Rescuers are still combing through the wreckage for survivors in the aftermath of China’s most serious natural disaster in 30 years:
The official rescue efforts have stopped at the Juyuan Middle School, where at least 600 students were trapped during the violent earthquake in China’s Sichuan province, which will leave an estimated 4.8 million people homeless, Chinese authorities said today. But while the workers have left the site of the three-story building in the village of Juyuan, neighbors and parents still gather here to try to comprehend why the children who went off to class Monday disappeared under tons of broken concrete. Some scramble over the debris, searching for any reminders of the dead. Others stand in the muddy, trash-filled lot and discuss the tragedy with a tone that drifts between sadness and rage.
“It was built out of tofu,” says Hu Yuefu, 44, of the school building that collapsed in the magnitude 7.9 quake and killed his 15-year-old daughter Huishan. He believes local government officials and the building contractors are responsible. As he speaks, a crowd gathers around to listen and offer their support. “I hope there is an investigation,” Hu says. “Otherwise, there are a thousand parents who would beat them to death.”
When one or two government building collapse in an earthquake, it might be reasonable to blame a few corrupt officials. When dozens or hundreds or government buildings collapse over a vast area, something more systemic is probably involved.
The openness with which this disaster and whatever may have contributed to the destruction is being treated in the Chinese media and by the Chinese government is a welcome development, extremely good news. Let’s hope that whatever investigation occurs goes beyond finding a few symbolic scapegoats:
“The government and the construction companies collude with each other,” says Hu, whose daughter’s corpse was pulled out from the Juyuan Middle School two hours after it collapsed on Monday. “It’s in their interest to build them poorly.”
In China it is often at the local level, where officials have the most direct impact on citizen’s lives, that corruption is most common and bears the most painful consequences. While that problem is widely recognized, the collapse of schools after the Sichuan quake has turned it into a major public issue. During a State Council press conference this week, a journalist from the state-run China Daily asked why so many schools were destroyed by the tremor, while government buildings seemed comparatively intact. “It was not just schools that collapsed, but because children were buried we pay close attention to that,” replied Wang Zhenyao, disaster relief director for the Ministry of Civil Affairs. “But in Beichuan county the civil administration building collapsed, and there were possibly casualties. The government buildings aren’t all that firm.” Still, online message boards teemed with demands for answers as to why so many schools were destroyed. “After the disaster is over, there should be an investigation of who built the schools, the material problems and whether there was a problem of corruption. I think there definitely was,” wrote one person on a Tianya web forum.
