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Chengdu shakes off earthquake

By Huang Zhiling, Diao Ying and Wang Wei (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-07 20:45

Although it is nearly three months since the devastating May 12 earthquake, some residents outside Sichuan province who call their friends in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan, ask if there are still aftershocks and end the conversation saying "you have led a hard life".

Deng Gongli, chief of the city's tourism administration, recalls the time he phoned the chief of the Harbin tourism administration in northeast China's Heilongjiang province about a month after the magnitude-8 quake.

Deng asked the Harbin chief, who is his friend, to organize tour groups to visit the city to help its tourism sector.

His friend was surprised that Deng would ask him to organize tourists to visit a city 92 km from the quake's epicenter.

"Are you calling from a tent?" the Harbin chief asked.

Yet the truth is Chengdu was unscathed in the devastating quake that killed nearly 70,000 nationwide. Only Dujiangyan, Pengzhou and Chongzhou, three cities under its administration, were hit.

About a month after the quake, life in Chengdu returned to normal. When journalists from Phoenix Satellite TV in Hong Kong visited Chengdu in late June, they found locals selling snacks, clothes and shoes as usual. Buyers and sellers bargained. What was more important, smiles had returned to their faces.

"We even found smiles on faces of residents in Dujiangyan where 90 percent of the houses were damaged in the quake," one of them told Ge Honglin, mayor of Chengdu, in an interview.

Downtown Chengdu only felt the quake - buildings shook as if they would collapse, but they didn't. Its losses mainly came in hard-hit Dujiangyan, Pengzhou and Chongzhou.

"Relying on agriculture and tourism, those three cities account for around 9.2 percent of Chengdu's GDP," Ge said.

Zhou Mi, deputy chief of the Chengdu committee for the promotion of investment, said the city still thrives as "the commercial center in southwest China".

A month after the quake, 23 new foreign-funded enterprises had registered in Chengdu with plans to invest nearly $134 million.

Only eight days after the quake, Tencent Inc, a popular Internet service portal, signed a contract worth 550 million yuan to set up a research and development center in Chengdu.

Tencent was the first to sign on for investment with Chengdu after the quake. "The decision is in line with the development strategy of Tencent," said Chen Yidan, Tencent CEO.

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