China Digital Times

Stories tagged with: School Collapse (38)

• After Quake, Parents In China Start Over

  

  After the government granted permission to parents of children who died in the Sichuan earthquake to have another child, many such families are trying to do just that. From the Wall Street Journal:

  In Sichuan, there is some evidence of recovery. Six months after the earthquake, schools are being rebuilt. And bereaved parents are trying their best to move on after losing the only child that they were allowed to have under the region’s strict population-control policies. Many parents are taking advantage of government waivers and subsidies to help their odds of conceiving again.

  More than a hundred quake mothers in the town of Dujiangyan — where hundreds of students were killed in their school when the earthquake struck on May 12 — are now pregnant, and there are more than 800 who want to have another child, says Wang Haiyun, a health official from Shanghai dispatched to help the town. Checkups and other health-care services for parents hoping to conceive again started in July, and will last for approximately three years.

  Many parents, especially those of middle- or high-school students, are too old or have had procedures to prevent pregnancies because of the one-child policy. Some hospitals are trying to help.

  This video accompanies the WSJ report:
  

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  • December 4, 2008 3:32 PM

• Majority of China Earthquake Victims Still Unidentified

  

  To date, only one quarter of the 70,000 Sichuan Earthquake victims have been identified:

  Soldiers took photographs and hair and blood samples before burying victims in mass graves in the hope that DNA testing might identify bodies in the future.

  But given the devastation wrought by the earthquake, some bodies may never be recovered. In some cases, there may be few relatives left to identify victims.

  19,065 bodies have been identified as students; because many bodies still have not been identified, the student death count is actually higher.

  The government has been very busy building housing in the quake-ravaged zones but, as winter approaches, many survivors are still living in tents:

  …almost 200,000 homes had been rebuilt and 685,000 homes were under reconstruction. But another 1.94m households still needed to be rebuilt or repaired and sites were still being selected for 25 townships which needed to be relocated.

  For more on the Sichuan Earthquake, see CDT past posts.

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  • November 22, 2008 12:10 AM

• China Says Quake School Toll Misreported (Updated)

  

  According to recently released statistics about the May 12 Sichuan earthquake, more than 19,000 people died in schools that collapsed in the disaster. From Reuters:

  The deaths of children, many buried under ruins of shoddily built classrooms while nearby buildings withstood the tremors, has been the most controversial aspect of the disaster.

  The 7.9 magnitude quake killed more than 80,000 people and horrified China but spurred both government and private individuals into a largely effective and widely praised response.

  Millions left homeless in Sichuan and Gansu provinces now face a bitter winter in thin tents, prefab housing and makeshift shelters, adding concern over basic necessities to the grief.

  It’s also been reported that an official in Mianyang, Sichuan, one of the hardest hit areas, has committed suicide, becoming the second official in the earthquake-hit regions to do so.

  Update: The death toll of 19,000 may not be as clear-cut as it appears, according to the Los Angeles Times:

  At a news conference on preparations for the winter in the quake zone, Wei Hong, executive vice governor of Sichuan, gave the student death toll as 19,065 — nearly a quarter of the total death count — a figure that was immediately quoted in stories by Chinese state-run and foreign news services.

  Soon, however, an officer from the Sichuan provincial propaganda office said an official translation at the news conference misconstrued Wei’s remarks. He said the 19,065 figure was the total number of earthquake victims who have been identified.

  For many, including the angry parents of children who died when their unstable schools collapsed, the about-face spoke volumes of how Chinese officials deal with sensitive revelations: a moment of candor followed by a contradictory reversal.

  The International Herald Tribune explains how the misunderstanding occurred:

  Asked about the final student death toll by a foreign reporter, Wei gave a lengthy answer that ended with the figure 19,065 - more than double previous estimates and one that would suggest that a quarter of the earthquake victims were children. Lest there be any doubt, the official English translation of Wei’s remarks placed the word “student” after the figure 19,065.

  The news was immediately picked up by foreign and Chinese media. Within hours it was posted on the central government’s main Web site. In a country where official statistics are often taken with a grain of salt, the figure seemed a stunningly frank admission that the quake’s toll on children had been even more horrific than anyone imagined.

  Later, however, the government issued a clarification, insisting that Wei’s remarks had been flubbed by his translator.

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  • November 20, 2008 10:49 PM

• The Best Reporting on the Sichuan Earthquake You’ll Never See

  

  Angilee Shah writes in the ChinaBeat blog:

  Six days after the earthquake struck, Pan went to Muyu District in Qingchuan County, the site of one of the disaster’s biggest tragedies. The Muyu Middle School dormitory had collapsed and buried hundreds of young students who were napping inside. Parents were camped in tents, homeless and looking for answers.

