The Sichuan earthquake: Salt in their wounds

The Sichuan earthquake

Salt in their wounds

May 14th 2009 | JUYUAN
From The Economist print edition

Bereaved parents treated like criminals

“CITIZENS of the disaster zone are marching towards a new life,” proclaimed China’s president, Hu Jintao, on May 12th, a year after an earthquake in Sichuan Province left more than 86,000 dead or missing and millions homeless. But for all Mr Hu’s talk of the victory won by China’s colossal relief efforts, some survivors are deeply unhappy.

APRemembering what was lost in the rubble

China’s immediate response to the earthquake won international praise for its speed and openness. Journalists, who are often kept away from disaster scenes, were given largely unfettered access. But officials soon began trying to limit their access to the angry relatives of the thousands of children crushed to death by collapsing school buildings. While Mr Hu spoke at a ceremony attended by foreign diplomats in the badly hit town of Yingxiu, close to the epicentre, police around the zone were on heightened alert to prevent parents from airing their grievances.

In the town of Juyuan, about 20km (12.5 miles) south-east of Yingxiu, police surrounded the fenced-off remains of a middle school where hundreds of children were killed. Foreign journalists now have to register with the government to report from the earthquake zone. Officials in Dujiangyan, a nearby city, insisted that a government minder accompany your correspondent to Juyuan. But once there, three black-shirted security agents soon put a stop to the tour. They drove the visitors to a police station where an officer declared that Juyuan was under “special controls”.

Buildings near Juyuan Middle School show few visible signs of earthquake damage. Parents suspect that this is because they were better constructed than the school’s two collapsed buildings. In the days after the earthquake, senior officials vowed to investigate whether shoddy construction was to blame for the destruction of more than 7,000 classrooms in the disaster. But the issue was soon played down. It was not until a few days before the anniversary that the government finally gave a figure for the number of students killed or missing: 5,335. But officials also insisted that not one school had collapsed because of poor building quality.

Some of Juyuan’s bereaved parents are not convinced. The father of a 15-year-old boy killed in the middle school accuses the local government of fearing a public investigation “because there is corruption involved”. Officials ordered this man and several other parents to join a sightseeing trip on May 12th, apparently to keep them out of town over the anniversary. Because of China’s strict family-planning policy, many of the parents had only one child.

In Beijing, a prominent artist, Ai Weiwei, famous as a designer of the “bird’s nest” Olympic stadium, has organised a team of more than 50 volunteers to travel around the earthquake zone and collect the names of students who were killed (he believes there were more than 7,000) and record interviews with their parents. He says team members have been stopped by police more than 20 times. The police usually confiscated or erased their recordings and threatened further retribution if they continued their work. On two occasions, volunteers were beaten. Several of the victims’ parents as well as foreign journalists have suffered similar thuggery. Parents have been warned not to protest. Some who have refused have been told they will be treated as supporters of Falun Gong, an outlawed sect, or of Tibetan independence, says Mr Ai.

Officials have not directly attempted to stop Mr Ai’s activities, but internet portals in Beijing often remove blog postings with updates on his name-gathering mission. In March police in Sichuan arrested an activist, Tan Zuoren, engaged in a project similar to Mr Ai’s. He is still in custody, as is Huang Qi, who was charged last year with possessing state secrets after gathering information on collapsed schools.

Mr Ai says the refusal of central leaders to admit policy failures has exacerbated parents’ frustration. In the 1990s, he says, shoddy school buildings were erected across China because of the government’s drive to provide enough classrooms for all children to undergo nine years of compulsory education. Building costs were supposed to be shared by central and local authorities, but the latter often failed to chip in. This led to quality problems.

A law took effect this month requiring that schools and hospitals be built to withstand quakes of magnitude eight, about the scale of Sichuan’s. This will be only a crumb of comfort to Juyuan’s grieving parents. They say local officials have banned them even from visiting the school’s weed-filled compound to mourn.