When I had heard Wang Xiaoning's story I said:"Libo is gone now. You and your daughter have a long road ahead of you. You should inject some life into yourself, and start living." I hesitated several times and then asked her:"You're still young; do you want to remarry?" Wang Xiaoning said:"I'll only consider that issue when the memory of him has faded in my mind. At the moment I'm not thinking about that. Really, not in the slightest. I'll never forget him. He was away for ten years, and in my opinion, it's as if he just left . . . " I wished from the bottom of my heart that she would not remain a widow forever. But at that point, what could I say when faced with her obstinacy? I had nothing to say.
Chapter 3 The White Disaster
In october 1996 Chairman of the Military Commission JiangZemin signed into effect a unit that had never been seen before in Chinese military history: the Sichuan-Tibet Highway Transport and Armed Police Mechanisation and Maintenance Unit (this title was later changed to the Fourth Transport and Armed Police Divi-sion). The unit had as its principal focus the maintenance of roads and highways
Jiang Zemin commissioned a scheme for troop detachments along the route in order to make a survey. Chai Jincun, the Vice-General of the lead squad of the Armed Police and Transport Unit (acting as General) accompanied the vice minster of the ministry of Communication Liu E. They drove around the Sichuan-Tibet Highway for seven days and lost six tyres. This Transport Unit veteran, who once performed deeds of great fame on the Kunjirap and Tianshan highways, told thus of his experiences:"Back then, the Sichuan-Tibet Highway really was scarred and battered. Without a restoration and maintenance troop, that road would have been abandoned. The Central Military Commission's policies are so farsighted!"
A few months later the Transport Unit hastily assigned its crack troops and competent workers to the Sichuan-Tibet Highway. They began the unique battle to keep the line open and maintain it. The detachment quickly set out the battlefield, which stretched 800 kilometers from Zhubalong to the Dongjiu bridge by the banks of the Jinsha River. Within a year they had worked huge change on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway, which reached the highest altitude and bore most disasters. Within that year they realized their goal of opening the road to traffc for eleven months during the first year. During this period I visited the line many times to conduct interviews. The moving stories of the soldiers and offcials working to maintain the line and keep it open once reduced me to tears. But what initially left the deepest impression on me was the bliz-zard of 2,000. That was a white disaster.
The Blizzard That Buried My Legs
Six twenty on the second of April 2000, by the banks of the Ranwu Lake. The leader of the Sixth Division, Li Shilin, rose very early, as he usually did. But he had no sooner left his house than a drift of piled snow a foot deep caved in. He shouted loudly and remained frozen to the spot. All around him he saw white snow, and there was no other color visible. He knew that another disaster had arrived. He had no time to wash his face, but immediately reported the situation to the guards' room in the division.
The telegram contained only one sentence: The Blizzard has Buried My Thighs. Ten minutes later he received the division's first order: prepare to carry out emergency procedures, and continue to observe the situation. Send out a reconnaissance contingent at once to scout the roads and search for the direction in which the Fifth Division has gone. If you find injured men and abandoned vehicles report them to us! The snow continued to fall. The snow-flakes were as big as eggs, and frightening. The blizzard blocked up the gate of the barracks, and the soldiers and offcers had to scrape a way through to get out.
Li Shilin stood on the snowy ground and blew the trumpet to call the men to an emergency meeting. The troops were shaken out of their stupor and were confused; they rushed out from their rooms. When they saw the whole scene covered in bright white snow, and Li Shilin's dark iron face, they knew that another battle was about to begin.
Li Shilin led off a small team of seven men with two days' rations on their backs. As they traversed the vast, snow-covered plain, Li Shilin began to feel scared. He had never seen so much snow since the detachment had arrived in Tibet. However, his fear suddenly left him when he recollected that grassroots cadres at that time were not allowed to be too cautious. His mind constantly returned to the plenum in which the detachment was created. Seven vigorous, forceful characters had been written on a piece of cloth ten meters long:"Make the Sichuan-Tibet Highway a thor-oughfare". Every offcial and soldier one by one solemnly signed his name, and wrote down the determined vow of the road main-tenance man. The solemnity of the promises and the roars like peals of thunder made it a moment that he would never forget.
