When He Wei was attentively digging debris with a shovel to save people buried by a devastating earthquake, a building next to him started to fall due to aftershocks.
He had to temporarily leave the site. But several minutes later, observing the building didn’t completely fall, he returned, and continued his mission.
“I couldn’t think about my personal safety at that time. All I thought about was rescuing as many people as possible,” He told the Global Times, recalling his rescue experiences of the 2008 Wenchan earthquake that claimed more than 80,000 people’s lives in Southwest China’s Sichuan Province.
He was then a worker in a fibre factory in Sichuan’s Dujiangyan, a county about 25 kilometres from Yingxiu Town, the epicentre of the earthquake.
When the unexpected earthquake shocked Dujiangyan, he and his colleagues were having a meeting. After one of them felt the tremble and yelled out, they immediately ran outside the plant.
“The first sight when we ran out of the plant was the dense smoke and many collapsed houses surrounding the plant,” he said.
He was 25-year-old back then, and the Wenchuan earthquake was the first time he faced a natural disaster directly.
Rescue teams were immediately set up, and members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) were urged to be the first to volunteer for the rescue mission.
He was then a Party member candidate. He stressed to the Global Times that Party members have the responsibility to run to the frontlines to help ordinary people in need.
He was one of the many Party members who threw themselves into the disaster relief work after the Wenchuan earthquake.
According to the news website people.cn , within four days of the earthquake, more than 2.29 million Party members joined the rescue mission.
Party organizations of different levels in the earthquake-hit area organized 18,200 teams of “Party members emergency squads” and “Party members commandos.”
They were regarded by the public as “the most lovable people of the new era.”
“The Wenchuan earthquake disaster relief work is a thorough test of our Party’s ruling ability during peacetime. It showed the human-oriented ideological concept of the Party’s rule … And it showed that our Party’s ruling ability is ever increasing,” read a commentary on the Xinhua News Agency.
He told the Global Times that despite the chaotic and gruelling conditions, all the teams composed of Party members behaved in an organized and disciplined manner.
He toiled from the early morning to the late evening every day. He could barely eat anything in the day.
“Sometimes, when you were eating, you would see other team members carry mutilated corpses,” he said.
He also admitted that sometimes he vomited after seeing too much blood and too many corpses.
His team rescued about 20 people in the earthquake. But he didn’t keep contact with any of them. “My mind was preoccupied with the rescue mission,” he said.
Asked whether he was afraid and considered quitting in the process, the man honestly replied, “Yes.” But the hopeless victims and dreadful reality spurred him to carry on the honourable mission.
Now a decade later, he said the memory was still too heavy and cruel for him to recall. He didn’t keep any photos from that time and he tried to forget it.
But the earthquake transformed him. After the Wenchuan earthquake, he joined the Blue Sky Rescue Team, one of China’s largest civilian rescue teams, and learned more rescue knowledge at his own expense.
In last year’s 7.0-magnitude earthquake in Jiuzhaigou county in Sichuan, he led a team there to rescue the victims for free.
“As a Party member, I should serve the people, rescue the people in danger and devote myself to disaster relief,” he said.
While his families are concerned about his own safety and aren’t willing him to risk his life, he said he won’t stop.
“I try to persuade them and gradually they will understand me,” he said.
