Party builds palaces as classrooms collapse
Saturday, 7 June 2008
Jamil Anderlini in Fuyang while Tom Mitchell
BEFORE the dust had settled from China's devastating earthquake residents in the disaster zone were already asking why so many schools collapsed, while most government offices seemed to survive intact.
Grieving parents have voiced claims that corrupt local officials allowed the construction of substandard schools, while ensuring their own offices were built to withstand tremors.
Every city in China has public buildings that serve as monuments to communist mandarins, but they are hardly ever schools or hospitals.
More than 2,000km from the tremor's epicentre, in the impoverished rural backwater of Fuyang in Anhui Province, the children of Gaojing primary school have been forced to move three times in the past six years to make way for government-supported real estate projects.
The first time they were evicted was when their school was demolished to make way for the district government office building - an enormous baroque palace that locals refer to as the "White House" though it bears a greater resemblance to the US Capitol building in Washington DC.
Completed in 2003, the White House - resplendent with the emblem of the Communist party of China and the five-starred red flag fluttering in front of its shining dome - has become a tourist attraction in Fuyang, and a symbol to local residents of the hubris and greed of local cadres.
The complex was built at an estimated cost of Rmb30m ($4.3m) to house the government offices of Yingquan District, a suburb of Fuyang with a population of about 660,000, mostly peasant farmers. The Yingquan government's tax revenue last year was only Rmb93m ($13.4m) and the average rural citizen in Fuyang earns just Rmb200 ($29) a month.
Over the past eight years, Yingquan officials moved peasants off their land and demolished homes and schools to make way for an industrial park, a shopping street, an "ecological park" (complete with driving range) and the magnificent new offices.
In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, Beijing is clearly trying to defuse the explosive issue of official corruption and largesse at the expense of public services.
The Ministry of Education has promised an investigation into school construction, and Wen Jiabao, premier, urged officials to spend less on business travel, banquets and entertainment and suspended approval for all new government or party-related office buildings.
Away from the immaculate lawns and glistening marble staircase of the White House, Fuyang's public buildings are mostly sad and decrepit; the schools are particularly run-down. When their first building was demolished the children of Gaojing primary school were shifted into a complex from the 1960s before it too was condemned to make way for government-affiliated developers. The children were eventually dispersed to three different schools in the district.
"In Fuyang you just have to buy the land from the government and they will relocate everyone and clear the land for you," said Liu Jing, a manager at Fuyang Number Nine Construction Company, which is building apartments across the road from the White House.
"The government policies here are looser than in bigger cities - you can start a project before you even have any approval papers or anything," Mr Liu's assistant added. The murky links between government and developers are complicated further in Fuyang by the fact that one of the biggest firms in town, Anshu Real Estate Development, is owned by the Yingquan district government.
In 2006, Li Guofu, Anshu's president, began travelling secretly to Beijing to petition the central government to investigate corruption allegations and land seizures by his company and the officials he worked for.
Li was approaching 60 and was bitter because he felt he was being sidelined by his colleagues and his boss, Zhang Zhi'an, Communist party secretary of Yingquan District and the man who oversaw the building of the White House, according to people close to Li.
Li wrote at least seven letters to the central government alleging bribery, corruption and mismanagement and petitioned officials in person. No action was taken against the company or Mr Zhang.
On his return to Fuyang from his last trip to Beijing last August, Li was detained by the police, along with his wife and son-in-law, on charges of corruption. His wife was released after 39 days but his son-in-law remains in custody.
Li was formally charged with corruption in March and his family, who had not been allowed to see him since his arrest, retained a lawyer to defend him.
According to prison officials and the local government, Li hanged himself in the prison hospital on March 13, four hours before he was to meet his lawyer for the first time.
However, his relatives claim that when they were finally allowed to see the body two days later his back and chest were covered in bruises, there was dirt on his hands and marks on both sides of his neck but none on his throat. His widow and children are convinced that Li was silenced. "My husband knew everything the government had done in the real estate business," said Yuan Aiping, 61, Li's widow. There has been no further investigation into Li's death.
Another FT Syndication Service report by Tom Mitchell adds: Father Wu Xianliang bows his head slightly and makes the sign of the cross as he navigates the back streets of Hanwang, a township that was devastated by the earthquake in Sichuan province.
