Vol. 72/No. 24      June 16, 2008

At least 10,000 of the estimated 67,000 killed were schoolchildren. Some 6,900 classrooms and school dormitories were destroyed. For most, the dead student was their only child, intensifying their grief and anger.

Many charge that school buildings used by the children of workers and farmers collapsed, while schools for more affluent families and government buildings remained intact.

“Look at this! A natural disaster I could understand, I could live with, but this was negligence,” said Jiang Xujun, whose 10-year-old son died in Mianzhu at Fuxing No. 2 Primary School. Showing a reporter for the London Independent the remains of the school, Jiang crumbled the mortar around brick debris in his hands. “Only dust was holding this building together.”

Angry parents surrounded the vice secretary of the Mianzhu city government May 24 and called her a liar for her report on the disaster, which failed to mention that 127 students had been killed.

The next day the parents organized to march to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, about 50 miles away. Jiang Guohua, a local Communist Party official, got down on his knees and begged the parents to stop marching. They refused. Three hours later the police tried to block the march.

According to the New York Times, “After a tense stand-off, the marchers agreed to board government buses to Deyang, the county seat.” In Deyang, the vice-mayor promised an investigation into the causes of the school collapse.

At a May 27 gathering of parents of students from Juyuan Middle School in Djuiangyan, Liu Lifu, a quarry worker, grabbed the microphone. His 15-year-old daughter was killed along with her entire class during a biology lesson.

“We demand that the government severely punish the killers who caused the collapse of the school building,” Liu shouted.

The epicenter of the earthquake was in Sichuan, the third most populous province and one of the poorest in China. Many Sichuan workers and farmers send their children to boarding schools, which cost more, because schools are too far away for daily travel. Natives of the province are a large percentage of China’s 140 million migrants, who seek work in other parts of the country, in part to be able to afford sending their children to school.

Sichuan officials announced May 26 that they would make exceptions to China’s “one-child policy” for parents whose only child was killed or seriously injured in the earthquake. The Chengdu Population and Family Planning Committee said qualified parents could apply for legal permission to have another child.

The reactionary one-child policy was introduced in 1979. It imposes steep fines on those who have more than one child. Children beyond the first-born are termed “illegal” and can be denied government benefits, including the right to an education. In some cases women have been pressured into having abortions.

According to the New York Times, the family planning committee “announced… that if a couple’s legally born child was killed in the earthquake, an illegal child under 18 could be registered as a legal replacement. If the dead child was illegal, it said the family would no longer be responsible for outstanding fines.”

“I’d say 90 percent of the people around here have only one child,” Wang Zix told the Los Angeles Times. “It takes a lot of money to raise children—we farmers have a hard time even supporting ourselves; how can we afford to pay fines to have more?”

Parents at Juyuan Middle School said they were told they would be compensated for the loss of their children.

“We don’t want their money,” said Luo Guanmin, a farmer whose daughter died in the collapse. “We just want the corruption to end.”
 
 
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