Chinese Authorities Attack Grieving Parents

From The New York Times Grieving Chinese Parents Protest School Collapse By EDWARD WONG Published: July 17, 2008 BEIJING — Hundreds of parents protesting shoddy school construction that they said led to the deaths of their children in the May earthquake were harassed by riot police officers on Tuesday and criticized by local government officials, the parents said Wednesday. Local officials were also trying to buy the silence of the parents by offering them about $8,800 if they signed a contract agreeing not to raise the school construction issue again, several parents said. The confrontation between the parents and the police officers erupted on Tuesday morning as 200 parents protested outside government offices in Mianzhu, a city in the earthquake-ravaged Sichuan Province, said Liu Guangyuan, a protester who lost a son when a school collapsed. It was the latest in a series of protests held by grieving parents, many of whom lost their only child in the earthquake. With an eye to the approach of the Olympic Games in Beijing next month, however, the Chinese authorities have ordered the police to crack down on the rallies. Chinese news organizations have also been told by the central government not to report on the schools, and all journalists have been barred from approaching the collapse sites. The parents in Mianzhu on Tuesday were demanding that the government offer a full report on why Dongqi Middle School collapsed, killing at least 200 of the school’s 900 students. The Chinese government has reported that a total of 7,000 classrooms collapsed during the May 12 earthquake, and by some estimates 10,000 of the nearly 70,000 confirmed deaths were of schoolchildren. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, many local governments promised to investigate the school collapses, but parents across Sichuan Province complained that they had yet to receive any reports. The parents of the Dongqi schoolchildren gathered at 10 a.m. and demanded to meet the mayor, but no officials came out for any serious discussion, said Mr. Liu, a carpenter. Instead, an official, saying that the parents were violating public security laws, “ordered us to leave within two minutes,” Mr. Liu said. “Then the riot police started pushing and dragging. Some of the outraged parents got into physical confrontations with the police. I saw eight or nine parents carried away to patrol cars parked on the side.” Mr. Liu said he had heard that the parents were taken to a police station, but it was unclear exactly what happened to them. A person answering the telephone at the Mianzhu government offices on Wednesday said officials were in a meeting and could not talk to reporters. Mr. Liu said that the parents of Dongqi students were offended by the offer of money from the Sichuan provincial government if they agreed to drop the issue. The amount “is far from enough to appease the grief,” he said. Mr. Liu said the parents of children who attended Dongqi Middle School would petition their case at higher levels of government. Dongqi Middle School was built in 1975 and renovated in 1981, Mr. Liu said. “When my son entered the school in 2006, they promised to build new buildings,” he added. “This was written in the enrollment welcome letter. But they didn’t keep their word, and then the earthquake happened.” Zhang Longfu, whose daughter died in another Mianzhu school that collapsed, said parents at that school had also been offered $8,800 plus a pension upon retirement in their 60s if they signed a contract acknowledging that their children died in the schools because of the earthquake and agreeing not to disturb reconstruction efforts. “Parents are generally concerned about the contract and are not willing to sign it because they’re afraid that by signing it, they’ll be admitting that their children’s deaths are not related to the shoddy school building,” said Mr. Zhang, whose daughter died in the collapse of Fuxin No. 2 Primary School. Mr. Zhang said some leaders of the parents group met on Tuesday with the vice mayor of Mianzhu, who he said acknowledged that the schools were poorly built and had some hidden safety problems but insisted that the earthquake was ultimately responsible for the collapses. Hundreds of parents also held a rally on Tuesday in Shifang to protest government attempts to give them compensation in return for silence, according to a report from Radio Free Asia, a nonprofit news agency that receives financing from the United States government. The report said that the local government was offering to hand out $14,600 to each household in which a child had died in a school collapse. Zhang Jing and Huang Yuanxi contributed research.