On both sides of the road rubble towers over his modest parish car. Few buildings are left standing, and those that have not collapsed are unsound and will have to be knocked down.
"It looks like there was a war here," says Father Wu, a Catholic priest from Chengdu, the provincial capital, who has been touring the damage in his diocese ever since the magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck on May 12. "How can you possibly know if there is anyone under all that?" he asks, pointing to a massive heap of bricks and concrete.
Over recent weeks there has been intense scrutiny of building ruins across northern Sichuan, stretching in an arc from the city of Dujiangyan to Beichuan County, two of the hardest hit areas. Most of the focus has been on schools, many of which were the only structures in their immediate area to suffer a total collapse. State media are reporting more than 4,700 school-related deaths, although the number could be higher, in a disaster that has officially claimed more than 68,000 lives with another 20,000 people missing and presumed dead.
Placating angry groups of grieving mothers and fathers, most of whom lost their only child in the tragedy because of China's strict family planning regime, is now the Chinese government's greatest earthquake-related political challenge. Protests are occurring on an almost daily basis, as parents demand explanations for the school collapses - and justice for their children.
Late last month the Financial Times toured 12 cities, counties, townships and villages, visiting six middle and primary schools where, conservatively, some 1,640 children and teachers died. Schools, parents say, should be the safest places in any community. Yet across the earthquake zone they collapsed in areas where other buildings only suffered structural damage, and even in places where neighbouring buildings appeared completely undamaged.
Kit Miyamoto, a Sacramento-based structural engineer with Miyamoto International, recently surveyed the damage and has published his findings in an online diary on his company's website. Approaching the Xinjian primary school in downtown Dujiangyan, Mr Miyamoto's first impression was that damage in the area was limited. "We pass a little tunnel-like gate to enter the school grounds," he writes. "I could not believe my eyes - total collapse of a four-story school building."
Mr Miyamoto chronicles a litany of engineering failures that were entirely avoidable. Large concrete floor areas - a necessary feature of schools and hospitals that makes design safety all that more critical - were held up only by weak brick walls. Where concrete support pillars did exist, they were often not sufficiently reinforced with steel rods and "exploded" during the earthquake. "[These flaws] are nothing new. We saw them in the 1970s - and over and over again we see them in different countries. We need to fix it," Mr Miyamoto told the FT. "Many people have asked me why this happened. But that's something that Chinese judges will have to answer. Thousands of kids died. Hopefully their lives will not be wasted."
Even students appear to have been aware of the dangers. Zhou Shuoji's sister died in one of the highest-profile collapses - that of the Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan. "The building was always very dangerous," she says. "They built more stairs after [the original structure] was finished. It was like there was no building plan. They just changed the building however they wanted."
Rescuers can discern much from a building's ruins, such as those in Hanwang that so stunned Father Wu. Gordon McMillan, a member of the UK's Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, who is helping to co-ordinate the European Union's relief efforts in the area, notes that a large ruin comprised of densely packed bricks and crumbled concrete will almost certainly have few if any survivors.
The same is true of buildings whose outer walls have fallen away from the structure, after which the interior floors "pancake" down on occupants, he says. The odds of survival are much better in buildings where large slabs of properly reinforced concrete have toppled inwards or sideways, as these can create "tents" or "voids" giving those trapped inside a precious few more hours or even days to live.
Most of the school ruins seen by the FT late last month were of the former variety: mountains of rubble with few if any surviving structural features. What remains of the No 1 Middle School in Beichuan -- a six-story building where more than 1,000 children are believed to have perished -- looks like it was hit by a landslide. One of the school's few recognisable architectural remnants is an exploded pillar; its steel support bars tangling outwards in all directions. The huge amount of lime that has been scattered over the site is not sufficient to staunch the smell of bodies below.
The ruins of each collapsed school are also littered with poignant reminders of the lives lost. At the Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan, a student's notebook contains lists of random English vocabulary - "work hard, make a lot of money, get an education". And then this inadvertent intimation of tragedy, each English word followed by a Chinese equivalent: "Earthquakes (dizhen ), happen (fasheng), possible (neng)."
Across town at the Xinjian Primary School, a simple question has been chalked on a door. "Gongcheng zhiliang?" it asks -- "Construction quality?"