  Who Killed Our Children takes a systematic look at the details of the collapse of the Muyu Middle School dormitory, where even the number of children who died in the collapse is in dispute. Official numbers say 286 of the school’s 846 students died; many believe the number is actually closer to 500. The film is series of interviews, brilliantly edited, that tackle the questions surrounding the disaster one at a time from different points of view.

  One interviewee calls the building “tofu construction,” describing the weak superstructure and foundation that has become common in China in recent years as contractors cut corners. Others say students on the second floor where locked in by teachers during their rest time. Help came too slow and ill-equipped, say aggrieved parents. Families buried their children in the hills with their own hands, and government officials reburied the children in the middle of the night without notification. There is a lot of heartbreak in the film. Ultimately, Who Killed Our Children is a relentless investigation of how people and their societies attempt to cope with unimaginable tragedy.

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  • October 25, 2008 8:25 PM

• China Concedes Building Flaws in Quake (Updated)

  

  Chinese officials are now admitting that shoddy construction, and not the earthquake alone, was responsible for the deaths of so many children in the May 12 earthquake. From the New York Times:

  A Chinese government committee said Thursday that a rush to build schools during the country’s recent economic boom might have led to shoddy construction that resulted in the deaths of thousands of students during a devastating earthquake in May.

  The statement by Ma Zongjin, the chairman of an official committee of experts assessing damage from the May 12 earthquake, is the first time that a representative of the Chinese government has acknowledged that poor construction may have led to the collapses. Until now, officials in Beijing and in southwest China’s Sichuan Province, which suffered the most damage, had said the sheer force of the 7.9-magnitude quake caused the collapses.

  The school collapses have become the most politically sensitive issue to emerge in the aftermath of the earthquake. This summer, grieving parents held street protests to challenge local governments and demand that officials conduct proper investigations into construction quality. Local officials felt so threatened by the parents that they ordered riot police to break up protests — officers even dragged away crying mothers — and offered the parents compensation money in exchange for them dropping their demands.

  Read CDT’s previous coverage of this issue. See also recent reports on dangers facing earthquake survivors with winter approaching.

  Update: Read a report from Caijing Magazine about the Ministry of Education’s failure to release the total number of children killed in the earthquake.

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  • September 4, 2008 8:58 AM

• No Answers For Parents of China Quake Dead

  

  Tania Branigan reports in the Guardian, via Khaleej Times Online:

  Three months on, the government has made extraordinary strides in rebuilding a province where at least 70,000 died. Temporary homes and basic amenities have appeared with startling speed. Adults are back at business; children have returned to study. At the Olympic opening ceremony, a nine-year-old survivor, who saved several classmates, bore the Chinese flag alongside basketball player Yao Ming.

  Yet behind the image of communal resilience lies an uglier story. The authorities are striving to aid millions of survivors. But they are also doing their best to silence angry families who want to know why so many schools collapsed when the buildings around them endured.

  No one is speaking for these parents. Not the foreign protesters who have flagged up issues such as Tibet and religious freedom through demonstrations in Beijing. Not non-governmental organisations in Sichuan, which are painfully aware that supporting them would spell the end to their other work there. And not the handful of activists who tried, but earned themselves detention. Instead, parents are speaking for themselves, despite the harassment and threats that have dogged them over the past eight weeks. They have been dragged away from protests, prevented from travelling to Beijing to air their complaints, and warned against talking to foreign reporters.

  “Now they do not even allow us to gather together,” one man told me. He had agreed to speak by telephone, despite his concern that the call might be monitored. “The officials asked us to be patient. They told us we need to support the Olympics, and after the Olympics they will sort this out. But we have been waiting for such a long time … I guess they hope that if the time is long enough we will just forget this.”

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  • August 27, 2008 9:38 PM

• Quake Victims in China Rally From Painful Losses

  

  Edward Wong of the New York Times writes a profile of the Sichuan Missing Limbs Restoration Center, where many of the victims of the May 12 earthquake are being treated:

  Li Chunyang, 16, is one of the children pulled from the rubble of Dongqi Middle School in the town of Hanwang after being trapped for 52 hours. His left leg had been pinned under debris. It was amputated after his rescue.

  The other day, he went on his own from Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan, to the city of Deyang to take a national school exam. The trip involved getting on a bus, then walking through city streets. It was his first journey with an artificial leg. It took two hours.

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  • August 18, 2008 9:06 PM

• Poem: Among the Ruins of a School

  

  Written by Jami Proctor-Xu 徐贞敏, a poet, translator, and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. From Tang Danhong’s blog:

  A hand covered in gray concrete dust
  with three scratches of dried blood
  A fist curled around a red and white pen

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  • July 26, 2008 8:29 AM

• China Buying Silence In Quake

  

  From International Herald Tribune:

  The official came for Yu Tingyun in his village one evening last week. While clutching a contract and a pen, he asked Yu to get into his car.