He would also never forget the blizzard that had happened two years before. Even though the snow then was not as thick as now, he and his squadron endured a severe test. In March 1998 the snow continued to fall thick and fast for days. It wrapped up the eastern Tibet plains tightly, and covered the Sichuan-Tibet Highway with an average thickness of thirty centimeters. On the morning of the twentieth of March Li Shilin led his men out to clear away the snow, when suddenly a depressed wail reached them from afar. Relying on fourteen years of experience repairing roads on the plateau, Li Shilin knew at once that an avalanche had taken place further ahead.
As he expected, the vehicle that had just left came speeding back in a panic. The driver leapt out and said:"Something's wrong-there's an avalanche up ahead!" Li Shilin led his men at once to the avalanche site some ten li away. All he could see was a snow-drift lying across the road, stretching for several li. At the highest point it was the height of a three-storey building. The offcers and soldiers threw themselves into the struggle to clear the road. On the snowy mountain more than four thousand meters above sea level, where the cold was biting and the air was thin, the men were assailed by hunger, by piercing cold, exhaustion and altitude sick-ness. They could only work for a short time before they felt faint and their stomachs became bloated. Some of the soldiers could not stand up, but knelt on the ground and scrabbled away at the snow.
In the beginning the big machinery could not get to the site because the area was too narrow. Only individuals could work at getting rid of the snow. So as not to slide down the moun-tain streams, the soldiers attached a safety rope to their waists. Later when the area had been suffciently widened the light-duty machinery could enter, and the rate of progress began to speed up. The bulldozers slid and slipped from left to right over the frozen roads, which was extremely dangerous. When they extracted a big piece of rock the best thing to do seemed to be to throw it by the side of the cliff; the bulldozers, however, could not stop once they had begun moving, and so they slipped towards the cliff side with the rock. The soldiers by the side showed ingenuity and resourcefulness, and quickly stripped off their cotton clothes and stuffed them beneath the tracks of the bulldozer. This stopped the bulldozers from sliding and saved both the vehicles and their comrades.
After two days and nights of struggling with all their might, the road was finally cleared. However, Li Shilin and his soldiers had no sooner breathed a sigh of relief than an avalanche occurred again in the location of the nearby 84th Highway Maintenance Squad. The ice and snow blocked up the streamway and the river water poured onto the highway. The depth of the water was over three meters. In ten short days there were twenty-three avalanches in succession in the fifty li area between Ranwu and Zhongba. Six of them were extremely major avalanches and ten were severe. Two vehicle transportation brigades and a hundred local goods vehicles, as well as over a thousand people were stuck on the road. Many military convoys travelling from west to east were held up in Bomi, Basu and Pongda. The situation was extremely serious, and the road had to be recovered as quickly as possible. In order to save time the offcers and soldiers took their instant food and dried vegetables to the construction site, working through the day and night to clear it for traffc.
"Avalanche!"
The bulldozer operator, Su Chengyun, heard the shouts of his comrade and immediately put his foot to the brakes. He raised his head to take a look, but all he saw was a huge drift of moving rocks rolling down from the hillside. It was too late to run, and so Su covered his head with his hands and crouched on the ground. The rocks fell into the meter-wide space in front of the bulldozer, and tore a deep hole in the foundations of the road. Ten days later the road was fully cleared. A Tibetan driver in the Changdu convoy said:"I gave up hope on the first day that the vehicles were held up. I could never have imagined I'd live another day. You've saved my life! Tuojiqi! Tuojiqi! (This means 'thank you')."
The local Party committee in Tibetan Changdu drove 400 kilometers in the snow with the express purpose of reaching the Ranwu Valley as quickly as possible to extend their solicitude to the Sixth Division. The Tibet Provincial Transport Department and the Logistics Department of the Chengdu Military District sent a telegram conveying their best wishes, and the First General Division awarded them a third class award. It was in this way that Li Shilin's exemplary division was born. The snow, however, had returned once more. Li Shilin could not have imagined that the Sichuan-Tibet Highway had never experienced such a snowfall in forty years on record. It fell for two whole weeks.
