3. When Reality and “Socialist Science” Collided
In 1976, socialist science and China’s earthquake prediction system ran into reality in Tangshan, a coal mining and industrial city about 70 miles east of Beijing. In late July that year, people in and around the city noticed that there was some weird stuff going on. Chicken refused to eat. Rats were spotted running in panicked packs in daylight. The water level in wells rose and fell. On the evening of July 27th, and through the early morning hours of the 28th, fireballs and flashes of colored lights were seen.
Such phenomena were strange, but people still had work to do and lives to live. So in the early morning hours of July 28, 1976, most of Tangshan’s residents were sound asleep, resting from the previous day’s toil, and recharging for the toil of the day to come. Then at 3:42 AM, disaster struck in the form of a massive earthquake, that registered between 7.8 to 8.2 on the Richter Scale. It lasted for less than half a minute – 23 seconds, to be exact. As seen below, that was plenty of time to inflict a catastrophe.