望乡台

An earthquake measuring 5.6 on the Richter scale early today damaged thousands of houses in Sichuan province, where an 8.0 magnitude quake last May left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing and 5 million homeless.

The quake, which experts say is an aftershock of last year’s catastrophe, occurred at 2:03 am in Mianzhu city and destroyed 8,600 rural houses, 60 small bridges and about 30 km of fiber-optic cables, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

Another aftershock, measuring at around 5.0 m, happened at 3:24 pm, the provincial earthquake administration reported.

“It was a strong tremor. I could hear sounds like trains running beneath my feet. I ran downstairs with some other locals; the rest slept on because it was in the early morning and they probably got used to it,” Wei Xiao, a 22-year-old college graduate in Mianzhu, told China Daily.

Rendong, a Mianzhu blogger based at Sina.com, a popular portal, said in a blog entry published at 2:22 am yesterday that the earthquake “went on for about ten seconds and felt like at least a 6.0-m aftershock”.

“It’s so frightening that such a strong aftershock would occur more than a year after May 12 (of 2008)! It’d be certainly hard to sleep tonight… I hope no one was injured,” he said.

A total of eight quake-related injuries were officially announced, while an anonymous social worker in Mianzhu told China Daily the local civil affairs bureau “confirmed three deaths”.

Li Juan, a staff with the Deyang foreign affairs office, refuted the claim, saying that she only heard of “some tiles falling off from obsolete rural houses”.

Units of the provincial emergency response office were sent to Mianzhu directly after the quakes were cited as saying few visible damages were found throughout its townships.

A petition letter signed by 118 parents whose babies suffered from melamine urging collective litigation was submitted by four representatives to the supreme court yesterday in the northern Hebei province.

The parents’ group, headed by Beijing resident Zhao Lianhai, whose own son was sickened by the industrial chemical, told China Daily their letter was also submitted to the provincial intermediate court and the Xinhua district court.

“Our primary demands are to raise a collective litigation, waive all litigation fees and have a negotiation with the government and dairy producers before trial opens,” said Zhao, a former employee of China’s food safety watchdog.

The 37-year-old said he is “pleased with the intermediate court”, which sent two senior officials to talk with them for hours and promised to forward their requests to higher-level authorities.

“They appeared to be quite understanding. I hope they can fulfill their commitment,” Zhao said, adding that their petition campaign would continue every Wednesday from now to relevant courts in Beijing until their claims are “truly dealt with”.

The Xinhua District Court in Shijiazhuang, Hebei’s capital city where the now-defunct Sanlu Group was based, remains the only court that has accepted compensation lawsuits since the tainted milk scandal sickened nearly 300,000 children across China last fall.

The Supreme Court earlier said courts around the country should accept lawsuits filed by melamine victims against Sanlu and other dairy producers if they refuse to accept the current compensation scheme, which offers 200,000 yuan ($ 29,262) in death cases, 30,000 yuan ($ 4,389) for infants severely sickened and 2,000 yuan ($ 293) for other victims.

But the petition letter said with the exception of the Xinhua court, which accepted one relevant lawsuit in March and another in April, all other litigation attempts against the producers have failed.

“The compensation we could get is obviously unfair, and individual litigation has made many families like ours suffer even more,” said Li Xiaohong, whose son was sickened by melamine. “The justice system is our last resort and the final frontier for impartiality.”

The two cases, according to the parents, are still “not even close” to coming before the court.

Peng Jian, lawyer of the first compensation suit against Sanlu, told China Daily that the presiding judge had approached his client, a girl surnamed Li from Beijing’s Chaoyang district, in private.

“Now that’s something very rare, if not unreasonable,” Peng said.

He added that with all the possible difficulties in mind, the parents’ group should be seeking the lowest amount of compensation when they file the suit.

Zhao had earlier collected signatures from more than 550 parents nationwide on a similar petition letter that demanded changes to the compensation scheme. The letter worked to no avail.

At least six children died from kidney and urinary problems after they drank milk tainted with melamine, a chemical typically used to make plastic, since last September.