The Soldiers Split off in Two Directions, and Progress Towards Anjiula Mountain
Eleven o'clock at night on the first of April, in Chengdu. The Commissar of the First Regiment, Chen Zhen, received a report and communicated three orders to his detachment. First, the road must be cleared in the shortest time possible; second, the safety of those along the route must be ensured. Third, troops must be care-fully deployed, organization must be meticulous, and command must be directed from the rear to avoid casualties. Chen Zhen, a veteran who had spent time in the desert zone in northeastern Tibet, accompanied the current Party Secretary for the Tibetan Autonomous Region, Hu Jintao, as he inspected the Heichang line. He knew the tests that the soldiers of the Sichuan-Tibet Highway would face if they were to be successful in implementing these three directives.
Early in the morning of the second of April, Bomi, at the Maintenance Division. Yi Jihong, the Division Marshal, and the Commissar Wang Hai convened an emergency meeting of the Party Committee. During the meeting they analyzed the general situation in the report sent to them by two squadrons of the Natural Disaster Department. They found that as a result of the current crisis roads had been cut off and roughly 100,000 Tibetans were trapped in their homes along the route. A more pressing matter was that the Sichuan-Tibet Highway was experi-encing a peak traffc surge; there were certainly many vehicles and personnel stuck halfway up the route by the blizzard. If efforts were not made to reach them in time, the consequences could be unimaginable.
Liu Genshui, the acting Commissar for the First Brigade, had come to the unit to gain experience at the grassroots level. He sent a desperate order to the Road Maintenance Squad: clear the road even if it kills you, and save the vehicles and people stranded there! At ten o'clock in the morning the leader of the Sixth Division received two instructions: set out immediately, and push towards Anjiula Mountain as best you can. Do your best to link up with the Fifth Division as fast as possible. Yang Xiaowu, the commander of the Sixth Division, took a team with him and set out at once.
They broke through the ice and burst through the snow, carving a way along the road. Ahead the bulldozer had cleared the road, and behind men were working to clear away the snowdrifts. Working at four thousand meters above sea level, where oxygen was thin and the cold was piercing, avalanches often threatened the lives of the offcers and soldiers. The fierce cold was at thirty degrees below zero. It made the tinned meals that the men ate freeze into blocks. When they thawed them by the fire the outside would heat up but the inside would still be frozen. Many of the men found that their lips cracked and bloodied, and so when they sucked with their mouths they would gulp down blood. Succes-sive days of road clearing combined with severe altitude sickness meant that the men were exhausted. Some of them had lost all their strength and simply lay on the ground scraping at snow; their posture did not change even when they had to urinate.
They worked from the afternoon to midnight and had succeeded in clearing away less than five kilometers of snow. The snow on the roads was thick. Just as the bulldozers would clear away a path of snow, another drift would collapse down from the mountain cliff with a crash. The road would be filled up again, even higher than before. Sometimes the bulldozers and men would be buried beneath the drifts of snow that caved in from above. It was dark and they could not see the road; on one side was the cliff, and on the other was the deep gully. Yang Xiaowu walked in front and used his hand-torch to shine on the bulldozers. His hand had frozen to the torch, and so he placed his hand in his chest to warm it up, and continued to provide light.
Meanwhile, under the leadership of Huang Ming, the commander, and Liu Hongchun, the squadron leader, the soldiers of the Fifth Division were setting out from Basu County towards Anjiula Mountain. They took a whole day to carve out a road through the snow on the eastern slope. At midnight the lights on the bulldozer clearing the road froze over. Liu Hongchun and Huang Ming stood on the footplates on either side of the bull-dozer and scouted the route. The Deputy Squadron Leader Tang Huaijun led from the front with a torch in his hand. The road was completely buried in snow. They were forced to rely on memory and feeling to advance, meter by meter. In some places the snow-drifts were several times higher than the bulldozer; they seemed like small mountains. The bulldozer had turned into a pangolin, using its hardness to force through a tunnel underneath the snow and ice.
