Chinese authorities said yesterday that Buddhist monks had been advised to leave an earthquake zone in a Tibetan region because specialized personnel were needed for reconstruction work, rejecting accusations that they had been told to leave for political reasons.
The death toll from last week’s earthquake rose to 2,187, with schoolchildren accounting for more than 200 deaths.
The information office for the State Council, China’s Cabinet, issued a statement in response to reporters’ questions about why Tibetan monks were told this week to leave Yushu County, the epicenter of the quake in a remote corner of Qinghai Province.
“Now it’s the phase for epidemic prevention and reconstruction and [it] requires specialized personnel to start their work,” it said. “It would bring more difficulties to disaster relief work if lots of unprofessional personnel were at the scene.”
Though “we fully recognize [the] contribution of monks who came to the disaster zone from other areas, in order to ensure the scientific effectiveness and order of rescue work, we advised them to return to their monasteries,” the statement said.
Earlier this week, Tibetan Buddhist monks told reporters they had been told to leave the area. Monasteries were given verbal orders to recall thousands of monks who had flooded to the region from neighboring provinces in the wake of the April 14 quake that left more than 12,000 people injured. A total of 9,145 people remained hospitalized as of Thursday, the Health Ministry said.
China’s communist leadership remains wary of Buddhist monks because of their loyalty to their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, whom Beijing says has pushed for independence in Tibet. At the same time, the government has capitalized on the full-scale relief operation to show it cares about China’s Tibetan communities, some of which staged anti-government protests in 2008.
The State Council Information Office acknowledged the monks’ “positive role” in quake efforts, saying they helped with rescue work, donating money and materials, organizing prayer sessions and conducting memorials for the dead.
State media quoted local officials in Yushu as saying yesterday that they too appreciated the monks’ work and did not request that they leave the quake zone.
“We did not give or receive any orders of such kind. Actually, we are very grateful for the role Tibetan monks played in the relief effort,” Wang Yuhu (王玉虎), governor of Yushu Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, was quoted as saying by Xinhua.
The quake killed 207 schoolchildren, a third of whom died after being trapped in collapsed school buildings, said Cering Tai, deputy director of the provincial education bureau, the official Xinhua news agency reported. The others died outside schools.
The earthquake affected 63 schools, with many school buildings cracked, but not destroyed, which allowed many students to escape, he said. The vast majority of buildings in Jiegu town in Yushu, mostly made of mud-brick and wood, collapsed.
CLASH OF WORDS: While China’s foreign minister insisted the US play a constructive role with China, Rubio stressed Washington’s commitment to its allies in the region The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday affirmed and welcomed US Secretary of State Marco Rubio statements expressing the US’ “serious concern over China’s coercive actions against Taiwan” and aggressive behavior in the South China Sea, in a telephone call with his Chinese counterpart. The ministry in a news release yesterday also said that the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs had stated many fallacies about Taiwan in the call. “We solemnly emphasize again that our country and the People’s Republic of China are not subordinate to each other, and it has been an objective fact for a long time, as well as
‘CHARM OFFENSIVE’: Beijing has been sending senior Chinese officials to Okinawa as part of efforts to influence public opinion against the US, the ‘Telegraph’ reported Beijing is believed to be sowing divisions in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture to better facilitate an invasion of Taiwan, British newspaper the Telegraph reported on Saturday. Less than 750km from Taiwan, Okinawa hosts nearly 30,000 US troops who would likely “play a pivotal role should Beijing order the invasion of Taiwan,” it wrote. To prevent US intervention in an invasion, China is carrying out a “silent invasion” of Okinawa by stoking the flames of discontent among locals toward the US presence in the prefecture, it said. Beijing is also allegedly funding separatists in the region, including Chosuke Yara, the head of the Ryukyu Independence
UNITED: The premier said Trump’s tariff comments provided a great opportunity for the private and public sectors to come together to maintain the nation’s chip advantage The government is considering ways to assist the nation’s semiconductor industry or hosting collaborative projects with the private sector after US President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on chips exported to the US, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. Trump on Monday told Republican members of the US Congress about plans to impose sweeping tariffs on semiconductors, steel, aluminum, copper and pharmaceuticals “in the very near future.” “It’s time for the United States to return to the system that made us richer and more powerful than ever before,” Trump said at the Republican Issues Conference in Miami, Florida. “They
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Taiwan must capitalize on the shock waves DeepSeek has sent through US markets to show it is a tech partner of Washington, a researcher said China’s reported breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) would prompt the US to seek a stronger alliance with Taiwan and Japan to secure its technological superiority, a Taiwanese researcher said yesterday. The launch of low-cost AI model DeepSeek (深度求索) on Monday sent US tech stocks tumbling, with chipmaker Nvidia Corp losing 16 percent of its value and the NASDAQ falling 612.46 points, or 3.07 percent, to close at 19,341.84 points. On the same day, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Sector index dropped 488.7 points, or 9.15 percent, to close at 4,853.24 points. The launch of the Chinese chatbot proves that a competitor can
RSS