Sat, Aug 30, 2008 page9

• Beijing gags bereaved parents of lost Sichuan children

  Thousands of schoolchildren died in the May earthquake, but months later, Beijing seems keener to crack down on the parents than the culprits behind shoddy construction

  • By Tania Branigan / THE GUARDIAN
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  He was nothing special, except to his parents. Not a trophy winner or soccer champion; not the class joker or swot. He was small for a 12-year-old, with glasses and a tentative smile — the sort of boy who blurs into the crowd in school photos, who stands aside on the playground.

  “He was born prematurely, at less than eight months. He wasn’t very strong, so we spent all our money seeking treatment for him,” his mother told me. “He was the source of all our mental strength. We didn’t expect him to be a ‘great man,’ but we hoped he would be a good one. Now we hope the government can give us a satisfactory explanation and justice.”

  She was speaking less than a fortnight after her son had been crushed in the total collapse of Fuxin No. 2 Elementary in Mianzhu, Sichuan. He was one of 4,700 children who died when their schools crumbled around them in the earthquake that ripped through southwest China on May 12. 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 (姚明).

  

  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 organizations 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 traveling 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,” he said.

  When I came across Fuxin, I had been in Sichuan, covering the earthquake’s aftermath, for almost two weeks; it was the sixth ruined school I had found.

  By the government’s estimates, 7,000 classrooms collapsed in the tremor. In Dujiangyan, children lay on the street in body bags; in Hanwang, they were stored on concrete ping-pong tables in the schoolyard; in Beichuan, the ground was thick with small corpses, ghostly with dust. The air stank of death. A teenager described lying trapped under rubble, touching the cooling skin of a classmate and knowing that she was dead. Another young boy came up to ask if anyone knew the fate of his best friend. Everywhere you went there were small bodies and welling pain and anger — magnified by the needlessness of their deaths.

  In areas such as Beichuan, the force of the quake destroyed almost everything in its path. Homes and shops and offices were thrown sideways or simply crashed to the ground. Schools suffered because everything did. But in other areas, such as Dujiangyan, schools crumbled while the buildings around them stood almost unscathed. Fuxin was another of those, and the contrast between the surrounding structures and the rubble of the classrooms had roused parents’ fury. Most were farmers or small traders; they were poor, largely uneducated people, who had never challenged authority.

  Pain overwhelmed their fear. The parents were not just willing to confront officials; they were desperate to do so. Each day, they gathered at the site, lit candles at a makeshift shrine to their children and waited for the authorities to come and apologize. Unclaimed schoolbags lay in a grimy pile; books, pencils and a scatter of fuchsia sequins poked through the dust.

  The Guardian’s photographer and I arrived shortly after the town’s education chief finally came to pay his respects, following requests from the parents.

  He said the matter was under investigation, then added: “I feel sad too, but it’s a natural disaster.”

  He reminded them that 11 schools had collapsed across the city.

  Before us, the families’ grief was metastasizing into anger — a rage impossible to ignore as the parents screamed into his imperturbable face: “Why are your hearts so black?” and “Why did our children die?”

  Fathers hacked at the remains to demonstrate concrete you could brush away like powder and thin steel frames that had buckled beyond recognition. They believed that substandard construction had claimed the lives of the 127 students who died here and those of many more students in other schools across the province.

  Across the country, millions of Chinese were drawing the same conclusion. Public outrage was swelling. The state media asked awkward questions and experts came forward to condemn poor design and construction. The investigative magazine Caijing examined five schools and claimed that none of the sites had been surveyed. The government fielded questions online and promised an inquiry into whether poor building work, linked to corruption, was to blame.

  When the Fuxin parents marched to higher authorities, the communist party secretary for Mianzhu city got on his knees to beg them to stop. They ignored him. Throughout the quake zone, the authorities were showing not just humility but unusual openness. They welcomed volunteers from across the country, invited overseas relief teams and allowed reporters to cover the disaster unhindered.

  For a few days in the wake of our visit it seemed as if the parents’ questions might be answered. The thaw did not last long. Within weeks, the censors had ordered the media to drop the subject. Within a month, police were dragging parents away from protests. The families fought back, at first. They threatened to register their dead children for the new school year. They pledged to sue. They protested outside government offices. They spoke to activists whom they hoped might help them.

  But by the time I returned to Fuxin, there was no sign of the angry demonstrations I had witnessed. The ruins of the school were guarded through the day. Plainclothes police were watching the site and the homes of the most vocal parents. Many of the relatives, once desperate to tell their children’s stories, were now too frightened to talk.

  “They don’t see the point of speaking to the foreign media; they don’t think it’s helped,” one mother said.