The small assault team that formed part of the squad was also under the leadership of Chief of Staff Pu Shiguang. They set out from the squad base in Bomi and progressed towards the Sixth Division in the Ranwu valley. Their job was to open up the road between Bomi and Ranwu, and link up with the Sixth Division as soon as possible. After three days the team were isolated in the "Quicksand" area. Snow some meters high had engulfed the road, and on the mountain avalanches and quicksand happened frequently. It was extremely diffcult for the troops to advance. They had to wait for a break before they could move a stage forward, and then when another avalanche came they would rush back down again. The team set up a temporary barracks in the snowy quicksand area.
The veterans in the team still remembered clearly the situation of some years earlier, when they had overcome the quicksand. In just under a year they had erected retaining walls over three kilo-meters high. The Tibetan provincial government had later called the walls "the Great Wall built on quicksand", and the walls became one of the major sights of the Sichuan-Tibet Highway. In former times the quicksand on the road had sucked stones into its flow throughout the year in a bored, listless way. The bulldozer would excavate a piece of road and in the flash of an eye, sand and rock would pour into life. Those on the construction site needed eyes in the back of their heads; a moment of carelessness could land a man in quicksand or onto a piece of rock. A light injury could graze his skin, and a serious accident could be fatal.
There was only one way of subduing the quicksand, and that was to construct a retaining wall. However, building the longest wall on the Sichuan-Tibet Highway on shifting quicksand was easier said than done. The foundations that stretched a couple of hundred meters, dug out with great diffculty, were swallowed up by the quicksand in the time it took to eat a meal. Ten or more days of painstaking effort were reduced to nothing in the blink of an eye, and it drove the men to tears. But no matter how much they cried, the wall still had to be built, and the foundations still had to be dug. They dried their eyes and again began work.
Two soldiers, Li Jianrong and He Yongzheng, immersed them-selves in digging the foundations. Suddenly a wave of quicksand flowed down fast, and before they had time to react they were buried up to their crowns in sand. The soldiers called out their names and rushed to scrape away the sand, splitting the skin on their fingers and losing their nails. With great diffculty they pulled their heads free. The faces of the two men had turned a egg-plant purple, and their mouths and noses were choked full of sand. They looked like living terracotta warriors freshly unearthed.
Feng Baobao of the Volunteer Corps was working below his three-meter high retaining wall when he heard the screams of the soldiers on sentry: get out of the way! The voices had hardly died away when a rock as large as a millstone rolled down onto the retaining wall and flew away over Feng Baobao's head. It fell on the road foundations and made all those present sweat with fear. It was unbelievable. The soldiers continued to brave all diffculties as they worked to construct the "Great Wall" to guard against quick-sand miraculously.
But now, the "Great Wall" was being submerged by snowdrifts, and they could not find even a trace of it. The Speed Repair team was waging a desperate weekly struggle against avalanches, quick-sand, and even Death himself. When the team had opened up half of the road they saw that several li beyond there were three vehicles stranded in an avalanche. The occupants of the vehicles were waving at them desperately. However, there was a blockage of snow in between them, and the team was unable to get closer. It would take two days of no food and no sleep to open up the road. Pu Shiming judged his surroundings. The people in the vehi-cles would be safe from avalanches for a while, but as time went on they would very probably starve to death or freeze. He was a decisive man, and so he split the team into two groups. One group continued to clear the road, and the other took a diversionary route over the mountain to deliver food and clothing to the people there. Six hours later the soldiers, having braved fatal perils, finally presented instant noodles, cotton clothes and medicine into the hands of the people trapped there.
Another team formed from the department faced a severe test. After the blizzard I met Zhang Dichun, a squadron leader and a deputy commissar for the detachment. He spoke excitedly of the emergency:"That really was a narrow escape! Especially for the privates-they suffered more, not sleeping at all or eating for days and nights on end. Everyone had a peeling face by the end. A lot of the men got snow blindness, where they couldn't see, and had to be led around by the others. For many days their eyes hurt so much they cried . . . " Over more than ten days the various teams triumphed over more than thirty avalanches.
Every Man Is Vital
"We can't afford to lose a single man! Not a single man can freeze to death, or starve!"