Melamine was added to watered-down milk to make it appear higher in protein. Ingestion in large amounts can cause kidney stones and kidney failure.

Three traffic police assistants responsible for sparking a mass protest late Tuesday have been sacked in a county of the northwestern Gansu province, according to local authorities.

Officials in the remote province’s Baiyin city and its subsidiary Huining county have set up a team to jointly probe what they call “a mass incident”, one that involved up to 1,000 protestors on the streets after traffic police and the three assistants beat up a cyclist for running a red light.

In a rare, timely statement released Wednesday on Baiyin’s government website, www.baiyin.cn, authorities claim that the incident occurred after traffic police and the assistants “failed to stop” Zhang Bing, the cyclist, at a red light around noon Tuesday.

Zhang’s subsequent confrontation with the police led to the gathering of crowds, the statement said, adding that the protestors “surrounded a police car” before more police forces arrived.

Ten police officers and government officials were injured by the protestors, who threw bricks at them, it said.

And after that, “about 200 masses relocated to surround the county government building”, according to the official story, which says that the protestors did not leave until midnight.

Online, however, anonymous eyewitnesses say at the China News Net it was police brutality, not Zhang’s confrontation thereof, that led to the protest.

According to one source, the traffic police and their assistants “pulled Zhang off his bike and beat him until blood was all over his face”. Zhang only quarreled with the police when they tried to take him away to wash off the blood, the source said.

In Baiyin government’s version of the event, Zhang is a jobless 21-year-old who “agitated the masses by jumping atop a police car, claiming to be a student who had been beaten by the officers”.

Huining county’s website, www.huining.gov.cn, lists Zhang as an 18-year-old who says he had studied in colleges in Guangdong and Hunan provinces, and has been back home in Huining since last month.

“The mass incident in Huining has been properly dealt with,” claimed the story on the Baiyin government website.

Elsewhere, officers from the notorious urban management corps of Nanjing, capital city of Jiangsu province, have been brought under the spotlight after causing the city’s largest university unrest in years earlier in the week.

These officers, whose identity in recent years has been synonymous with brutality against the poor and small, often unregistered street vendors, allegedly attacked a group of students who set up sidewalk stalls in the city’s Jiangning district around 6 pm on Monday.

Claiming that a female student was injured in the incident, thousands of outraged students from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics took it to the streets and cut off traffic for nearly five hours.

The students carried bilingual slogans in both Chinese and English, claiming to stage the protest through the Gandhian “nonviolent noncooperation”, photos taken with cellphone cameras, which were later uploaded and widely circulated across online forums, showed.

The photos also showed signs reading “help vulnerable social groups and construct a harmonious society” – a vow of the central government since 2004 – carried by students as they approached dozens of traffic and riot police.

The line of riot police, who arrived on scene at around 9 pm, was at one point broken through by the protestors, according to eyewitnesses who recalled the incident online on early Tuesday.

The stalemate ended at close to 11 pm, when the students gradually began to leave, witnesses say.

But the Nanjing police, in a written statement to China Daily, denied that any student “was setting up sidewalk stalls on Monday night in the square (in Jiangning district)”.

No one was beaten or verbally abused either, the statement went on to claim.

Nanjing’s urban management officers, better known as “chengguan”, made the headlines last April when 300 chengguan chiefs from around the country gathered to criticize their counterpart forces in the coastal city for beating a local citizen “until he broke an arm and shitted his pants”.

Last month, another chengguan scandal, which involves the leakage of an inside “how-to” book for the officers in “beating the vendors without leaving blood on their faces or wound on their skin”, shocked the nation.

Zhao Yang, himself a chengguan in Nanjing, was responsible for the leakage.

Chengguan teams were set up in Chinese cities from 1997 to deal with street peddlers who evaded taxes and cluttered streets, Xinhua said. he teams ae responsible for "aintaining public facilities, including phone booths and manholes, banning spitting and littering in public and stopping construction sites from making too much noise at night", it said.