(Additional reporting by Yang Jie)
Under syndication
arrangement with FE
BEFORE the dust had settled from China's devastating earthquake residents in the disaster zone were already asking why so many schools collapsed, while most government offices seemed to survive intact.
Grieving parents have voiced claims that corrupt local officials allowed the construction of substandard schools, while ensuring their own offices were built to withstand tremors.
Every city in China has public buildings that serve as monuments to communist mandarins, but they are hardly ever schools or hospitals.
More than 2,000km from the tremor's epicentre, in the impoverished rural backwater of Fuyang in Anhui Province, the children of Gaojing primary school have been forced to move three times in the past six years to make way for government-supported real estate projects.
The first time they were evicted was when their school was demolished to make way for the district government office building - an enormous baroque palace that locals refer to as the "White House" though it bears a greater resemblance to the US Capitol building in Washington DC.
Completed in 2003, the White House - resplendent with the emblem of the Communist party of China and the five-starred red flag fluttering in front of its shining dome - has become a tourist attraction in Fuyang, and a symbol to local residents of the hubris and greed of local cadres.
The complex was built at an estimated cost of Rmb30m ($4.3m) to house the government offices of Yingquan District, a suburb of Fuyang with a population of about 660,000, mostly peasant farmers. The Yingquan government's tax revenue last year was only Rmb93m ($13.4m) and the average rural citizen in Fuyang earns just Rmb200 ($29) a month.
Over the past eight years, Yingquan officials moved peasants off their land and demolished homes and schools to make way for an industrial park, a shopping street, an "ecological park" (complete with driving range) and the magnificent new offices.
In the aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake, Beijing is clearly trying to defuse the explosive issue of official corruption and largesse at the expense of public services.
The Ministry of Education has promised an investigation into school construction, and Wen Jiabao, premier, urged officials to spend less on business travel, banquets and entertainment and suspended approval for all new government or party-related office buildings.
Away from the immaculate lawns and glistening marble staircase of the White House, Fuyang's public buildings are mostly sad and decrepit; the schools are particularly run-down. When their first building was demolished the children of Gaojing primary school were shifted into a complex from the 1960s before it too was condemned to make way for government-affiliated developers. The children were eventually dispersed to three different schools in the district.
"In Fuyang you just have to buy the land from the government and they will relocate everyone and clear the land for you," said Liu Jing, a manager at Fuyang Number Nine Construction Company, which is building apartments across the road from the White House.
"The government policies here are looser than in bigger cities - you can start a project before you even have any approval papers or anything," Mr Liu's assistant added. The murky links between government and developers are complicated further in Fuyang by the fact that one of the biggest firms in town, Anshu Real Estate Development, is owned by the Yingquan district government.
In 2006, Li Guofu, Anshu's president, began travelling secretly to Beijing to petition the central government to investigate corruption allegations and land seizures by his company and the officials he worked for.
Li was approaching 60 and was bitter because he felt he was being sidelined by his colleagues and his boss, Zhang Zhi'an, Communist party secretary of Yingquan District and the man who oversaw the building of the White House, according to people close to Li.
Li wrote at least seven letters to the central government alleging bribery, corruption and mismanagement and petitioned officials in person. No action was taken against the company or Mr Zhang.
On his return to Fuyang from his last trip to Beijing last August, Li was detained by the police, along with his wife and son-in-law, on charges of corruption. His wife was released after 39 days but his son-in-law remains in custody.
Li was formally charged with corruption in March and his family, who had not been allowed to see him since his arrest, retained a lawyer to defend him.
According to prison officials and the local government, Li hanged himself in the prison hospital on March 13, four hours before he was to meet his lawyer for the first time.
However, his relatives claim that when they were finally allowed to see the body two days later his back and chest were covered in bruises, there was dirt on his hands and marks on both sides of his neck but none on his throat. His widow and children are convinced that Li was silenced. "My husband knew everything the government had done in the real estate business," said Yuan Aiping, 61, Li's widow. There has been no further investigation into Li's death.
Another FT Syndication Service report by Tom Mitchell adds: Father Wu Xianliang bows his head slightly and makes the sign of the cross as he navigates the back streets of Hanwang, a township that was devastated by the earthquake in Sichuan province.
On both sides of the road rubble towers over his modest parish car. Few buildings are left standing, and those that have not collapsed are unsound and will have to be knocked down.
