China is investing almost US$15 million this year to more than double the size of its international search and rescue squad.
The move follows 2008’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, which left an estimated 90,000 dead or missing.
“We will be able to send more teams to operations overseas and that’s one of the reasons we are expanding,” Huang Jianfa (黃建發), a division director at the Chinese Earthquake Administration, said on Friday.
While critics say China is not taking on responsibilities to match its greater role in the world, Beijing points to contributions such as its increased commitment to UN peacekeeping forces and its help in international disasters.
The rescue squad, founded in 2001, sent 60 members to Haiti last month.
China will inject 100 million yuan (US$14.6 million) to increase the team’s numbers from 220 to 500 by year’s end, Huang said.
Another 5,000 rescue workers belong to purely domestic teams around China, but train at the squad’s center northwest of Beijing. There they conduct exercises in a simulated disaster zone that are an eery echo of real tragedies: Sniffer dogs scrabble over collapsed buildings and rescuers call out to potential survivors. Others descend from tilting apartment blocks, with plastic “children” strapped to their backs.
Liu Xiangyang (劉向陽), who commands the rescue corps, said: “I believe this is good for [how people perceive] China. In the past what we gave was food and materials — now we can save lives, and life is the most precious thing of all.”
But he added: “The pressure is bigger on overseas jobs. Most of our team speak English, but sometimes the locals do not, so it’s very difficult to understand how deeply people are buried or how badly they are injured.”
The team also includes 20 paramedics and specialists in building structures.
State media reported that 29 people were injured in a 5.1-magnitude quake in southwestern Yunnan Province on Friday.
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS