Photos of dogs and cats orphaned during the Wenchuan earthquake

OK, so this is not terribly interesting in itself but just interesting tidbit, especially for those that love animals!

You can see more of the pictures here.

Wenchuan: should we stay or should we go?

The debate rages on, with many Wenchuan local residents, according to a survey, inclined
to get out of there while they can. This article claims that out of 768 people surveyed, over 90% of them wanted to leave and rebuild their homes and their lives somewhere else. There’s a passage that’s particular revealing as it talks about the uneven economic development in the area.

过度发展招来泥石流

汶川城从原先的5000人发展到如今4.5万人，修路、建厂，开发过程中破坏了很多山体

地震后，四川省地矿局的刘洪涛进入汶川考察。他在对县城所有的地质灾害点进行摸底后发现，由于县城逐渐扩张，直接引发县城周边的30多处地质灾害点。“这些隐患多数是人类活动造成的。”

上世纪50年代，汶川县城由绵虒镇搬迁到如今的县城所在地威州镇。1984年，整个县城面积是91公顷，进入上世纪90年代县城面积扩展到3.5平方公里。人口从原先的5000人到后来的4.5万人。

建设部抗震救灾规划专家组驻阿坝州组长、清华大学建筑学院副院长尹稚来考察后说，汶川城这片土地只合适5000人生存。

刘洪涛在县城里看到多处地方，有削山建房屋的活动痕迹。他说，这样就容易造成山体下挫，发生滑坡。

汶川城在弹丸之地新修了校场街和校场横街，而后又修岷江路。地震前，县城还准备向南北扩展，合并雁门和绵虒一些区域，将人口发展到7万人。

地震中断了汶川的发展梦。

地震当天下午3点，汶川时代广场新开楼盘杨柳水岸小区原本约定业主收房。开盘前，地震发生。这个位于峭壁边上的住宅小区其一楼迅速被山上滚石淹没。如今，有些楼房的三四层楼已被埋于土下。

龙溪乡乡长周光辉说，希望地震后，过度发展与山区承载力的矛盾能引起重视，如果村民都回去原址重建，且不说目前还有没有地方可建，就是能重建，以后也会严重破坏山体，破坏生态环境，带来更多的地质灾害。他建议，对于他们龙溪乡，最多只能回去 1000多人，其他的地方进行封山育林。

The thing is that in the 1990s, as mining and other industries spurred economic development, the population grew from 5000 in in the mid-1980s to about 45,000 in the 1990s. However, the article claims that this parcel of land was not really meant to support more than 5000 people. The picture that I am getting from both this article and the other that I translated and read is that the headlong rush to economic development has complicated the issue. Now, what was once （and some believe still is) a good place to live faces numerous dangers–the mountains, the rivers, the buildings. In a situation like this, it’d be hard to convince any of the survivors to stay here. If I lived there I would feel less than safe, and that’s not even considering the trauma of being in the place where it all happened. It seems quite understandable that people would want to start afresh somewhere else. One of the people quoted in the article said that even if they had to rebuild their lives in Xinijiang, they would go and never look back.

Technorati Tags: wenchuan, sichuan, earthquake, houses, people, building, construction, environment, degradation, politics, chinese, disaster

Porcine Earthquake Hero Zhu Jianqiang

This little piggy made it through days and days after the earthquake without dying, mostly by licking coal,
which had some moisture on it. And of course, he’s now a celebrity. These are some nice pictures of him/her.

Should Chinese teachers protect their students?

The Ministry of Education in China is getting around to revising its code of ethics of teachers, and this time around they are thinking about including “protecting students,” a move no doubt in part spurred by the memory of teachers protecting students during the Wenchuan earthquake. Some who have argued against such a move say that teachers are humans too, and making it obligatory for the teacher to put life and limb in danger to protect students is going too far. They say it’s natural to want to protect the young, but to codify it might create more problems (of interpretation) than it would solve. Another more sarcastic reply was that perhaps they ought to include karate as part of teacher training from now on, and if you don’t pass muster you will not be qualified to be a teacher.

Pictures of Kungfu Panda protests in Chengdu

So it looks more serious than I had thought…still you wonder what the fuck people are protesting about. Chinese people are really oversensitive, I mean Kungfu Panda is not much different than Mulan or anything of that sort…I don’t know why they are protesting all of the sudden. Of course, with the earthquake, everyone is especially sensitive about anything relating to Sichuan and probably feel, understandably, the need to protect what they perceive as the dignity of the place…

Technorati Tags: wenchuan, sichuan, chengdu, china, boycott, kungfu panda, jack black, dustin hoffman, film, wenchuan, film , catastrophe, disaster, relief,

Maybe we ought to take out “earthquake insurance”

This Xinhua article comes up with some interesting statistics: in the last 300 years, there were 50 natural disasters that claimed over 100,000 lives, and of those, 26 were in China, with the total number of dead numbering 103 million, 68% of the total amount.

