Heavenly Land of Abundance

With strong evidence revealed by human genomics, it is now believed by many scientists that about 100,000 years back in history some of our distant ancestors began to leave the African continent. They never returned.
They left the cradle of Homo sapiens certainly not because they had in mind a Shangri-La or something like that. It could be a thousand reasons. They might be chased away by enemies, or they might be chasing animals, or just exploring for the sake of exploring.

They went further and further. In time some descendants of these early migrants had come to the Far East to settle. They developed cultures and civilizations. Some ended up in Sichuan. They just didn't know these were unstable lands on top of massive fault lines. Here the tectonic force had created one of the most beautiful mountainous landscapes on earth. In geological terms these lands are young and energetic. Rivers had been running everywhere with sweet water from snow mountains, and the lands were just green and fertile. People could easily grow crops and raise animals, and they flourished. They occupied every single corner of it. Later in history they called it the Heavenly Land of Abundance.

This might be the Land of Promise, yet this was no heavenly land of eternity. Every now and then a rupture of the land would occur somewhere and devastate all lives on top of it. In another time a flood would wash away villages and towns. As disasters didn't happen too frequently all the time, people just rebuilt their homes immediately after a devastation and stayed. Soon they simply forgot it as though it had never happened. They took their chances and prayed to the gods or Buddha for not seeing it happen again. They kept on flourishing. But it certainly would happen again, perhaps at another time and in another place not far away. Only it never told exactly where and when. Those who had survived a devastation might not encounter another one during their lifetime, but their children or grandchildren might do.

China is big, so big that even a magnitude 8.0 earthquake, which sent nearly a hundred thousand people to go perishing, affected only a tiny fraction of its population. And the badly stricken areas make up only a small part of the province of Sichuan, and the whole province's current contribution to the nation's GDP is merely about 4 percent.

China is big, so big that it has been able to develop a strong system of economy, so strong that many economists have optimistically predicted that the rehabilitation of the devastated areas could even boost the national economy, instead of dampening it.

China is big, so big that many backwaters of it proceed so slowly along their unique ways to modernization. The historic Tangshan earthquake that killed more than 240,000 people three decades ago has little inspiration in terms of getting prepared for an anticipated contender, in all parts of China that sit on the most risky zone. As the Yunnan-Sichuan area is situated well in the zone, large populous cities like Kunming, Chengdu, Chongqing, etc., without getting well prepared by the nation, are just like sitting ducks taking their chances. Most people living in these lands are not rich enough to deal with the risk on their own. The nation just has to do something about that.