Today, Chinese riot police stopped a protest of more than a hundred parents who had lost children in a shoddily-constructed school that collapsed during last month’s devastating earthquake in Sichuan province. The parents, from Juyuan, were kneeling in front of a courthouse in nearby Dujiangyan when they were dragged away. Reporters were detained. The Communist Party’s fifth-ranked leader, Li Changchun, was touring Dujiangyan at the time of the incident.
Grieving parents pose the most delicate challenge to Beijing at this moment. Up to now, most of them have been left alone to talk to reporters and carry in public large photos of their dead children. Even three weeks after the quake, parents visit the site of the Juyuan school every day to burn paper money, a Chinese custom, or stand in silence. About 270 students died at the school, a concrete structure with almost no steel reinforcement. Parents want to know why construction was so poor, and they want to hold officials accountable.
As the shock of the disaster wears off, parents across Sichuan have become increasingly vocal in their demands, and small-scale protests have occurred in the areas affected by the quake. Said one Dujiangyan bureaucrat about the parents detained today, “The government will solve their problems.”
The sentiment is admirable, but it is hard to see what officials can do. They have issued apologies , given permission to grieving parents to have another child despite the one-child policy, and announced a token payment for children lost in the quake. Yet the one thing that will heal wounds is something beyond their power to provide. “Give me justice,” demanded a parent who had lost a son in a nearby city. She too was detained.
Justice? In this instance, justice demands the punishment of officials at all levels of government: lower-tier ones for stealing money allocated for reinforcing bars and higher level ones in Beijing who did not authorize sufficient funds for safe school construction in Sichuan’s unstable terrain. Premier Wen Jiabao, who received so much praise immediately after the quake for traveling to hard-hit areas, is a geologist by training. He had to know that his government’s policies, which deliberately starved education, would inevitably lead to thousands of children needlessly dying in a tremor. The Party’s monopoly on power means that it is ultimately responsible for whatever happens in China. In this case, tens of thousands of people did not have to perish, and there is no one else to blame.
The Chinese people know that. “Officials are black-hearted,” said Lin Hao, who lost a daughter in Juyuan. She tried to dig her child out of the rubble. “I heard her saying, ‘Mother, save me.’ “