Over 1/10 of the earthquakes happen in China, as well as typhoons, droughts, etc.

So the article then delves into the issue of insurance…specifically natural disaster insurance. The problem, as with anything in China, if is there a legal system that can support it, and then of course come the issues of the particular insurance models that will spring up to compete for the buyer’s money. But this article calls for the government to make haste in setting up the proper legal protocols so that instead of just having the government and the victims “split” the costs of the damages, a third-party–the insurance companies–start playing a part. The article cites 9-11 as an example…

Technorati Tags: earthquake, insurance, wenchuan, sichuan, china, chinese, 9-11, accident, disaster, history

Chinese in Sichuan province to boycott Kungfu Panda?

So, as one might expect, there are some calls from people on the web to boycott the movie Kungfu Panda, an animated film about a panda that learns kung-fu and saves the day. First off, I’m not 100 percent sure whether this is purely an expression of popular sentiment or an official pronouncement, but according to one website it said that on June 20, which was the day that Kungfu Panda premieres in China, no Sichuan province movie theaters will show the movie.

Why would Chinese people not like this movie, to the point of calling for a boycott? I suppose that every person would give you a slightly different answer, but most of them are going to tell you something along the lines that it’s “insulting” to Chinese culture and Hollywood’s slickly produced orientalism really doesn’t come across well so soon after the deadly earthquake that ravaged Sichuan, where the pandas mostly live, and where it might seem kind of wrong for Hollywood hucksters to be making some money.

I am not going to bother reading through tons and tons of angry tirades, so the above is just my conjecture of a typical Chinese viewpoint—meaning typical “against” position. One writer, for example, says that although it’s insulting to Chinese wushu that they shouldn’t get too up in arms about it. He calls it an “artistic insult” and says that perhaps they ought to just change the name of the movie to “American Kungfu Panda” and “American Hero” or something…just to make sure there’s no false advertising and people know that there’s nothing real, authentic, traditional, etc. about this movie. The captions in the pictures on this essay are funny…and also capture, in a more succinct way, what the author feels about the movie.

Another writer asks what the point of boycotting Kungfu Panda would be. The essay mentions that on the 16th there were some people that went to SARFT with a few banners to protest the movie. Some guy named Zhao Bandi, compared Hollywood to Sharon Stone, which, in my mind, would imply first and foremost that Hollywood is eminently fuckable for its age, but I don’t think that’s what he meant. No, he probably meant something a bit more sinister … this Zhao fellow was evidently appalled by the fact that Hollywood intended to make money from this movie, a point which the writer calmly replies “uh…DUH” to and points out is the way the world works, no different from when the Chinese aim to sell a computer to the Americans.

The writer then takes on Zhao’s second point, which was that Kungfu Panda “steals” a Chinese national treasure (the panda) and kung-fu and spins into an American-style coming of age story. The writer replies that since Zhao, of his own admittance, has not even watched the movie, he might as well go around and offer his services as a psychic.

The writer concludes that says that the movie does put Chinese culture in a positive light and is about goodness, truth, and justice. So what’s the point of boycotting it, he asks—and I’m inclined to agree.

I know that some people out there probably hate Jack Black, but I think he’s pretty funny…Nacho Libre, School of Rock, Be Kind, Rewind…don’t know if I’ve seen any others but they appeal to a cheesy side of me. There might be something essentially American about this kind of comedian and his brand of humor. All I can say is that, on the whole, I think he’s good for the world.

Just noticed that there are already similar posts/articles about this, one from People’s Daily and another from Variety Asia Online.

Psychological relief in Sichuan: more harm than good?

I was reading netease and came across a link to a Blue Cross China report about post-traumatic stress disorder among the survivors of the earthquake. Well, I don’t know if what they are talking about necessarily meets the clinical definition (and I don’t have a clue what that is anyway), but more about general symptoms of psychological disturbance. The survey was done in some local Chengdu district and said that over 90% of the people surveyed had some kind of symptoms, ranging from loss of sleep to waking suddenly in the night to having hallucinations of “earthquake feelings” (meaning, I guess, the sense that they are experiencing another earthquake).

