Students at an outdoor class in front of a stone tablet engraved with the Chinese gan en (gratitude) at a rebuilt school in Longmen town, Lushan county. Provided To China Daily

Learning lessons

Zhang Deming, a neurologist and director of the Ya'an People's Hospital, has learned many lessons from participating in disaster relief work after landslides and earthquakes, such as the magnitude-7.1 tremblor in Yushu, Qinghai province, that claimed more than 2,600 lives in April 2010.

"The key to reconstructing earthquake-stricken areas and restoring residents' confidence lies in rebuilding industries and public services, such as schools and hospitals," he said.

The hospital's emergency department has been enlarged and redesigned to ensure a rapid and efficient response to earthquakes and other natural disasters, and the rehabilitation department has also been expanded to help the injured recover from their wounds, both physical and mental.

Following a magnitude-8 quake in Wenchuan in 2008 - also known as the Great Sichuan Earthquake - in which more than 69,000 people were killed and about 18,000 injured, the central government provided funds to build a helipad and a number of advanced medical facilities at the hospital in Ya'an. The medical staff now also has access to professional training throughout the year.

Despite the improvements across the county, it's still a challenge for hospitals in the earthquake-prone mountainous regions in the west of Sichuan to attract highly qualified staff. Zhang said the pediatrics, gynecology and emergency departments all have a serious lack of doctors, with fewer than 50 percent of the staff required.

According to the Ya'an government, 371 schools and 76 hospitals have been rebuilt in the city since the 2013 quake.

Siyan Middle School in Lushan was rebuilt with donations from a real estate company headquartered in Chengdu, Sichuan's provincial capital. The school, which has 350 students and 60 teachers, now boasts a teaching block, a dining hall and two dormitories.

Chen Yong, the headmaster, said about half of the students are "left-behind children", who live apart from their migrant worker parents, who have moved away to work in distant cities. "They are very hard-working, and taking the national university entrance exam is sometimes their only way out of life in the countryside," he said.

A man surnamed Wang, whose child is a student at the school, was impressed by the facilities on offer: "This is the first time I have seen a computer room, a music room, a multimedia lab and a library. Now, the children have no excuse not to try their best."

Contact the writer at liyang@chinadaily.com.cn

Rebuilding a shattered community

The official response to the Lushan earthquake was the first time the central government had assigned main responsibility for a reconstruction program to a local government. President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang have both repeatedly given instructions to the officials in charge of the projects.

Tourism, modern agriculture, generation of electricity, manufacturing of machinery, new materials and new energy are the five main industries in Ya'an after the earthquake.

In the past three years, more than 68 billion yuan ($10.5 billion) has been spent rebuilding areas of Ya'an devastated by the quake, and more than 66 percent of the money has been used to improve people's standards of living.

The local government has employed town-planning experts from Beijing and Shanghai to oversee construction projects in city and villages.

Last year, the city's gross domestic product hit 50.26 billion yuan, which is 1.26 times higher than in 2012, the year before the earthquake. In the past three years, the annual incomes of urban residents rose by more than 10 percent, while those of rural residents have risen by almost 12 percent.

The authorities have restored nearly 29,000 hectares of forested land and 14,000 hectares of dedicated giant pandas habitats that were affected by the quake. More than 27,000 hectares of land prone to water loss and soil erosion have been treated to eradicate the problems.

The disaster-prevention construction and relief exercises formulated after the earthquake mean that no one has died since 2013 as a result of landslides or other natural disasters that frequently occur in the region around Ya'an.