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May 31 With election bribery curbed, rural democracy will deepen, gov't saysChina’s Saturday release of a circular targeted at curbing village election bribery will deepen democratic procedures at the most grassroots level, civil affairs minister Li Xueju has said.
The document comes at a time when “external uncertainties” to the national economy are on the rise and China can’t afford any instability in its vast countryside, Li said in an interview published on the ministry’s website (www.mca.gov.cn) yesterday.
The country’s village committees, chosen through direct elections since 1988 in a historic law that promises self-management for millions of residents, are the basis for governing rural affairs – the political foundation for the Communist Party of China (CPC).
Direct village elections are, in Li’s words, “among the widest forms of socialist democracy in China”. The country is home to some 604,000 villagers’ committees, where more than 2.3 million local residents are involved in governance of rural affairs.
Premier Wen Jiabao has repeatedly said ensuring rural stability is at the very core of the government’s goal this year: maintaining social harmony and a high growth rate.
Twelve provinces, or more than a third of China’s total administrative regions, are scheduled to hold rural elections, instructed by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, this year.
“Any improper handling of village elections may easily cause partial or complete instability in rural areas,” Li said.
The Saturday circular has a clear and visible target.
“The villagers’ committee elections are not properly conducted in some rural areas, where bribery is grave and seriously harms the elections’ impartiality,” said the circular, jointly issued by the General Office of the State Council and the General Office of CPC Central Committee.
It also defined, for the first time, rural election bribery as “any act by any candidate or their relatives to, directly or otherwise, alter or affect the constituents’ own willing by bribing them, election workers or other candidates with financial or other interests”.
As China urbanized itself and with migrant workers rushed into cities, it became increasingly impossible to organize village meetings, on which occasion the voting takes place.
The meetings had been thus halted for years in rural communities with significant migrant labor, where elections are most vulnerable to manipulation and violence by local clans and mobs, as well as outright bribery by rich, ambitious city returnees.
The potential benefits behind these seemingly small posts are attracting more and more to compete and in some places where bribery is seen, Li earlier said.
Some spend up to millions of yuan in their campaigns. “There’s only one thing that’s for certain once they sworn in: they’ll want plenty more back,” said Li Changping, a renowned official-turned researcher of China’s rural issues.
He calls rural elections “China’s grandest democracy experiment in 5,000 years, only to be carried out amidst rapid industrialization and urbanization that exploit resources from the countryside”.
“Therefore, any problem that may surface in this process (of rural elections) is perfectly normal, considering,” Li said.
“A village chief has a post smaller than a sesame seed, but with power greater than heaven,” Lin Changfa, a migrant worker-turned poet, said of rural elections on Utopia (www.wyzxsx.com), a popular website devoted to disenfranchised groups.
But that isn’t the case everywhere. Zhou Jianmin, a professor with Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, reminds that regional differences play a major role when it comes to rural elections.
“The competition in some rich areas are really fierce, while no one in some poor regions would like to work in villagers’ committee,” he said.
“While developing the villages, some heads can make huge sum of money by turning farmland into commercial land.” May 29 In harsh times, high school grads refuse college, look for jobsEverything shrinks when an economic crisis this serious hits. Even student population does.
Minister of education Zhou Ji earlier predicted that the overall number of applicants would still exceed 10 million – with no guarantee of surpassing last year’s 10.5 million – but that number has dropped in many provinces.
In Shandong, China’s No. 2 provincial economy, education officials say they have 100,000 fewer applicants this year than in 2008. That’s a drop of more than 10 percent, a record in decades.
The country’s most populous province Henan is also seeing 29,000 fewer college entrance exam applicants than last year. Similar numbers are reported in Shanghai municipality and Hebei, Beijing’s neighboring province.
Fueled by the deepening economic crisis, this trend is once again raising alarms for the much-debated national college entrance exam, reinstalled after universities stopped normal recruitment during the “Cultural Revolution” between 1966 and 1976.
Only selected groups of so-called “worker-peasant-soldier students” were admitted to universities between 1972 and 1977 based on recommendations.
The restoration of the college entrance exam was hailed as an opening chapter of the Reform and Opening Up. The numbers told the tale: in 1977 alone, as many as 5.7 million candidates competed for 220,000 college places.
But the exam has come under intense criticism in recent years as it relies solely on written testing, with no evaluation of a student’s overall capability. Critics say it has resulted in the restoration of China’s centuries-old test-oriented education system in the feudal era and should be abolished.
The exam has long been considered the life-changing opportunity for most high students who want a better education and, in turn, a better job. But when the crisis hit, that dream soon faded.
“Since the financial crisis last year, the grim employment situation has broken the ‘employment myth’ for those with a college degree. Some students changed their minds about getting a good job through higher education. They simply quit (from taking the exam),” an anonymous recruitment officer with the Beijing Institute of Technology said.
Until the mid-1990s, the government used to assign jobs to university graduates. Although that sometimes meant assigning archeology majors to banks or computer geniuses to zoos, Li Dajun, a retired worker from a state-owned firm in Beijing, said there wasn’t truly much to worry about back then.
