May 8, 2009
China releases Sichuan earthquake child death toll — but no names
Jane Macartney in Chengdu
China has finally revealed how many children perished during last year’s earthquake but the publication of an official death toll immediately provoked criticism from parents and a leading campaigner.
Just how many children died at schools that failed to withstand the tremor has become an extremely sensitive issue.
Numerous questions have been raised as to whether the thousands of schools that crumbled had been built to shoddy standards, with corners cut amid the corruption and mismanagement that have dogged China’s rapid economic reforms.
Almost a year to the day when the 7.9 magnitude earthquake killed as many as 90,000 people in Sichuan, a mountainous region of southwestern China, officials announced that the number of children who died when schools collapsed was 5,335, including confirmed dead and those listed as missing. No names were given.
The announcement was criticised by Ai Weiwei, the renowned Chinese artist who, with the help of 60 volunteers, has been compiling an independent list of the children killed.
Mr Ai, an adviser to the architects who designed the Bird’s Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing, has so far identified 5,203 child fatalities.
He said that the Government tally, which provided the total but did not explain how it had arrived at that figure, was insufficient. If the names are not known, he said, it prolongs the grief of parents who lost children in the disaster and helps prevent a proper investigation of possible wrongdoing by builders.
“I don’t think this is progress,” he said. “Any incomplete information is just a partial truth. These are all unreliable. The names should be made public.” The official death toll remains at 68,712 with 18,000 listed as missing and presumed dead. Many of the dead may never be recovered, buried in the ruins of entire towns and villages that disappeared. Children were in afternoon classes when the tremor struck on May 12 last year. About 3,000 schools simply crumpled.
Parents devastated at the loss of sons and daughters, most born under China’s strict “one couple, one child” family planning policy, have sought a government accounting and a proper explanation as to why so many schools fell down.
Police and local officials have blocked parents of the dead children from staging protests to seek information. An Amnesty International report this week chronicles instances in which parents were detained by police while seeking answers from courts.
Lawyers who took on such cases came under pressure to drop their involvement.
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