  She had agreed to meet me at a nearby market and we drove around the back roads of the area, past lush, green rice fields, to avoid the attention of public security officials while we talked. Though a loyal party member, she feared retaliation if she were caught; like all those I spoke to this time, she asked not to be named.

  The previous day, five of the parents planned to catch a train to Beijing, to petition the central authorities. It is one of the few routes left to those who believe local officials are ignoring them. But an edict from on high had warned provincial governments to ensure “zero protests, zero petitioners to Beijing” in the run-up to the Olympics.

  “The Public Security Bureau were waiting for our representatives when they went to buy tickets at the station. I think they must have a list of us all because they knew who they were, and told them not to go. They have told us not to make trouble,” she said.

  “We don’t want compensation; we just want someone held accountable. We don’t want this to happen again,” she said.

  As she spoke, she stroked a tiny photograph of her daughter. She was, she thought, too old to have another child; she did not sound as if she had the heart to try.

  The Fuxin parents sought a full investigation. Instead, they were offered money: 60,000 yuan (US$8,300), a huge sum by Chinese standards, but one that came at a cost. Parents reported coming under intense pressure to apply for the cash by signing a document that included a promise to abide by the law and maintain social order — in other words, stop protesting.

  “We are not pursuing wealth; we just need justice. We want the people who deserve it to be punished,” an angry father told us. “But they were extremely eager that we would sign. They forced and deceived us. The officials stayed in our rooms until 11pm or 12pm, and they told us that others all signed this and if you did not sign you would be the only person who got nothing.”

  “So we signed, and the next day we found that they told everybody this. We found out that we had been cheated. They got rid of the evidence, the wreckage of the school [which they leveled]. They said they had to do it to prevent infectious diseases, but it was just because it showed that the building was dangerous. My child should not have died,” he said.

  There was, he said, little sign of the investigation that the authorities had promised.

  “I thought the government would give us justice, but it now seems that is impossible,” wept another woman. “Some people still tell us that the government will solve this, but most of us think that they’ve been bought by officials. I haven’t cried in the last three months, but I do now. Before, I thought the government would help us and if we had any trouble we could go to them. But when we went to them there was no one there.”

  Nor can the parents turn to outside assistance. Last month, a human rights group reported that a teacher from Sichuan had been sentenced to a year’s re-education in a labor camp for “disseminating rumors and destroying social order” — that is, photographing the ruins of the schools and circulating the pictures on the Internet, along with criticism of the construction standards.

  Liu Shaokun (劉紹坤) is thought to be the third person held for posting such material.

  The family of Huang Qi (黃琦), a long-standing human rights activist from Sichuan, said he was formally arrested for “illegal possession of state secrets” after helping bereaved parents and posting articles about structural failings of schools on his Web site. One of his articles was about Zeng Hongling (曾宏玲), a former academic, who may have been the first detained.

  A Hong Kong-based rights group said she has been held on subversion charges after posting online essays attacking shoddy construction.

  The crackdown is all the more striking because the parents have never sought to challenge Beijing’s authority. It is not an issue of national sovereignty, such as Tibet; or about alternative power structures, such as religion. They were not questioning the legitimacy of the government. They were simply embarrassing it at a moment when international attention to China made officials particularly sensitive.

  The families’ voices were potent and numerous and the problem was too complex for a single person or department to take the rap.

  Corrupt officials siphoning off cash may have played a part in places. But so too, it seems, did inept designers, untrained laborers, contractors who themselves took an illicit cut of the budget, the factories who churned out poor-quality materials and the supervisors who failed to spot problems.

  “There was no one person clearly responsible for the incident; you would need to overhaul the whole system,” said Nicholas Bequelin, a China specialist at Human Rights Watch.

  The authorities’ response to such complex issues was recognizable from previous scandals, he said: pressure to take compensation in place of real redress.

  “The government gives signs that it’s serious and transparent and more accountable — but then these efforts fade away,” he said.

  “One problem,” he said, “is the absence of a free press to keep the issue in the headlines. The incentive for finding out things that are going to embarrass you is just not there. A second is local inertia. Once [central government] officials have left and the issue is not in their minds, the provincial bureaucracy reasserts itself in the old ways. It’s a problem we have with a lot of positive steps the government takes.”

  Earlier this month, the authorities announced a US$139.1 billion recovery plan for the quake zone, promising to prioritize the reconstruction of schools and hospitals — and vowing to make them “extremely safe and solid structures the public can feel reassured about.”

  It is not the first time school safety has been on the government’s agenda. Caijing reported that last year, Sichuan put aside US$100.6 million to improve dangerous buildings. An at-risk register was compiled. Fuxin was not on it.
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