But chengguan has no legal foundation, according to Wang Jianxun, a professor with the China University of Political  Science.

“They are the freaks in our society,” says Wang, who calls for legal intervention in balancing the dynamics between chengguan and the marginalized groups.

–        July 1997: Luo Qi, dubbed “China’s best female rock singer”, was admitted to a drugs rehab center for three months after asking the taxi driver “to go get some drugs” just after landing at the airport in Nanjing, Jiangsu

 –        Sept 1997: Zhu Jie, a 28-year-old actress who just played a drug addict in her film debut, died from overdose

 –        Oct 2001: Quitting, a cinema reinterpretation of the true story of actor-and-drug addict Jia Hongsheng’s descent into drugs since 1992, debuted. Jia, now 42, has not made a public appearance since 2007

 –        Oct 2003: Jing Gangshan, singer, found with drugs at a security check at the Beijing Capital Airport. He later related drug use with “creative inspiration” for music

 –        Nov 2004: Jiang Tao, singer, detained for illegal drug possession

 –       May 2007: Xie Dong, singer, arrested for drug offences with his girlfriend

 –       Jan 2008: Zhang Yuan, a famous director, and his staff arrested for drug use in a studio in Beijing. Zhang was named among the world’s top 100 young leaders for the 21^st century by Time magazine in 1994

 –        May 2008: Xie, now a high-profile anti-drug volunteer, arrested again with his girlfriend for drug abuse

Man’s detainment has sparked heated discussions online regarding entertainment celebrities’ decreasing moral standards.

Some of these celebrities’ behaviors “challenge society’s bottom line”, Zhang Jian, a lawyer from Beijing, said in his blog.

“Their so-called ‘fame’ and ‘influence’ are absolutely non-tradable with the moral bottom lines of society and the law,” Zhang said.

“The least this incident could do is to let the public be less narrow-minded and more rational in dealing with celebrities.”

Luo Qi, once dubbed “China’s best female rock singer”, was admitted to a drugs rehab center for three months after asking the taxi driver “to go get some drugs” just after landing at the airport in Nanjing, Jiangsu province in July 1997.

Whatever excuse people – be they from inside the entertainment industry or out of it – may come up with, drug use “is a highly pathetic thing”, she said yesterday, without reference to Man.

As June 26, the International Day against Drug Abuse draws near, Luo says she truly hopes “people could all come to pay attention to what this day represents”.

Party and government officials who mess with the media or ignore their interview requests will be held accountable from next month on, according to a document released by Yinchuan, capital city of China’s smallest autonomous region Ningxia.

In a historic document, the city said, although without specific details, that all local Party officials and public servants would be accountable for not dealing with the media’s interview requests, or ignoring them altogether.

The cadres who do so may be suspended and advised to leave their posts, according to Zuo Xinjun, secretariat of Yinchuan’s Commission for Disciplinary Inspection.

Once implemented, the document will “further regulate the behaviors of Party and state department staff and improve their execution”, Zuo told the local Yinchuan Evening News last week.

Officials who chat online or indulge themselves in the stock market and computer games during work time will similarly be taken to task, said the circular.

The Yinchuan Evening News applauded the regulation, which it said is China’s first-ever document to explicitly state that Party and state officials could be held accountable for improper handling of the media.

But many cities have, like Yinchuan, a remote city of merely one million people, implemented similar frameworks for cultivating media-friendly officials, including Dandong, China’s border city with the DPRK.

Dandong, a city of 2.4 million, last month released a circular that included media supervision as a basis for performance evaluation of local officials.

Online, the new rules have been cautiously welcomed by most netizens. Yu Jingning, a renowned commentator based in the central Hubei province, said Yinchuan’s move is “necessary and inspiring”.

“Some governments have too often been pushed around by ‘dogs that bark most’ when it comes to balancing between the interests of the local National People’s Congress, the local committee of the People’s Political Consultative Conference, the media and the public,” Yu said in his blog.

But the media and the public “may not ever stand a chance with relevant government departments on ‘duo maomao’,” warned Cao Lin with the China Youth Daily.