“That’s why the college entrance exam was that great an opportunity to change our lives. Who could’ve known it’d be this hard for college kids today to find a job now?” asked Li, whose son will graduate from college next month.
When Li’s son does find a job, his starting salary is likely going to fall considerably short of his aim. An earlier study by Fudan University’s journalism school found that college graduates in Beijing as well as the southern metropolises of Guangzhou and Shenzhen this year would see their average starting salary cut by around 10 to 12 percent from 2008.
The problems with the college entrance exam long predated the economic crisis, of course. For example, since 1999, the government took several steps to drastically expand university enrollment. But that, experts say, have amounted to pressures in the job market.
By 2006, with no significant increases in job vacancies, China already had five times more graduates than it did in 1999, according to Yang Dongping, an education expert.
Some 6.1 million college graduates will hit the job market this year, the Ministry of Education has said.
The decline in the number of applicants to the college entrance exam may be beneficial to transforming the mindsets of parents and students, several Beijing-based middle school teachers were cited as saying by a report by the China Youth Daily yesterday.
It is only with the exam’s magic might out of the picture can parents start to rationally help their kids decide what’s best for them in the long run, a professor surnamed Chen with the Beijing Information Technology College said. May 26 We'll have another harvest, agricultural chief saysThe country’s agricultural chief Sun Zhengcai today said China is likely to see the sixth bumper harvest this summer, erasing earlier worries that this spring’s drought – the worst in 50 years – may jeopardize that goal.
The central government has revised the grain output target this year to 500 million tons, a conservative estimate based on last year’s number, a record 528.5 million tons.
But Sun, speaking in Henan province, China’s breadbasket, said another harvest is very likely given there’d be no major natural disaster.
A sixth consecutive summer harvest will create history and “be of particular importance” in face of the financial crisis, he noted. May 21 Street riots in Gansu, Jiangsu after violence by police, chengguanThree 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.
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. May 20 Puff, the magic entertainment industryPopular singer Man Wenjun has been detained by Beijing police for drug offences since early Tuesday morning, in yet another episode of drug abuse in China’s entertainment industry. Man, his wife and more than 10 people attending her birthday party Monday evening at a Coco Banana venue tested positive to urine tests after police raided their VIP room, the Beijing News reported yesterday. A drug dealer in Beijing, who refused to be named, purportedly told the China Entertainment Net yesterday that the Man couple - both frequent buyers - bought 2.5 grams of heroin from him Monday morning. Tuesday's drug raid followed an anonymous tip-off, said a brief statement released by the Beijing police yesterday, which confirmed that Man, 40, was among the detained.
Mai Hongmei, the actress wife of renowned singer Sun Nan, and Meng Jun, Man and Sun’s music producer, were also briefly detained said a report yesterday morning by www.cctv.com, the website of China Central Television. Mai was cited as saying by Phoenix entertainment later yesterday that she “did not see anyone using drugs that night”. The actress went home after telling the police what she saw, she said. But the Legal Evening News – citing police sources – said the Man couple had confessed to drugs. An official from a charity foundation dedicated to children suffering from brain paralysis, where Man has been a brand ambassador since 2007, said she was shocked and that the foundation "was not ready to comment". The Coco Banana venue, near the Workers’ Stadium, has been ordered to close and is expected to reopen in three to six months, according to Chinese law. Unconfirmed local reports say Man, who gained his fame in 1996 for a song named “I Understand You All the Time” but has been quiet for much of the time since, may be sent to a rehabilitation center with his wife.
Man’s 10-year-old son is staying at his grandmother-in-law’s apartment, local reports say. Song Ke, CEO of Taihe Rye Music, to which Man is currently contracted, refused to comment on the matter, saying he was on a work trip out of Beijing. Drug abuse has been a headache for China’s entertainment industry for years. The most well known cases include the following:
– 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 21st 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”. May 19 From June 1 on, don't mess with the media in Yinchuan
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. May 15 In Sichuan, official sacked after buying sex from a minor
A Sichuan official who had sex with an underage girl and escaped criminal charges with an alibi cursed by the entire country has been stripped off his Party and government posts, local sources said yesterday.
A no-byline story published on the official Yibin News Net (www.ybxww.com) yesterday afternoon said Yu Lumin, a division chief of the local taxation bureau in the earthquake-plagued province, was “immediately sacked” from his posts last Sunday after news of the scandal leaked.
The story, likely the work of local publicity officers, said Yibin county on Thursday called on all local officials to “learn from the lesson and strengthen the construction of virtues” among cadres.
No details were given as to why the news came a day late.
Lu, 47, was fined 5,000 yuan (US$ 730) earlier in the week after coming clean of charges of child rape after claiming he did not know the victim – 13 years old at the time of his offence – was underage.
The former official told Mou, a hot pot restaurant owner he liked young girls and was “willing to spend big bucks” to have sexual intercourse with a virgin, according to earlier reports. Mou approached a middle-school student to ask her to sleep with Lu. The student refused, but persuaded a classmate to do it and introduced her to Mou.
