The flood that hit the Weihe River Valley last year was the worst in 20 years and it was still fresh in the memory of Chen Shibao, a deputy from the Shaanxi Provincial Military Command. The flood also set him to think about establishing an emergency system to deal with unexpected crisis, which threatens public security. His proposal is: to combine the national defense mobilization system with crisis handling emergency system, and on this basis to form a national emergency system that combines peacetime need and wartime need.
Chen held that at present the flood-control and drought-fight command offices, disaster relief committees, firefighting committees, earthquake disaster relief offices, production safety offices established by governments at various levels are performing their own functions separately and all of them have inadequate capability to handle unexpected crisis independently.
He suggested establishing a comprehensive national emergency system to deal with unexpected crisis on the basis of the existing national defense mobilization system. Such system combines peacetime need with wartime need and can carry out national defense mobilization at wartime and handle emergency public security affairs such as disaster relief at peacetime.
Chen believed that the establishment of such a system could avoid overlapping of similar organizations and eliminates waste of national administrative resources, and at the same time it is also conducive to improve the reaction speed in handling crisis. At present, such a system is commonly adopted system in the world, such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency of the U.S., whose predecessor is National Defense Mobilization Agency. After September 11 terrorist attack, the said organization played an important role as a national emergency center.
By Ou Can
(Mar.11, PLA Daily)
