Chen Peijin translates an article from Southern Weekend about the school in Juyuan, one of many schools that collapsed in the recent earthquake. From his introduction to the translated article:
The Juyuan Middle School was one of the “worst” tragedies of the Wenchuan earthquake: the entirely school collapsed and took the lives of the hundreds of people that were inside it. Recent media attention in China has been focused on why certain buildings managed to stay upright while others completely collapsed. Shoddy construction, lack of transparency and oversight, corruption, “quotas” from above that had to be met–this report from Southern Weekend lays out many of the facts and the background and shows, at least in my mind, that so much of the problem is systemic. This means that while certain heads may roll and justice may be meted out in some kind of quasi-rational fashion, the thornier issues is how you “pull out the weeds” in the system. It is perhaps this natural disaster which will, more than anything else, throw light on the true “price of progress” of these last thirty years of economic development.