However, I found another link from that page a bit more interesting—and this was about survivor guilt manifested as suicidal tendencies among survivors. Although this phenomenon has yet to crop up, at least in significant numbers, I am guessing that the psych experts are worried because they’ve seen this kind of thing happen before. According to the article, the Chinese Psychological Association is prepping itself for some long-term intervention by setting up counseling station around the area. One representative said that after Tangshan they did 20-30 years of counseling work and people were still traumatized (or faced psychological obstacles of various sorts), and expects that the amount of long-term psych work needing to be done here to be at least that much if not more.

There was another interesting factoid in there: the report claims that after the earthquake happened about 50 teams of people numbering over 1000 total went to the earthquake to assist in psychological counseling—but most of them don’t have proper training in post-disaster counseling (or whatever the official/scientific name for it is), thus exacerbating the psychological burden on the survivors.

I don’t know if there is any way to really verify this, as it would involve a lot of leg work and research, but it reminds of me of a video i saw a couple of days ago about Hua Dan, a non-profit that uses theater-type techniques as a form of therapy, primarily for little kids of primary school age. They’re trying to get the kids to laugh and be normal and trust each other and all that good stuff—and I applaud them for that, because it’s certainly more than I am doing (i.e., nothing)—but this article I just read makes me wonder just how such a situation is handled. Do you get some experts trained in the field of post-traumatic stress disorder and exclude others, at least until some later date? Or can these types of people and skills somehow work in tandem? I don’t know, but it’s an interesting question because although the untrained might be of some help, you don’t want them as the last resort — I mean there’s no substitute for professional training in this matter is there? Though I think the work that Hua Dan does during school time should not be at odds with this kind of counseling — perhaps the issue is that there is just enough experts to be spread around, and thus you have this vacuum, but in that case you can’t really go around blaming other organizations for being the only ones there.

I wish there was some psych expert out there that could sort this out for me because these questions are making my head spin.

Technorati Tags: psychological, psychology, stress, relief, PTSD, earthquake, sichuan, wenchuan, relief, teams, humanitarian, tangshan, disaster, Chinese

Southern Weekend investigative report on the Juyuan Middle School

The Juyuan Middle School was one of the “worst” tragedies of the Wenchuan earthquake: the entirely school collapsed and took the lives of the hundreds of people that were inside it. Recent media attention in China has been focused on why certain buildings managed to stay upright while others completely collapsed. Shoddy construction, lack of transparency and oversight, corruption, “quotas” from above that had to be met–this report from Southern Weekend lays out many of the facts and the background and shows, at least in my mind, that so much of the problem is systemic. This means that while certain heads may roll and justice may be meted out in some kind of quasi-rational fashion, the thornier issues is how you “pull out the weeds” in the system. It is perhaps this natural disaster which will, more than anything else, throw light on the true “price of progress” of these last thirty years of economic development. Here’s my rough translation of the SW piece, with a lot of muffed up proper names and government bodies, but hopefully of some use to someone out there.

*The original link is the following, and includes links to many more Wenchuan earthquake stories, interviews, and features*

[Mourning for a School]–Ministry of Housing and Urban Redevelopment confirms that collapsed schools were flawed–An investigation into the tragedy of Juyuan Middle School

“The death of so many children ought to make our
our urban planning officials, our archictects, and our structural engineers all reflect deeply.”

Juyuan Middle School’s location, architectural sturcture, consturction prociess, and consturction materials all had problems,” said Chen Baosheng, a Ministry of Construction disaster relief team member and professor at Tong Ji University.

Public opinion of late has focused on the investigatoin into the collapse of Juyuan school, but this has been the first official statement on the matter.

Ju Yuan school has two buildings which collapsed during the May 12 earthquake, causing the deaths of 278 students and teachers and leaving 11 missing. It was here that Wen Jiabao shed tears and bowed three times to pay his respects to the deceased.

However, the buildings around Ju Yuan school did not collapse, suffering damages which made them dangerous to be in but no more. The parents found this hard to accept. “How come the only building to collapse was the school? You can’t blame this on natural disasters,” said Zhao Deqin. Her twin daughters were among those that died in Juyuan school, and this forty-something mother has since turned as frail as an old woman.

In the rubble where the school used to be, brittle blocks of cement were easily broken, and the wires found in plank beams were especially thin. It was hard for the earthquake relief team that found this to contain their anger: “These are just metal wires inside the cement, not steel!”

Ju Yuan school wasn’t the only the school like this–Du Jiang Yan elementary school met a similar fate. The newly built school had half a building collapse during the earthquake, taking with it 239 lives. However, the kindergarten behind the collapsed building was fine and hardly had cracks on the wall. Just on the outside of the school, older buildings constructed in the 1980s were also unscathed, while another elementary school only about 100 meters away suffered minor damage to the walls.

