Reconstruction efforts in Wenchuan county's ethnic Qiang villages in the four years since the Sichuan earthquake have come under fire for devastating the area's distinct cultural identity.
At issue are government programmes that required residents of Aer village to demolish traditional stone houses that may have received little damage from the magnitude 8 quake in 2008 and build modern structures of concrete and steel.
Residents needed to use the new materials to qualify for subsidies ranging from 18,000 yuan to 23,000 yuan (HK$22,120 to HK$28,260).
'These traditional stone-made houses were actually firmer and more solid than concrete houses,' Zhang Yuan , a researcher on ethnic minorities from Southwest University for Nationalities in Chengdu , told the Century Weekly's online portal. 'You only find cracks in them, when most of the modern buildings toppled in the earthquake.'
Zhang similarly faulted a reconstruction project launched by Hong Kong Red Cross in 2009 for altering the area's distinct appearance by using only modern building materials. The scramble for building subsidies set off a local construction boom.
Eleanor Lam Chuen-ping, Hong Kong Red Cross' head of field operations for Sichuan, said it was involved in only one reconstruction project in the village and had respected the local government and people's choices. 'We don't have any requirement on building style. We only require that the new houses be able to resist a certain level of earthquake and have a proper size,' Lam said.
The survival of the struggling Qiang community has been a leading concern for activists, academics and aid workers since the quake struck the centre of the group's traditional homeland and wiped out, by some estimates, 10 per cent of its 320,000 people.