This was the third order that came down from the detach-ment to all the squadrons on the line. In the afternoon of the fifth of April the Fifth Division received a directive from the detach-ment: twenty-five people and ten vehicles were trapped by the snow on Anjiula Mountain, four thousand meters above sea level. They were close to death, and the order called for an immediate dispatch of men to rescue them. The squadrons organized a rescue team at once which set out, braving the snow, to Anjiula Moun-tain. The wind was bitterly cold and the snow danced about in mad swirls. The temperature descended to below minus thirty. There was no road beneath the soldiers' feet. The offcers and men carried mantou, canteens and medicine on their backs, tramping through snow that reached up to their knees, relying on their memories and sheer instinct to grope their way forwards. They trekked forward with great diffculty, looking for the group that had been stranded.
When dusk arrived the rescue team led by Commander Huang Ming climbed up the mountainside. They saw several small black spots not too far away in front of them. It was only when they advanced further forwards that they discovered it was a small bus. There were nine people inside. A woman saw them and ran into their arms, sobbing: "My treasured ones-you've actually come . . . " The rescue team pressed forwards onto the mountain and searched around, and found another stranded vehicle. Half of the body of the vehicle was buried in thick snow. The fifteen people inside had suffered the wind and snow for three days and nights and were exhausted in body and spirit. Their lips were purple and their limbs were paralyzed with cold. Most of them were on the verge of death.
When they saw the armed police soldiers suddenly approaching they could not help breaking out in tears. The offcers and soldiers brought out rations and gave them to them. They kept the kettles, which had long since frozen into a block, close to their bodies until they thawed, and then they gave them to the group to drink from. Some of the people pointed at the peak of the mountain with trembling hands, saying:"There are people on the top; go and save them, quickly!"
The rescue team split into two groups. One group oversaw the passage of the fifteen saved people down the mountain. The other group continued the climb upwards. The snow grew thicker the more that they advanced up the mountain, and the road was very treacherous. The offcers and soldiers had to roll and crawl to make any headway. Snow was still falling and night was approaching. To avoid slipping over the cliff or falling into a crevasse, the soldiers tied on the waist belt on their rucksacks and followed each other, using spades and sticks to scout the route and advance while helping each other up. They trekked for over ten arduous hours before they finally climbed up the summit of the mountain and found the bus, which had already overturned into a gulley.
When they arrived, five Tibetans were already lying limp in the snow. The limbs of the driver, Danzeng, had frozen stiff and he was unable to think clearly. When the soldiers fed food and water to his mouth he opened it in reflex, and then passed out. The soldiers took off their overcoats and wrapped him up, and then carried him and the other four down the mountain. At the same time, the search and rescue operation from the eastern to the western slopes of Anjiula Mountain began.
At dawn the team commanded by Yang Xiaowu, the commander of the Sixth Division arrived on the mountainside of Anjiula Moun-tain. They made contact with the convoy that had been stranded there for two days. There were fifteen vehicles in total in the convoy, and over forty people. When they saw the armed police coming to rescue them, the driver wept:"We had nothing at all to eat, and if it hadn't been for you coming, we'd have died for sure!" The drivers had nothing to report, but took out the solid money that they had to stopper up the tracks of the bulldozers. The soldiers were firm in rejecting the gift, and gave it back to them. Some of the drivers knelt down and begged, calling them their benevolent saviors and claiming that the gift of money was their earnest desire. Yang Xiaowu became angry and said:"This is our duty! You're insulting us by doing this!"
By the evening of the eighth the detachment had rescued over seventy stranded vehicles and over three hundred people from the snow. However, there were still over two hundred people in danger out in the vast snowy plains, and the troops had to fight a continuous battle. At this point the soldiers and offcers had not slept for four days and had not eaten a hot meal. When they walked on the snow-covered mountain and in the frozen valleys they would be blown over again and again by the wind or buried beneath a mound of snow; but they would tenaciously rise to their feet. The acute altitude sickness tormented the soldiers to the point that some of the new recruits began to vomit and develop split-ting headaches. They tied the belts on their rucksacks tight around their heads to lessen the pain.