In the rubble of the new school, a Southern Weekend reporter discovered that there was not a single steel beam or wire to be found inside the plank beams.

A similar situation occurred with the Du Jiang Yan Xiang’E middle school. When the earthquake hit, the school collapsed in a very short time, and out of 420 students only about ten managed to escape. Yang Huaqing lost the last of his bloodline: his grandsons Yang Liang, Yang Ke, his nephews Li Pan, Li Yang all died that day. Yang Huaqing also believes that Xiang‘E’s shoddy construction was to blame for the tragic loss of life that day.

The schools that collapsed during the earthquake were Beichuan middle school, Mao Bei Vocational middle school, Mao Bei elementary school, JuYuan middle school, Xin Jian elementary school, Xiang’E Bei middle school, Ping Tong Township elementary school, Hong Guang elementary school, Dong Hu elementary school, Mu Yu middle school, Hang Wang township’s Number One middle school and technical school, Hong Bai middle school, Hong Bai elementary school, Mianzhu County Fuxin Number Two elementary school, etc. As of the 14th of this month, the still incomplete statistics from the Ministry of Education state that 6898 educational rooms collapsed (Wenchuan, Beichuan numbers not included). When Southern Weekend asked about new statistics of collapsed buildings and the death toll, we were told that by the Sichuan Province Information Office chairman Hou Xiongfei that they were still tabulating new figures.

In the face of such a tragedy, Ministry of Construction expert Chen Baosheng said, “With so many children dead, the relevant government , planning officials, architects, and structural engineers ought to reflect deeply on this matter.”

As for Ju Yuan middle school, Chen believes that the problems began with the choice of location. The main buildings were north-south and parallel to the faults, which is why they were easily razed by the force of the earthquake.
The same structure, if placed in east-west and therefore perpendicular to the direction of the fault, would have suffered damages, but not collapsed.

Chen also believes that the Ju Yuan plank boards had problems. A quality plank board ought to have a 4mm-diameter thick beam of reinforced steel–this kind of plank board, can be pulled from the bottom or pushed from the top but should, like a rubber band, bend but not break, and therefore help proof the building against earthquakes. However, the planks he’s seen in the wreckage are like “something that someone just hurriedly put through a wire-drawing machine, without considering its capacity, so that when each layers pressed against each other, the thing naturally just collapsed.”

Chen Baosheng also estimates that the main steel beams in the collapsed buildings had a diameter of 1.2 centimeters, which is also much less than the normal number.

Chen explained that Ju Yuan school’s had a synthetic architectural structure, which is poorly equipped to deal with earthquakes. The steam beams don’t have connecting beams. So when an earthquake hits, the connectors between the walls and the beams, the distance between the posts and the boards, and the connectors between the boards all get severely damaged. “It’d be surprising if the building didn’t collapse under the force of a strong earthquake” said Chen.

*Inadequate Educational investment*

“This is the lowest possible way of doing things–just stuff the children into a building and you’re done” said He Rong, head of the Chengdu City Board of Education.

Juyuan Middle school Principal Yi Ancheng remembers when the collapsed buildings were being constructed.

70 year old Yi remembers they started construction in 1986. At the time, the funding for village level elementary schools came from the townships itself; villages in poorer areas could hardly pay the wages for the teachers, much less construct new schools. Only until 2002, did village elementary schools receive funding on the county level.

At the time the classrooms at Ju Yuan were made using cement and gravel-stone from the 1950s, and were already quite dangerous. Yi applied to the then village Party-secretary Ma Rujun for funds to build a new classroom building. The local elementary school received a 10,000+ yuan sum for the construction. “Ma Rujun read my report and thought that a middle school building was more important than an elementary school building, so he took back the 10,000 yuan and gave it to us to construct our building,” Yi recalls.

Yi also filed a report with Li Yunsen, head of the local Board of Education. Dujiangyan city’s board of education had planned to building a three story, twelve-classroom building, with each room occupying 60 square meters. The Board of education would be directly responsible for the quality control on the project. In order to save money, Board of Education engineeer Wang Liangping just borrowed the blueprints from Congyi middle school and changed the name to Ju Yuan middle school. “After completing the paperwork, the invedstors–the Juyuan village government–gave the job to a local contractor surnamed Liu,” said Yi.

At the time the village government only had about 10,000 yuan in funds, “the cost of the construction had to be minimized as much as possible, and the contractors still wanted to squeeze a profit out of it, so you can just imagine what the resulting quality was.”

