For your next family vacation: A visit to the Sichuan Earthquake Theme Park (tm)

Yep, nothing like turning a national disaster into a tourist opportunity.

Beichuan county, one of the areas worst devastated by the 8.0 earthquake that ripped through Sichuan last May, is being transformed into a "world class" relic site, where the ruins of buildings reduced to rubble that crushed thousands of people in a massive quake will be preserved for visitors.

The projects, which come with a total price tag of more than 50 billion yuan, will preserve ethnic cultural sites and turn Mianyang county into "a first class travel destination that combines sightseeing, meeting, leisure, and holiday facilities."

Ooh la la.

And the sites are already attracting the curious: About 200,000 tourists visited Beichuan during Spring Festival in January, and planners hope their endeavour will bring in enough cash to cover both the cost of the 93 individual restoration projects and the 6 billion yuan Mianyang lost in tourist revenue thanks to quake-related damages (not to mention sightseers leery of travelling a region that has been rocked by twice-monthly mini-quakes since May).



In the meantime, the millions of people left homeless in the earhquake's aftermath are still homeless, and they're wondering where the billions of yuan in earthquake relief donations have gone.

At least some of that money has allegedly been spent on snazzy cars for local bureaucrats; although few people here would ever go so far as casting aspersions on the conduct of the central government, many refer to corruption and misspending by local officials.

Beijing isn't about to let that derail what has so far been a pretty stellar publicity campaign, however. The government has given in-person notice to frustrated quake survivors that if they complain or talk to the press, their asses are grass and they can kiss goodbye any chance at getting help rebuilding homes destroyed in May (as it is, the gov is paying less than a third of the total cost of the homes--the rest will come from savings, or from cash used to pay off families of kids crushed in the rubble of shoddily built schools).

Cries of foul continue, however; a riot erupted in the Mianyang village of Baolin last month as thousands of villagers stormed a police station over disagreements on how the local aid fund was being spent. One person was killed and 10 injured during the fracas. (apologies for the Epoch link; only other English-language article I could find was the SCMP and that's behind a paywall). Residents of the ruined towns now being turned into museums are being relocated to new cities--"New Beichuan," etc--a ways away. Not everyone is delighted at the prospect of

But most of all, residents are just confused and frustrated. Families I spoke with in Shifang earlier this year are struggling to figure out how to build the homes that are still incomplete almost a year after the quake; they also can't figure out where all the billions of yuan in aid money is going to. In a country where people live for--and through--their kids, having lost their only children leaves these families little hope for what looks like a fairly bleak future.

In January, these families were living in tarp-and-bamboo tents permeated by moisture in rural Sichuan's damp climate. If they're lucky, they'll scrape together the money to build real houses, and maybe reconstruct livelihoods interrupted or made impossible by the quake's devastation. If they're really lucky, these now-childless parents will have more kids--maybe they'll even be able to afford medical costs needed for risky 40-something pregnancies in an area with few good hospitals.

And if they're hyperbolically fortunate, perhaps--just perhaps--someday they'll be able to take their kids to the Mianyang Earthquake Memorial Theme Park (TM).