"It looks like there was a war here," says Father Wu, a Catholic priest from Chengdu, the provincial capital, who has been touring the damage in his diocese ever since the magnitude 8.0 earthquake struck on May 12. "How can you possibly know if there is anyone under all that?" he asks, pointing to a massive heap of bricks and concrete.
Over recent weeks there has been intense scrutiny of building ruins across northern Sichuan, stretching in an arc from the city of Dujiangyan to Beichuan County, two of the hardest hit areas. Most of the focus has been on schools, many of which were the only structures in their immediate area to suffer a total collapse. State media are reporting more than 4,700 school-related deaths, although the number could be higher, in a disaster that has officially claimed more than 68,000 lives with another 20,000 people missing and presumed dead.
Placating angry groups of grieving mothers and fathers, most of whom lost their only child in the tragedy because of China's strict family planning regime, is now the Chinese government's greatest earthquake-related political challenge. Protests are occurring on an almost daily basis, as parents demand explanations for the school collapses - and justice for their children.
Late last month the Financial Times toured 12 cities, counties, townships and villages, visiting six middle and primary schools where, conservatively, some 1,640 children and teachers died. Schools, parents say, should be the safest places in any community. Yet across the earthquake zone they collapsed in areas where other buildings only suffered structural damage, and even in places where neighbouring buildings appeared completely undamaged.
Kit Miyamoto, a Sacramento-based structural engineer with Miyamoto International, recently surveyed the damage and has published his findings in an online diary on his company's website. Approaching the Xinjian primary school in downtown Dujiangyan, Mr Miyamoto's first impression was that damage in the area was limited. "We pass a little tunnel-like gate to enter the school grounds," he writes. "I could not believe my eyes - total collapse of a four-story school building."
Mr Miyamoto chronicles a litany of engineering failures that were entirely avoidable. Large concrete floor areas - a necessary feature of schools and hospitals that makes design safety all that more critical - were held up only by weak brick walls. Where concrete support pillars did exist, they were often not sufficiently reinforced with steel rods and "exploded" during the earthquake. "[These flaws] are nothing new. We saw them in the 1970s - and over and over again we see them in different countries. We need to fix it," Mr Miyamoto told the FT. "Many people have asked me why this happened. But that's something that Chinese judges will have to answer. Thousands of kids died. Hopefully their lives will not be wasted."
Even students appear to have been aware of the dangers. Zhou Shuoji's sister died in one of the highest-profile collapses - that of the Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan. "The building was always very dangerous," she says. "They built more stairs after [the original structure] was finished. It was like there was no building plan. They just changed the building however they wanted."
Rescuers can discern much from a building's ruins, such as those in Hanwang that so stunned Father Wu. Gordon McMillan, a member of the UK's Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service, who is helping to co-ordinate the European Union's relief efforts in the area, notes that a large ruin comprised of densely packed bricks and crumbled concrete will almost certainly have few if any survivors.
The same is true of buildings whose outer walls have fallen away from the structure, after which the interior floors "pancake" down on occupants, he says. The odds of survival are much better in buildings where large slabs of properly reinforced concrete have toppled inwards or sideways, as these can create "tents" or "voids" giving those trapped inside a precious few more hours or even days to live.
Most of the school ruins seen by the FT late last month were of the former variety: mountains of rubble with few if any surviving structural features. What remains of the No 1 Middle School in Beichuan -- a six-story building where more than 1,000 children are believed to have perished -- looks like it was hit by a landslide. One of the school's few recognisable architectural remnants is an exploded pillar; its steel support bars tangling outwards in all directions. The huge amount of lime that has been scattered over the site is not sufficient to staunch the smell of bodies below.
The ruins of each collapsed school are also littered with poignant reminders of the lives lost. At the Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan, a student's notebook contains lists of random English vocabulary - "work hard, make a lot of money, get an education". And then this inadvertent intimation of tragedy, each English word followed by a Chinese equivalent: "Earthquakes (dizhen ), happen (fasheng), possible (neng)."
Across town at the Xinjian Primary School, a simple question has been chalked on a door. "Gongcheng zhiliang?" it asks -- "Construction quality?"
(Additional reporting by Yang Jie)
Under syndication
arrangement with FE