A later principal of the school, Lin Mingfu, had filed a report regarding the dangerous situation of the building to Dujiangyan education officials in 1998, saying that this building, constructed in 1986, had serious flaws. Officials told Lin to use some steel wires to hold up the part of the roof that was about to collapse rather than add anything to really buttress it. These few wires wrapped together are what held the building together until the day that it collapsed.

Juyuan Middle school also lost a four-story building constructed in 1996. According to Lin Mingfu, this building was built to meet the goals of the “nine-year compulsory education” measures.

One of the goals of the nine-year compulsory education measures was having proper classroom buildings. Li Mingfu recalls: if the higher levels of government had a demand, our leaders had to promise to meet it.” One of those demands was that Juyuan middle school construct another classroom building, so even though the Juyuan government didn’t have enough funds, the construction had to happen nonetheless.

Li Mingfu recalls, the blueprints were designed by the Dujiangyan engineer Wang Liangping. The contractors were Juyuan township, Sanba village branch party secretary Zhu Chaohong. Zhu recalls that when the blueprints were drawn up that the diameter of the main structural posts were only two-third or even just one-third of the normal size. “At the time I asked, aren’t these too thin? Isn’t this going to affect the quality of construction,”

According to Zhu, his price for contracting was 400-500 per square meter. But he is not willing to reveal the entire sum paid for the building, even though this price no doubt put much financial pressure on the township government. Li Mingfu recalls that in order to finance this building, the government went into debt for several years.

This method of going into debt to contractors and credit societies in order to meet the goals of “nine-year compulsory education” measures and cost-cutting construction methods are not at all unusual in the less developed areas of China. Sichuan Province met its “Nine-year” quotas and goals between 1992 and 1996, but even so, as late as last year, Dujiangyan’s government was still issuing work reports that mentioned the problem of debts stemming from their “9-year” projects.

As of the end of 2005, Sichuan Province still had 8.1 billion yuan of debt from “9-year” projects and as of the end of 2007, that number had been reduced to 4 billion.

This is an almost common phenomenon–during the “9-year” period, the funds withheld would sometimes amount to half the cost of the construction. Some local schools, have not, to this very day, received their allotted funds for these projects. Because of the shortage of funds, building contractors would often attempt to get construction materials on credit–and just obtaining it was a matter of great face, but there was no way you could guarantee its quality,” said a building contractor that mostly focused on schools. “This was the lowest level of operation possible–just get the students into some kind of building,” said Chengdu city Board of Education head He Rong. He Rong recalls that “most of the time there weren’t any serious standards, and sometimes the blueprints weren’t even ready, you just got a construction team together and started building.”

After completing the “9-year” projects, Chendu’s Board of Education began to perceive that these buildings were potentially dangerous and in 1997 began a series of “9-year improvement” projects, but nevertheless, the funding situation had not improved, and each day that there wasn’t enough money was another day where the benefits of the project failed to materialize.

After 2002, after county level educational investments were set up, educational building funding became more secure. He Rong believes that because of this, most of the buildings in the affected area built after 2002 did not collapse. Taking Dujiangyan as an example, Dujiangyan elementary schools that collapsed were all built in 1993-4, in the middle of the “9-year” projects period, moreover, Xinjian elementary school, which served large numbers of handicapped, special education, and lower income students and was located on the edge of town, always had its difficulties in getting construction funds.

Xiang’E Middle school’s collapsed building also dates from the “9-year” period. Local residents remember that construction stopped in 1995 because of quality issues, but in 1996, after Dong Jiaxiang became the local Party-Secretary, construction resumed, and many villagers were even asked to donate money to help finance it.

The earthquake leveled these three schools to the ground. Faced with the massive loss of life and damage caused by the earthquake, He Rong, who was filing a report to his superiors, broke down in tears.

Afterwards, He Rong said, “actually, if, at the time, there was 10 million yuan, these buildings might have been constructed the right way, and there wouldn’t have been such a great loss.”

He Rong explained that many of the schools in Sichuan are still using buildings hastily constructed in the “9-year” project years, and that many other underdeveloped provinces face similar issues. He suggested that the government ought to do a thorough countrywide investigation of all the classroom buildings in affected areas constructed during that period.

He also has counterexamples to prove that even with limited funds buildings of inferior construction are not your only choice.

