China laments its lost children

For appalled Chinese watching the news from their country’s quake-stricken south-western provinces, one story has stood out as the source of particular horror: the collapse of at least half a dozen schools with hundreds of children inside.

“How come it’s the schools that fall down first? Why are government offices so sturdy?” asked one contributor to the Tianya online discussion website on Tuesday.

“Government [officials] think their flesh is more valuable,” replied another poster on the site. “Many schools are built of little more than bean curd dregs – and who would dare to build a government office like that?”

While the causes of individual building failures remain unclear, such complaints underscore widespread concerns about the quality of much of China’s infrastructure amid an unparalleled but only patchily supervised national building surge. The criticism is also a potent reminder of the political risks that natural disasters – with their merciless exposure of administrative or societal failings – can pose even to rulers as firmly rooted as China’s Communist party.

So far Beijing leaders have appeared well prepared to minimise such risks. Hu Jintao, China’s president, and Wen Jiabao, the premier, reacted decisively and very publicly within hours of the quake on Monday. And state-controlled media have kept Mr Wen centre-stage in their coverage from the earthquake zone ever since.

“This is clearly a team that realises they cannot muck around on disaster relief,” says David Zweig, director of the Centre on China’s Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Mr Wen’s calls for local officials to redouble relief efforts have bolstered his man-of-the-people image and attracted online praise for the government, largely drowning out accusations of shoddy school construction and anger that officials failed to forecast the quake.

Indeed, the official response to the Sichuan earthquake highlights the progress China has made in recent decades. When an earthquake levelled the northern city of Tangshan in 1976, leftist national leaders failed to organise effective relief efforts, concealed the scale of the disaster and refused foreign aid. More than 270,500 people died.

Beijing’s high-profile emergency action this week has also put it in comfortable contrast to the military junta of neighbouring Burma, which has drawn international condemnation for appearing to put politics over relief efforts after a devastating cyclone.

Meanwhile, the Communist party’s sophisticated system of media and internet controls means it is well placed to contain any online discontent.

Yet it might well be wise for China’s leaders to look carefully at the criticism sparked by the school collapses. The country has built a lot of world-class infrastructure in recent years, but urban planning departments remain hotbeds of bureaucratic graft. In 2006, for example, the vice-mayor responsible for Beijing’s Olympics-related construction was toppled in a corruption scandal.

Architects say suggestions the schools should have been more robust are not just idle internet chatter.

“It is obviously very hard to say from just a few photos, but it does look as if some of those school buildings used little construction steel,” says a Shanghai-based architect who asked not to be named. “[That] perhaps explains why they collapsed completely.”

Zhou Yun, head of the Institute of Civil Engineering at Guangzhou University, says that while Chinese schools are not in themselves subject to special standards, any public building constructed according to codes introduced in 1989 should be basically sound.

Unfortunately, rushed and substandard construction means that many are actually “hidden hazards”, says Prof Zhou, who also heads a research centre for earthquake-resistant construction.

“If standards were adhered to and corners not cut, then schools would not be the first to fall down,” he says. “It is an issue of whether designers and contractors are corrupt or fail to guarantee quality.”

Beyond the toppling of the urban schools, the earthquake will highlight the human cost of failing to regulate construction with effect in rural areas. The government has worked for years on a new rural building code aimed at narrowing the gap with urban areas, but it has yet to be published.

Still, while Prof Zhou says urban buildings are generally more earthquake resistant, Chinese cities have not learned enough from the tragic lesson imposed by the 1976 Tangshan disaster.

The death toll of the Sichuan quake would be limited by the lower population density of the mountainous and mainly rural areas near the epicentre, he says.

“If this kind of thing happened in a city it would be very tragic,” he says. “If it happened in Beijing, then I reckon if half of the buildings didn’t fall down, then at least one-third would.”

Additional reporting by Geoff Dyer

China responds to a human tragedy