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Govt center in the air weighs on rebuilding

By Huang Zhiling and Wang Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-22 09:10

The new administrative complex of the Chengdu government in Sichuan province. The controversial building, said to cost 1.2 billion yuan ($180 million), has been put on sale to raise funds for quake reconstruction.

Faced with the gargantuan task of reconstruction after the devastating quake struck on May 12, Sichuan authorities are prepared to make any sacrifice to put the province's economy back on track.

"Chengdu this year will cut 10 percent of the operational cost of the departments under the Chengdu municipal committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), Chengdu municipal government, the city's people's congress and political consultative conference," He Huazhang, chief of the provincial capital's publicity department, told media last Wednesday.

The 8.0-magnitude quake left 4,304 people dead, 33,506 wounded and more than 1 million homeless in Chengdu alone.

Economic losses were put at more than 120 billion yuan ($18 billion) for the city, 92 km from the quake epicenter.

One major challenge is the resettlement of the homeless, which is said to be on the scale of that seen for the Three Gorges Dam project, the city's publicity chief said.

In that instance, the resettlement had taken a decade.

Fiscally, Chengdu needs at least 150 billion yuan for total reconstruction efforts, He said.

The city is short of that mark by tens of billions of yuan.

Drastic measures are now being taken to cut down on expenses and build up funds for reconstruction, including canceling official trips for overseas exchanges and banning departments from buying new cars for official use.

Above all, the city announced last Wednesday that it will sell its new administrative center to raise funds for reconstruction.

The center costs 1.2 billion yuan, covers 17 hectares and is located in the city's southern suburbs, near the Shuangliu airport.

It was completed at the end of last year, after three years' construction.

The complex has a main building shaped like Beijing's egg-shaped National Grand Theater and its peripheral structures borrow designs from the Olympic National Stadium, better known as the Bird's Nest.

More than 5,000 people can be accommodated in them.

The idea of clustering all the administrative departments into one complex was aimed at improving work efficiency.

Before the quake struck, most of the departments under the CPC Chengdu municipal committee and government had already moved to the new center.

Only the offices of the city's top leaders, including the party secretary, mayor, people's congress and political consultative conference, had yet to move in.

But the quake paved the way for the city's decision to sell the administrative complex.

While the move won the support of residents and administrative employees, controversy soon built up around the actual sale of the complex.

Jie Liang, an official with the city's sports bureau, told China Daily that she would feel more at ease in her old office located in the Chengdu Sports Stadium downtown, considering how quake victims continued to suffer in Sichuan.

Her office had moved to the center less than a week before the temblor struck.

Following the disaster, Jie had gone to several quake zones to help in relief work and came face to face with the suffering of victims.

In Dujiangyan, where 900 students were killed in a school building collapse, Jie found a distraught middle-aged mother facing the body of her daughter.

"And when I went to quake-hit Mianzhu about 10 days ago, I did not expect to see about half of the city's population of 500,000 still living in tents. It felt wrong to be staying in a grand edifice like the center while millions of people are homeless," she said.

Also, the new complex is too far from the city center, Jie said.

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