On the internet, the so-called “best Project Hope” school–Beichuan county’s Liuhan Project hope school, which was built at a cost of 400 rmb per square meter, and was built in 1998. The Juyuan middle school buildings contracted out to Zhu Chaohong in 1996, according to Zhu, made for 400-500 yuan per square meter. If you take into account inflation during those two years, Zhu Chaohong’s building costs were clearly higher than that of the Liuhan school.

Then why could a lost-cost school like Liuhan elementary become earthquake-proof?

According to Li Chengpeng, Liuhan school’s construction was strictly monitored and supervised, and if they found too much gravel mixed in, they would request the workers to wash it out. When some parties attempted to block donations and funds, those responsible for the construction were forced to break off relations with them, reclaim the funds, and transfer it to the construction contractors–and with the money in hand, they were able to ensure the quality of the construction.

However, according to a long-term labor contractor, during the “9-year” period of the 1990s, the whole process of contracting out construction work as well the subsequent quality supervision was a mess. Most of the construction work on schools was undertaken by the local board of education or village/township level government departments, so there was no real public bidding for contracts. Many of the county-level education departments had their own construction and architectural teams, who carried out much of the work that needed to be done. “The cadres would use their own guanxi to contract out the work to people they had good relations with, even if those people had never done anything related to construction before!” said this labor contractor. All that had to be done was to find a local company that has a level three or above construction qualifications, and, upon paying a management fee, “borrow” (the term used in the business) these qualifications, find some local experts and some migrant workers, and construction could begin.

“At the time there was basically no such thing as a engineering superviser.” After the old schools were demolished, in the rush to get the children into a new school the construction process was forcibly sped up, and “if there were no obvious problems with the buildings, the government construction departments would be hard-pressed not to let the building pass inspections.”

Zhu Chaohong, who oversaw the construction of Juyuan Middle School’s four story classroom building, denies things happened this way. Zhu told Southern Weekend that the reason he was able to secure this contract was because his company, the Dujiangyan Juxing Construction Company was the only that was qualified to undertake this kind of work. Zhu claims that after 2000, most of the schools in Juyuan township were built by his company. Then why didn’t some of the other Juyuan school buildings collapse? Zhu’s explanation: This means it wasn’t a matter of the construction process, but of the blueprints. After 2000, most of the school buildings in Juyuan Township were designed by Dujiangyan Design Center, and Juyuan Middle School building constructed in 1996 was designed by the head of the Design center, Zhang Zhongshan.”

“I think you should investigate whether or not the blueprints were flawed. If they weren’t, then the problem must be with my construction. If it is indeed my responsibility, then I will definitely bear full legal responsibility for what happened” Zhu said emphatically over the telephone.

The day before, Zhu Chaohong had repeatedly avoided reporters’ phone calls. When a reporter went to the township government to find him, he managed to walk out without the reporter noticing. When the reporter discovered what happened and tried to find him, he had already disappeared.

At the time that the Middle School buildings were constructed, the name of Zhu’s company was Juxing Construction Company,” but according to sources, this company declared bankruptcy in 2000, made some internal changes and then established itself as Juxing Construction and Installation Company”, and continued to work on construction projects. According to these sources, some of the partially-collapsed buildings in the Dujiangyan Hospital were also built by this company. Local residents said that in the past, Zhu Chaohong used to like to drive around town in his Mercedes-Benz, but after the earthquake and the tragedy at Juyuan Middle School, he hasn’t been seen around and his mobile phone is always turned off.

Dujiangyan Board of Education Party-secretary Zhou Zebang told a Southern Weekend reporter “If there were any problems with the construction process, the government will fully investigate it.”

Ministry of Education spokesman Wang Xuming said on May 26, “The Ministry of Education’s position on the collapsed schools is quite clear; we are going to cooperate with all the relevant departments in order to undertake this investigation. There will be no tolerance for any irresponsible cutting of corners, especially the “tofu shreds” (translators note: this refers to a particular method of making construction materials on the cheap) or any form of corruption or bribery. Perpetrators will be severely punished.”

Southern Weekend interview with Sichuan education official Lin Qiang

This interview is with an outspoken education official from Sichuan named Lin Qiang and was featured in a recent issue of Southern Weekend, a newspaper based out of Guangzhou, known (in the past), for some more independent, hard-hitting news and coverage of events.

Lin Qiang had been chosen to be a torch-bearer and was also invited to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, but has forgone these privileges out of a deep sense of shame and remorse for what he believes was the unnecessarily large of loss of life from the earthquake. He has some somewhat harsh words to say about the system and the behavior of officials in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Here’s my rough translation for what it’s worth.

