March 9, 2009
Chinese Official Defends Construction of Schools Felled in Quake
By KEITH BRADSHER
HONG KONG — A vice governor of the Chinese province hardest hit by the earthquake last May said Sunday that many schools collapsed then because of the strength of the 7.9 magnitude quake, and not because of shoddy construction.
Wei Hong, one of the eight vice governors of Sichuan Province, also declined to release the number of schoolchildren who were killed, saying that the exact tally still had not been calculated almost 10 months later, news agencies reported from Beijing. Mr. Wei spoke to reporters on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress there.
State news media have reported that the quake left more than 80,000 dead and thousands more missing. The most controversial aspect of the quake has been the damage to 14,000 classrooms, half of which collapsed entirely.
Heavy damage to schools, some of which fell down in neighborhoods where other structures remained standing, has prompted accusations from local residents that the schools suffered from what many Chinese have termed “tofu” construction.
Epicentre location as shown in NY Times
Local and provincial officials have responded angrily to criticisms of school construction practices, and particularly to suggestions from some parents that there might have been corruption involved in the construction process for schools. The local authorities have silenced many parents who lost children in the earthquake, through a combination of compensation payments and intimidation.
A mother whose 11-year-old daughter died in the earthquake said by telephone on Sunday that “of course it was tofu construction that led to the collapse of the school.”
The mother, who requested anonymity because of continued government efforts to discourage public discussion of the collapse of the schools, said that she believed that the government must have a tally of schoolchildren who died in the earthquake, since communities in her area were well aware of death tolls at their local schools.
Mr. Wei was promoted to vice governor on June 1, less than three weeks after the quake on May 12, part of a series of shifts in provincial leaders that followed the quake but that may have been scheduled to some extent before the natural disaster.
The Beijing authorities sent their own committee of experts to Sichuan Province after the earthquake to assess construction practices there.
The chairman of the committee, Ma Zongjin, said at a news conference in Beijing last September that because of a rush to build schools during China’s economic boom in recent years, more than 1,000 damaged schools had suffered from at least one of two shortcomings: they were built extremely close to the fault line and were destroyed with other structures near them, or they were poorly built.
But detailed results of that investigation have not been released.
