as two survivors were pulled out after a week under the rubble.
The transport ministry reported
that mudslides had buried more than 200 relief workers over the past
several days.
The government last week
estimated more than 50,000 people died in the May 12
quake—measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale—that reduced entire
towns to heaps of steel and concrete.
But that number looked to be a
huge underestimate with the Communist Party chief of worst-hit
Sichuan saying that, as of late Sunday, 32,173 people had been
confirmed killed there.
Another 9,509 people were buried
and 29,418 others missing, Liu Qibao said, according to Xinhua,
bringing the overall figure to 71,100.
It has triggered an outpouring of
emotion in the rapidly developing country of 1.3 billion people,
with thousands offering to volunteer or using the Internet to send
condolences.
Others have offered to care for
children made orphans in the disaster.
The official China News Service
said the mourning was unprecedented for a national disaster in the
world’s most populous country. Even the relay of the Beijing
Olympic torch, which has elicited strong excitement across China in
the run-up to the Games in August, was called off for three days as
a mark of respect.
The five-star red flag was also
at half-staff in the Chinese territory of Hong Kong and at Chinese
embassies overseas, according to state media. The government pulled
entertainment programs off television for three days.
--AFP
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