Southern Weekend (SW): To be a torch bearer and also be able to watch the Olympics is a great honor, but you have chosen
forgo this honor, which is quite surprising. What considerations went into your decision?

Lin Qiang (Lin Qiang): It’s mostly because of my mood. Right now, my heart feels very heavy.

SW: Why is that?

LQ: So many schools collapsed and so many innocent children were lost as a result of the earthquake, and I think that anyone with a modicum of conscience would find this hard to accept, and more so for one who is a education official.

SW: So what you meanb is that as an educatoinal official, you believe that you hold a certain responsibility fo rwhat happened?

LQ: Of course, The shcools collapsing is a societal event, so the entire society bears responsibility. Howeever, the educational system bears a greater responsibility. As an educational official, I ought to feel a great sense of guilt.

SW: When did you start feeeling this sense of guilt?

LQ: From the very moment that I began witnessing these tragic events.

SW: Can be a bit more specific about the circumstances?

LQ: I was perhaps one of the first Sichuan education officials to arrive at the epicenter. I received orders on the morning of the 13th and sent a group of disaster relief experts to Beichuan. By the time that we got to the disaster relief control center inside a Beichuan middle school, it was already 5 am on the morning of the 14th. The relief team immediately launched into action, and I couldn’t really do much else, so I took a video recorder and walked around the county town. At that point the roads from the relief center to the county town were not yet cleared, and no motor vehicles could get through, so most of the disaster relief teams were confined to the Beichuan middle school. I wanted to see for myself what was happening in the county town.

SW: What was the most shocking thing that you’ve seen?

LQ: I saw a parent crying. A five story building collapsed, pinning his child down. There were no rescue teams around, and the parent watched the life slipping away from his child, and could do nothing about it. Four hours before I arrived, the child had died right before their parent’s eyes. The parent kept crying and murmuring “that’s my baby, my baby had such good grades in school.”

SW: Were you at all mentally prepared for this kind of situation?

LQ: There is no way you could be prepared for this kind of thing. I felt horrible.

SW: What was your first reaction?

LQ: The first thing I did was to take all the money that I had on me–I was in a hurry and didn’t have that much on me at the time, maybe just a couple thousand yuan–and I took it out and gave it all to him, and he said, no, my child is dead, what would I need money for. The people around us took the money and put it in his pocket. I knew that the money had no meaning for him, but this was the only “relief” that I could offer, at the time, there was nothing else I could do.

SW: In fact, this was just a instinctive attempt at self-redemption.

LQ: Right. It was an attempt at redeeming myself. At the time I felt especially guilty. As a educational official, I didn’t bear directly responsibility for what happened, but still, my conscience made me feel as I’d somehow wronged the child and the parents.

SW: You actually don’t have to be that self-critical, it was a level 8 earthquake, there was nothing much that you could do about that. For example, the Ministry of Education of Sichuan province just released their five main reasons why the buildings collapsed. One was that the earthquake was just much more powerful than they had expected. Secondly, the earthquake unfortunately happened while the kids were at school. Thirdly, the schools have crowded classrooms and corridors. Fourthly, the schools and dormitories are rather old and backwards. Fifthly, the schools were properly earthquake-proofed and therefore flawed from the beginning.

LQ: Yes, of course it was a natural disaster, but natural disasters don’t always lead to human tragedies, and to blame the tragedies on nature is just morally lazy.

SW: So, when you arrived at the scene, were you witnessing a tragedy or a natural disaster?

LQ: For the most part, I think it was a tragedy. It wasn’t as if those students were meant to die, and it’s not as if that school that they were at was meant to collapse. I took a picture of another school, which was just about 7-800 meters away from Beichuan middle school, which didn’t collapse, and in which no one died and only three people were injured.

SW: Why was there such a difference?

LQ: The reason is quite simple. The schools that did not collapse were Project Hope schools created by the Central Academy of Sciences. There was oversight from the donors, thus ensuring the quality of construction. The schools that collapsed were mostly not, when built, subject to that kind of oversight and control. There was no way to guarantee the quality of their construction.

SW: That is to say, it wasn’t purely the natural disaster that killed these people. It was a lack of oversight and a systemic inertia that ended up enlarging the deadly effects of natural disaster.

LQ: Natural and man-made disasters have always “worked hand in hand”. I wasn’t so aware of this point before, when I had thought that the worst that could happen was economic damage and not a huge loss of human life. But having witnessed this tragedy first-hand, to say that it was “extremely brutal” (translators note: hard to translate Chinese idiom here) is not at all inappropriate. This was a real blow to me and really shook me to my soul. From that moment on, I just couldn’t stomach any more denying of responsibility (or pushing it onto others). If, in front of the departed souls of the children and these broken homes, we still adhere to the ‘rules of the game’ where officials protect each other so that we’re all ok–that would just be unconscionable and utterly shameless. At the point we would have lost our humanity, to say nothing of being an educator.