“Duo maomao”, or simply hide-and-seek, refers, in today’s China, the incident where an inmate in a Yunnan judicial detention facility was beaten to death by prison bullies. Local authorities then announced he had died in an accident when playing hide-and-seek.

The effectiveness of public opinion must be taken further, netizens throughout online forums say. Or otherwise, what had happened to Bao Junkai may be an indication to the fate of officials in Yinchuan, or wherever, held accountable for messing with the media in the future.

Bo, a former deputy chief of the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine’s department of food quality supervision, received a serious demerit for dereliction of duty last fall during the height of the milk scandal.

But in April, the media found that he had been reassigned as chief of the administration’s branch in Anhui province.

1)      On arrival, set the scene by saying a few nice things about the infrastructure—the high rises and the multilane highways, the interchanges. Developmenty sort of stuff.

2)      Make an amusing, self-deprecating comment about your inability to speak or read the funny language they have in China. Play down the fact that you are dependent on a translator for quotes and newspaper reading. Never admit in print to getting story ideas or borrowing quotes from the China Daily.

3)      Get story ideas and borrow quotes from the China Daily. Make sure you do this discreetly. For background only.

4)      Now for reportage. After saying the nice things about the new buildings, get your translator to find a Beijing yam seller whose slum was knocked down to make way for the Olympic badminton hall. Do a few paras on him, and how all the money thrown at the Games is not helping the poor, and how terrible the huge income gap is. Make sure you write at least three times as much about the yam seller whose slum was pulled down as you do about all the new apartments, new metro lines, the growth in car ownership, the expanding health insurance and all the other good news about China that nobody in the west really wants to know about.

5)      Say how horrible the air in Beijing is, even if it isn’t on the days you are there. Everybody says Beijing air is horrible, so play along.

6)      The political bit. Interview a token party member, but reword him subtly to make it sound like he is just spouting the party line. Bend the translator’s words to fit—it’ll be rubbish English anyway. (Ditto in all quote treatment). Then find a good Chinese, one who is fluent in English, has lived in America or Britain, and is prodemocracy. Give them lots of space, let them sing. Martin Lee types, but preferably younger and female, for the mugshot. If you can get an interview with the Olympic artist, Ai-whatsisname, who is an anti-Commie quote machine, give him full throttle. Hopefully, he hasn’t been arrested yet.

Lastly, please remember: Chinese who love their country are called “nationalists.” Never use this word for Americans, French, Tibetans and other civilized peoples who love their country or territory. When demonstrators protest over Tibet they are acting in a heartfelt, spontaneous way, waving pretty flags you would be happy to see woven into your granny’s bedspread. When Chinese counter-demonstrate, they are always “bussed in,” the mood is “ugly”, and they are draped in intimidating red flags that can be made to look a bit Hitler Jugend-ish with the right kind of photo. (They probably did arrive in buses as this is the cheapest way of moving numbers of not-very-well-off people around, but you don’t need to prove the insinuation that the regime laid on the vehicles). Beijing is always a “regime,” by the way, and is not to be confused with western “governments.” (But: Hong Kong is an exception. Because it was under benign, enlightened British dictatorship for a long time, it cannot be a “regime.” “Regime” only applies to dictatorships in rubbish countries).

That’s about it. Don’t be deceived by all that friendly smiling and optimism, that’s just a front. It’s your job, with your long days of experience of the Far East and your fluency in a language spoken by nearly 0.005% of the locals, to get under the radar and ferret out the truth. Did I mention how bad the air in Beijing is?”

A total of 5,335 students died or went missing in last May’s Sichuan earthquake, local authorities said yesterday for the first time since the tremor leveled or severely damaged 11,687 schools.

No detailed list of the dead students was released, but the number, calculated from applications for State compensation and relief funds for families of the deceased students, is “responsible and reliable”, Sichuan’s education chief Yang Hongbo told a press conference in Chengdu, capital of the quake-hit province.

