The autumn sun is bright, its light spilling through the clouds onto the western Beijing mountains ablaze with red maple leaves, while the winding Yongding River glitters. No one will forget the wounds the torrential rains of last year inflicted on this land of mountains and rivers; still less will they forget how the people on both banks steadfastly piled stone upon stone to rebuild their homes.
More than 15 months, over 400 days and nights. The whole city has raced against time to restore normal production and daily life in the disaster areas, and has done everything possible to advance post-disaster recovery and reconstruction plans and bring projects to fruition, building with care and dedication a safer, more resilient, and more beautiful and livable new homeland. Villagers from Yanhekou Village, Zhaitang Town, Mentougou District, came to the home of fellow villager Liu Yujin to celebrate his housewarming. Photo by Wang Haixin
Streamlined Approval: 168 Projects Launched at Full Speed
National Highway 108 is the only route from the northern valleys of Fangshan into the city. The flash floods triggered by last year's "23·7" torrential rains directly destroyed more than 100 sections of the road on both banks of the Dashiqiao River, totaling nearly 30 kilometers. Although this "lifeline" was reopened at the earliest opportunity, it was far from regaining its former traffic capacity.
"Precisely because this road is so important to the people of the northern valleys, the city issued a 'strict order' that recovery and reconstruction had to be completed before the 2024 flood season," recalled a relevant official of the Fangshan Highway Branch of the Municipal Transport Commission.
Immediately after the torrential rains, Beijing launched the drafting of a post-disaster recovery and reconstruction plan, setting out the overall approach of "basic recovery within one year, comprehensive upgrading within three years, and long-term sustainable development." "The sooner these projects are completed, the sooner people's lives return to what they were," explained a relevant official of the Municipal Development and Reform Commission. When drawing up the timetable, hard tasks were specifically set for key milestones such as the autumn school opening, the heating season, the Spring Festival, and the pre-flood period of 2024, so as to ensure that the production and living conditions of the affected people are restored to pre-disaster levels as quickly as possible.
After comprehensive surveying and screening, various departments listed 168 projects in fields such as transport and water affairs that needed to be completed before the 2024 flood season. The National Highway 108 duplicate-line flood-damage restoration project was one of them.
Generally speaking, a road project takes more than a year from initial design to project approval and then to bidding and other procedures, but the National Highway 108 duplicate line began construction in September last year in just over a month.
This is because the city simplified the approval process by treating it as an emergency project: restoration and reconstruction projects at the original site and on the original scale were exempted from planning, land-use, and construction permit procedures and did not require public bidding. At the approval stage, departments of development and reform, finance, planning, transport, and water affairs sat down together for centralized joint review and coordinated action. Within one month after the disaster, three batches of nearly 120 projects passed the municipal joint review and all began construction before the end of last October.
In May this year, the National Highway 108 duplicate-line flood-damage restoration project in Fangshan District was completed, taking more than 230 days.
This is a vivid close-up of the recovery and reconstruction scene. In less than a year, 259.5 kilometers of flood-damaged river channels, 12 reservoirs, and 1,620 kilometers of water supply and drainage pipelines were restored; 381.3 kilometers of roads at or above the county level and municipally managed urban roads, 1,035.96 kilometers of rural roads, 1,164 communications towers, and 171 bus terminals were repaired and their disaster resistance enhanced; all 759 affected schools opened on schedule; and 4,729 houses were rebuilt... All 168 projects under "basic recovery within one year" were completed before this year's flood season, and the reconstruction targets for each key milestone were met on schedule.
Additional Government Bonds Help Drive Three-Year Comprehensive Upgrading
While National Highway 108 was being rebuilt at full speed, Fan Xuebo, deputy director of the Beijing Meteorological Observation Center, was leading his team over mountains and ridges to reweave the meteorological observation network in the western Beijing mountains. "Dozens of stations stopped working normally because key components were damaged, and ten stations were directly washed away," Fan Xuebo said with particular distress.
Post-disaster recovery and reconstruction must also take the long view. While achieving "basic recovery within one year," the city has focused on the "resilience" of the city against natural disasters, planning to enhance disaster prevention, mitigation, and relief capabilities, and intends to complete post-disaster recovery and reconstruction comprehensively in about three years. The meteorological service capacity improvement project is on the "three-year upgrading" list.
This upgrading project combines various existing communications base stations to deploy automatic weather stations. After completion at the end of this year, the number of weather stations citywide will increase to more than 3,800, and the average distance between stations will be reduced from the original 5.5 kilometers to 2.2 kilometers. "This will allow us to grasp more real-time data, depict and characterize the weather conditions in a given area more precisely, and better leverage the role of meteorology as the first line of defense in disaster prevention and mitigation," Fan Xuebo said.
For the "three-year upgrading" projects, relevant departments have established a green approval channel. On the basis of ensuring that not a single statutory approval requirement is omitted, they have maximized the parallel processing of approval steps and strengthened element guarantees to the greatest extent, adopting measures such as acceptance with deficiencies and prior land use to enhance approval services, cutting the time for pre-construction procedures by nearly 60%.
If faster approval is about racing against time to start construction as soon as possible, then government bond funds are about safeguarding smooth construction. At the end of last year, the central government issued an additional 1 trillion yuan in government bonds to concentrate efforts on supporting post-disaster recovery and reconstruction. Data from the Municipal Development and Reform Commission show that relevant national departments have allocated a cumulative 59.6 billion yuan in additional government bond funds to support 276 projects in the city. These projects all began construction before the end of May this year, 121 have been completed, and the remaining projects under construction are expected to be fully completed by 2026.
Pairing Assistance Brings in Quality Resources and Elements
Though separated by green mountains, we share the wind and rain together.
After the disaster, the city promptly settled on a "one-to-two" pairing assistance mechanism, with 10 plain districts assisting 29 severely affected mountainous townships, towns, and subdistricts.
In Shidu Town, the city's first newly built post-disaster "dual-use for peace and emergency" public service facility, supported by Chaoyang District, has been completed; in Tanzhesi Town, Shijingshan District helped complete the roof waterproofing and repair project for relocated housing; in Qinglonghu Town, Daxing District took charge of the relocation and reconstruction of homesteads in Beicheying Village; in Xiayunling Township, Tongzhou District accelerated the construction of the local emergency command center and township-level emergency shelter and resettlement site project... Over the past year and more, the plain districts have carried out 293 assistance projects, with a total investment of 679 million yuan in supported projects.
Restoring "physical strength" requires, above all, enhancing the capacity to "generate blood."
In Mentougou in western Beijing, an artificial intelligence industry cluster has been born. The Beijing Ascend Innovation Artificial Intelligence Technology Center, supported and built here by Haidian District, provides inclusive computing power support to more than 200 small and medium-sized artificial intelligence enterprises and research institutes.
Not far away, Daxing District, home to the "Medicine Valley," is leveraging its strengths in the biopharmaceutical industry to build a cardiovascular medical device industrial park in western Beijing, driving local industrial upgrading.
"The plain districts each have their own advantages in enterprises, markets, and talent. The sustained input of these advantageous resources and elements is helping gradually shift from 'point-to-point' township assistance to 'face-to-face' citywide collaboration," said a relevant official of the Municipal Development and Reform Commission.
In western Beijing today, the once-collapsed mountainsides are covered with new growth, the sunlight falls warmly on newly built farmhouses, and a new story has already begun.
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