  Yu’s daughter had died in a cascade of concrete and bricks, one of at least 240 students at a high school in Hanwang who lost their lives in the May 12 earthquake. He became a leader of grieving parents demanding to know if that school, like so many others, had crumbled because of poor construction.

  The contract had been thrust in Yu’s face during a long interrogation by the police the previous day. In exchange for his silence, and for acknowledging that the ruling Communist Party had “mobilized society to help us,” he would get a cash payment and a pension.

  Yu had resisted then, but this time, he took the pen.

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  • July 23, 2008 7:57 PM

• Photo: Looking at photos of students from a collapsed school

  

  

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  • July 16, 2008 12:23 PM

• Protesting Quake Parents Detained

  

  From Radio Free Asia:

  Authorities in the southwestern province of Sichuan detained at least 10 parents whose children were killed when school buildings collapsed during the May 12 earthquake, after hundreds of bereaved relatives staged rowdy protests outside government offices in quake-ravaged area.

  Several hundred parents staged a sit-in outside municipal government offices in Deyang city Tuesday, calling on local government officials to meet with them. Similar protests were reported in towns across the areas worst hit by the earthquake, in which at least 70,000 people died, an estimated 10,000 of them schoolchildren.

  In nearby Shifang city, about 1,000 parents from at least five nearby towns staged a similar protest at proposals by local officials to hand out almost 100,000 yuan (U.S.$14,600) in payouts per household, if parents signed an agreement waiving their right to sue the government over allegations of shoddy construction in school buildings.

  “They characterized the money as a government subsidy, not compensation,” a bereaved father surnamed Lei from Shifang said.

  Read also Grieving Chinese parents protest school collapse by Edward Wong.

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  • July 16, 2008 9:03 AM

• China Seeks to Muzzle Quake Victim Parents

  

  The Financial Times reports from Mianzhu, Sichuan on the pressures being exerted on families of children killed in shoddy schools in the Wenchuan earthquake:

  In tent cities that have sprung up throughout the region, soldiers carrying batons patrol the streets and security agents and police have stepped up efforts to muzzle any sign of “social instability”.

  An atmosphere of anxiety reigns among the parents of children killed in school collapses in the towns of Mianzhu and Dujiangyan as government and security officials apply increasing pressure on them to drop demands for a full investigation.

  A parent in Dujiangyan said that officials had said “not to make trouble” and to quietly accept cash compensation of Rmb12,000 ($1,750) per child with the promise of a further Rmb20,000 ($2,917) to come later.

  Read also a previous CDT post: “Parents Wait for Answers on Quake School.”

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  • July 3, 2008 7:59 AM

• Quake Teacher Detained

  

  From Radio Free Asia:

  Police in Sichuan have detained a middle-school teacher who openly criticized the construction of school buildings that collapsed in large numbers during the devastating May 12 earthquake.

  Liu Shaokun, who teaches middle school in Deyang city and had been doing volunteer aid work since the quake, was taken into custody late June 25, according to a friend who asked to be identified as Ms. Xian.

  “He disappeared suddenly, so his wife called the police, and they told her that her husband was detained,” Xian said.

  “He is accused of spreading rumors and instigating parents to negotiate with the government—sort of disturbing the social order. He isn’t allowed to see his family, but they can send him clothing,” she said.

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  • June 28, 2008 5:52 PM

• Police Detain Parents After China Quake City Protest

  

  From Reuters:

  Police in southwestern China on Saturday detained and also beat up some parents who tried to protest outside a city hall, demanding answers to the school collapses in last month’s earthquake which killed their children.

  “They detained several of the parents’ representatives. We are trying to get them released. They detained eight people,” said Hu Jian, a resident of Dujiangyan, a small city 50 km (30 miles) from the Sichuan province capital of Chengdu.

  His daughter was crushed to death when her school collapsed.

  The quake in Sichuan province killed some 70,000 people, and many parents of the 9,000 or so children killed blame the flimsy school buildings and officials whom they claim spurned building safety rules.

  Read also No answers for Chinese who lost children to quake by Cara Anna.

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  • June 21, 2008 5:09 AM

• Parents Wait for Answers on Quake School

  

  AP reports on a sit-in by parents whose children were killed when their school was destroyed in the Wenchuan earthquake. The parents were asking for the results of an investigation into why the school collapsed so easily:

  The parents sat in the shade ignoring pleas from local leader Zhang Qing to board buses that would take them to a larger town nearby to meet government officials.

  “If they just go with me to a quieter place … they would hear the answers,” Zhang said. “We have to listen to what they say. They are not going to tell you here.”

  After a standoff that lasted at least three hours, the parents got on the buses.

  In the afternoon, at least two foreign journalists, including an Associated Press reporter who spoke to parents at the school, were detained by police.

  Read also an investigation from Caijing Magazine on the collapsed school, as well as more reports on the subject via CDT.

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  • June 20, 2008 8:12 AM