5/17/2008 - Chinese government officials struggled Friday to answer questions from angry citizens on why so many schools collapsed in this week’s deadly earthquake and vowed to punish anyone responsible for shoddy construction in the buildings.
In a rare, real-time online exchange with ordinary Chinese, the first measure of the number of destroyed school-rooms — 6,898 — emerged, with figures still to come from the hardest-hit areas of Wenchuan and Beichuan.
Education officials in provinces across China also started making promises to tear down and rebuild school houses if they were not quake-safe to avoid another disaster.
“If quality problems do exist in the school buildings, we will punish those responsible severely and give the public a satisfactory answer,” Han Jin, head of the Ministry of Education’s development and planning department, said on Friday’s state-run forum.
Local officials have been ordered to investigate why so many school buildings collapsed, said Yang Rong, standards director at the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development. Monday’s 7.9-magnitude earthquake far exceeded the state building requirements of earthquake resistance, he added.
But the officials’ measured answers in the online question-and-answer session were met with the kind of angry comments that have echoed across the Internet since the quake left whole villages destroyed.
“China’s government buildings at every level are more magnificent than those of developed countries, the schoolrooms are worse than Africa’s, who’s to blame!!!” said one comment on bbs.people.com.cn, the forum that hosted the question-and-answer session and is part of the Communist Party newspaper People’s Daily.
Exactly what kind of anti-earthquake building standards are there for schools?” another person asked.
The earthquake’s toll on schools has spotlighted China’s chronically underfunded education system and also has been especially painful in a country that restricts many of its citizens to a single child.
In one striking case, a high school in Juyuan just north of the Sichuan provincial capital of Sichuan collapsed in seconds, killing all but a handful of the 900 students. Neighboring buildings appeared little affected.
In Mianzhu, close to where President Hu Jintao arrived to inspect rescue efforts Friday, seven schools collapsed, burying 1,700 people, the state-run Xinhua News Agency said. Another 700 students were thought to have been buried in a school in nearby Hanwang town, while in Beichuan, 700 were still buried in another school, it reported.
The government mandates nine years of compulsory education for all China. But cash-strapped local governments especially in rural areas have struggled to comply. Though Beijing has boosted education subsidies by double digits in recent years, to a projected 156 billion yuan (US$22 billion) in 2008, parents complain of old, badly maintained schools, out-of-date textbooks and poorly paid teachers who sometimes seek bribes to teach better.
Building experts said the problem in China, as in many other parts of the world, was a lack of commitment by governments to improve the quality of school buildings.
“Schools should never collapse, and hospitals and fire stations should never collapse. These are all civic structures that are needed in a disaster,” said Roger Bilham, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “So when I hear a school has collapsed, I point the finger at politics.”
The day after the earthquake, the Ministry of Education ordered all provinces to stop using dangerous school buildings that had been damaged by the earthquake — but it didn’t say what to do with dangerous school buildings in general.
Housing Minister Jiang Weixin told a news conference in Beijing the government would do everything in its power to improve construction standards, but suggested unlawful corner cutting was to blame.
“Substandard projects are never allowed,” he said.
Officials in at least six provinces promised to tear down dangerous school buildings to protect students, according to state media reports.
“I’m really worried about the students’ safety, and I feel a deep responsibility to get rid of these dangerous buildings,” Luo Chongmin, the head of the education department in the southwestern city of Kunming, told the Metro Times newspaper.
The debate over school funding in China has echoes in the United States and many other countries. Fouad Bendimerad, chairman of the Earthquakes and Megacities Initiative, said the lack of quake-proof schools is a worldwide problem.
“It’s frustrating to see earthquake after quake after quake and not do much about it,” said Bendimerad, whose nonprofit organization works to reduce disaster risks in big cities./AP
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