BEIJING -- Just like hardship may test the real character of a man, a country's response to disasters may also be an indicator of its strength. With a miraculous record of post-quake reconstruction efforts, China has proven the effectiveness of its national governance system.
The world may have gotten used to Chinese Miracles, but it could hardly imagine that in places far away from big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, new life could be breathed into battered towns and villages as fast as the pace of the national economy, or even faster.
In China's southwestern county of Wenchuan, center of a magnitude-8.0 quake on May 12, 2008, reconstruction program has been completed two years ahead of schedule.
In nearby Beichuan, China's only Qiang ethnic autonomous county, local people found their businesses booming thanks to pouring-in tourists after a massive relocation program by the government after the quake.
The county of Lushan, which was struck again by a magnitude-7.0 quake on April 20, 2013, saw prosperous new towns and villages only two years after the disaster.
In stark contrast, in quake-hit Japanese Prefectures of Iwate and Miyagi, only 15 percent of government-funded housing units were completed with merely a year left for the official reconstruction plan.
And in the Italian city of L'Aquila, six years after a magnitude-5.8 earthquake, debris could still be seen everywhere and many villages are practically ghost towns, due to a lack of reconstruction fund.
The Lower Ninth Ward in the U.S. city of New Orleans was the hardest hit region by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Ten years after the disaster, over half of the mainly black work force there are still jobless and people are complaining that there has never been a government-led reconstruction plan.
Countries are alike in the sense that none of them is immune from natural disasters, but their different responses to such disasters often reflect different national governance capabilities.
For those wondering what is behind China's post-disaster reconstruction miracles, they should see a powerful central government that helps the people, an open society that has enormous ability to mobilize resources and people-oriented policies... Together these elements constitute the China Model.
As pundits have pointed out, to decide if a government is good or bad, one has to see if it is willing to provide the people with needed services and has the capability to do so. As facts prove it, governments of developing countries, such as China, have done a better job.
The effectiveness of China's post-quake reconstruction efforts is evidence that the Western-style national governance, with all its merits, is by no means superior in every way as some have claimed.
Facts have also proven that the choice of a path that suits China's national reality is the best choice for the country as well as for its people.