SW: So you decided to forgo your right to be a torch-bearer and watch the Olympics?

LQ: Yes. On a certain level, I’m guilty for what happened and therefore ought to serve penance for it. I ought to kneel in front of the dead children, their families, and this society, instead of being given honorific robes. But I have no other way of redeeming myself, so have decided to forgo my role as torch-bearer instead.

SW: Will your request be approved?

LQ: I still don’t know. But I hope that this small request will be respected. And I know that I am not just forgoing my role, I am also hoping that Mr. Zhang Yimou will be able to understand and feel the mood around the country and the severe blow it has dealt all of us and make the appropriate adjustment to his preparation for the opening ceremonies.

SW: In what regard do you think he should make adjustments?

LQ: I think that it still ought to big, but less flamboyant, more solemn and down to earth, and should somehow express the people’s feelings of compassion and sympathy towards all living beings. I would think under present circumstances, it would be hard to imagine an opening ceremony that didn’t somehow express this. Of course, it’s not just a matter of the opening ceremonies, the entire mood of the Olympics ought to be adjusted. Our pain and our sorrow–but also our strength and perseverance–ought to be the main thrust of the Olympics.

SW: That sounds like a good idea, but how do we implement it?

LQ: Let’s begin with the selection of the torch-bearers. Let’s try to give as many of the chances to be torch-bearers and watch the opening ceremonies to the heroes of the earthquake relief efforts or the families of the victims and the NPC officials from the hard-hit areas, thus expressing the Chinese peoples’ spirit of perseverance and making the passing of the torch into a symbolic transmission of life and spirit.

SW: Your thinking on this has real value. But is this way of thinking representative of the educational system?

LQ: To be honest, it probably doesn’t, it’s more just my personal views.

SW: I’ve heard some people say, in the past people used to always criticize China for this and that, but now they can all shut up, because after this earthquake, the Chinese educational system has had some exceptional achievements, teachers have helped rescue people, and even sacrificed their own lives trying to protect their students; many students were brave as well and tried to rescue their classmates. This heroic actions and deeds prove that the Chinese educational system is in fact successful.

LQ: These opinions are quite common in the administrative system, but that fact points a very big problem with the system. If you look at it from another, more human perspective, you would reach the opposite conclusion. Sure, those teachers are heroes, and those children are heroes, but heroism doesn’t always require that sacrifice your life.

If we, administrators and officials in the educational system, had done our jobs and not let corruption gain a foothold, then maybe more dorms and schools would be as sturdy as the Project Hope school in Beichuan, and those teachers and children wouldn’t have had to die, and we could avoided all these tragedies. The people that most deserved and needed protection didn’t get it, and instead died unnaturally–this should be a great source of shame for all of us who work in the educational system. We ought to reflect, we ought to feel a deep sense of remorse, and not use these heroes or the tragedy itself to slough off our own responsibilities and make ourselves look good.

SW: I notice that you tend to emphasize the words “bei min” (pity, sympathy, compassion)

LQ: The reason why I do that is because that’s what the educational system lacks the most.

SW: What specific instances of this are there?

LQ: As of now, we still have not yet actively attempted a systemic analysis of why our buildings collapsed or any serious inquest (including the collecting of evidence) into responsibilities of what happened. Furthermore, we haven’t even offered a formal apology to the families of the deceased–all of these feelings of responsibility and measures designed to protect human life must not concern us too much–these are specific instances.

The parents who lost their children in the earthquake have tears in their eyes and yet are constantly searching through the rubble to construction materials that can serve as evidence for future investigations. As an educator, and as a civil servant, we ought to feel a great sense of shame and remorse and yet be grateful for their actions. We ought to respect them, and we ought to support them. However, not many people in the educational system are willing to think like that, and even less people are willing to do that. Of course, everyone is very busy, trying to arrange the university examinations for people in the affected areas, finding and rewarding model workers among those involved in disaster relief, gathering statistics and date on the damage, and planning the eventual reconstruction. But no matter what, you cannot deny that the departed souls of the children, their parents, and this entire society–demand an explanation. If a tragedy of this scale cannot occasion any reflection or explanation on our part, and if we always put our own reputations and futures ahead of the lives of children, then how can we ever really lift our spirits or improve the system? How can we ever guarantee that tragedy will never strike again?