Officials also stressed that results from a two-month investigation last summer by more than 2,500 experts and staff found no case where a school had collapsed in the disaster because of shoddy construction, a widespread claim among parents of the deceased schoolchildren.

The May 12 quake destroyed more than 7,000 classrooms and dormitories, official figures showed. Many parents claimed the buildings fell apart because of “tofu dregs construction”, a term used to describe construction projects that deliberately use cheap cement without any steel bars for reinforcement.

The collapsed or damaged schools of Sichuan subsequently became one of the most glaring images of the 8.0-magnitude quake, which killed more than 69,000 people and left another 18,000 missing.

The authorities in Sichuan had not spoken directly on the sensitive issue of school buildings until yesterday’s briefing, held amid nationwide preparations to mark the 1^st anniversary of the country’s deadliest quakes in decades.

Still, the State Council, the country’s Cabinet, had recently issued a promise to build schools that are safe, reliable and under close supervision.

“The quality of school buildings is a concern for social stability and should be the focus of local authorities at present and in the coming days,” the circular stated.

The release of the number of confirmed student deaths yesterday also drew a wide range of concerns from across the country.

For artist and activist Ai Weiwei, who has launched a private investigation to list all student victims of the earthquake, the figure Sichuan authorities announced “is still far from the truth”.

If Sichuan officials got the number from applications for State compensation for the deaths and relief funds for families of the child victims, that would have meant they already had it 11 months ago when the funds were allocated, Ai told China Daily in a phone interview in Beijing yesterday.

Ai’s own investigation, conducted with a team of about 60 volunteers, so far identified 5,205 students – with detailed information of each of them – as dead or missing from the earthquake.

The list, published on his blog at major information portal Sina.com, includes the name, age, gender and family contact of each child victim.

Ai said his team updates their findings and name list whenever they can, but the site’s management has deleted their online entries on more than 20 occasions.

“We’ve only finished 80 percent of our research, so the real number (of the quake’s student victims) should be about 6,000,” Ai said.

Provincial authorities have also blocked a number of parents of the victims from speaking to his team, Ai said.

The activist said he also has a 100-hour video proving a campaign by local officials to “buy silence” from parents who have demanded that someone be held accountable for the collapse of the schools.

But Ai said he is not uploading the video online for public viewing yet.

“I don’t want to trigger anger… I want to show respect for the dead,” he said.

Still, a number of parents in Sichuan wanted more from the release of the official tally of student deaths.

“The total number of the deceased students is similar to what we had thought,” Yang Mingyu from Beichuan, the worst hit township of the quake, told China Daily yesterday. Her 16-year-old son died in the tremor with about 1,300 other students at the Beichuan Middle School.

Yang said her biggest wish now is “to find out the real reason behind the (school’s) collapse”.

Like many in Beichuan who share her sorrow, Yang has urged the local government to publish a report on the quality of the school buildings.

She also hopes to erect a monument with all the names of the deceased students at the ruins of her son’s middle school, even as she struggles to move beyond the quake. Yang’s family paid a 30-yuan (US$ 4.4) insurance fee for their son, but they received only 4,000 yuan ($ 586.4) of compensation because “that’s the standard for quake-related deaths”.

But for Yinghua township resident Deng Qingyan, the release of the confirmed death toll yesterday is just another reminder of the disaster she is desperately trying to forget.

Deng, 36, lost her daughter in the quake and still believes the “tofu dregs” construction was responsible for the collapse of her girl’s school. Deng said her family received 90,000 yuan in compensation for her daughter’s death and another 38,000 yuan of endowment insurance.

With that and her 4-year-old boy enrolled in a newly built kindergarten, Deng says she is no longer pursuing the matter of any possible negligence in the construction of school buildings that fell in the quake.

“The new kindergarten is a lot safer than before; it was thoroughly supervised during construction,” she told China Daily. “I am more than pleased with it.”

“It’s been a year (since the earthquake). I don’t want to think about the past too much. After all, we have received all due compensation and we do have our livelihoods to think about,” Deng said.

“To me, this thing is over.”

Tan Yingzi and Cai Ke contributed to the story