Lu had sex with the girl in a cheap country hostel in December, paying altogether 6,000 yuan. The girl, surnamed He, received only 1,000 yuan, with the rest going to her classmate and the restaurant owner.
Lu was detained on March 3 after He reported the incident to police. He was given a minor fine a week later for visiting a prostitute after claiming he had no idea that the girl was under 14, the threshold for child rape in China.
The Yibin Public Security Bureau said sex with a 13-year-old was not a criminal offence, if the person was not aware that the other was underage and the act was consensual.
Having sex with a minor carries a jail sentence of between three and 15 years, local police said.
But neither the cyber public nor the media have bought that explanation.
Netizens are again pressing for criminal charges, arguing that what has been done so far “is saying that it’s okay for officials to buy sex from minors so long as they claim to not know the girls’ real age”.
Wang Zuofu, a consultant with the China Law Society, echoes that speculation by saying that it is “a legal loophole”.
“It was very suspicious that Lu would have paid 6,000 yuan for He if he didn’t know she was underage, when a local adult prostitute would only cost about 100 yuan,” said Wang.
The official Xinhua News, too, ran an unusually harsh commentary on Thursday, saying that the judicial interpretation Yibin police relied on is, in effect, not practiced because it had resulted in “significant controversies”.
The story then went on to ask: “Is it really the case that the Yibin police has no understanding of the Criminal Law? If so, what let them lost their basic judgment?”
The fact that the public is questioning Yibin police’s dealing of the incident “reflects that the people’s legal awareness is on the rise”, the Xinhua story said.
Online, tens of thousands of people continue to press for criminal charges for Lu, saying that his excuse “is an insult to the intelligence of all Chinese people”. May 11 四川：重生之痛 国务院第一大部委、中国最具权威的宏观经济调控部门国家发改委上周五再次向公众强调，中央政府将力争在两年内，即在明年9月前，基本完成三年重建的四川地震灾区复兴任务。
发改委副主任穆虹同时承认，“提前一年完成任务的难度不可低估”。
地震已至周年。四川的地方官员、开发商和居民虽备受鼓舞于过去一年来重建所取得的成绩，却也忧心于赶时赶工可能带来的负面效应。
四川，这个今日中国最庞大的工地，正处于历史性变化的风口浪尖。在灾难最初岁月的巨大阵痛过去后，一切慢慢趋于平静。时至今日，有多少善良的人们相信温总理“多难兴邦”的殷切希望，就有多少罪恶的灵魂奢求于从中获利。
“如果我们赶时赶工，一些地方的建筑质量就可能得不到保证了，”一位名叫朱阁（音译）的德阳市政府官员说。
德阳市的绵竹和什邡同属18个极重灾区之列。在全市各地，数以百计在地震中被毁的学校、医院、公路和地产开发计划已然重新开工。
朱阁透露说，灾区各地考核官员的两条重要标准，一是看他们能提前多久完成重建任务，二是看当地社会安定与否。
然而“一刀切”的标准，往往并不能反映出官员的真实能力。很多地方的政府都已夸下海口，声称要在九月前完成所有受损学校的重建工作。但时至今日，一些学校的重建尚未开始 – 可这并不是由于地方人员的消极怠工，反而恰恰是他们出于安全考虑，强调学校重新选址必须“谨慎，再谨慎”的结果。
德阳市某路建公司经理陈勇（音译）说，中央政府在重建的对口帮扶工作上做出了十分积极的努力。“但问题是，投标过程可不怎么公平透明，”他举例说，一些援助省份“只允许自家单位参与竞标”。
而由于这些援助省份的企业不能直接参与四川的重建工程，“他们得一而再、再而三地分包，”陈勇说。他所在公司正在参与的路建工程，就是四次分包后所得。而当工程落入公司之手时，原有预算的将近一半已无影无踪。这时，路建工程尚未开始。
“这样的情况，在这里是比较普遍的。我们没得啥子利润，”陈勇说。没有了足够的预算，他承认有些重建工程不得不偷工减料。
在刚刚重新对公众开放的北川，黄江学校教师母志文表示了同样的担忧。
“政府提出要‘三年规划，两年完成’。其实这个口号我们希望不要提，”他说。这个羌族汉子的爱人在去年的地震中去世。现在，他带着三岁的孩子和岳父母来看她了。
母志文和孩子住在“重建得相当不错”的黄江学校宿舍里。他的岳父母虽然仍住在板房，但“宁可（在板房里）多等一段时间，因为规划会出现很多问题，希望一步到位，保质保量。”
北川是四川汶川特大地震中遇难人数最多、受损程度最重的县城，死亡或失踪人数近两万，达总遇难人口的近四分之一。
山东省援建办公室主任王汉成透露，援建北川的该省，在已开工或即将开工的100多个县城开发项目中，对相关款项实行内部监管。
他同时表示，山东将在年内把用以重建、加固农村永久性住房的7.2亿元资金交予北川县，并将派40-50名技术员为该项目把关。
而有关城镇设施和县城开发的118个项目，则均由山东方面完成后，再转交给北川县。
中部省份河南所援助的江油市，更是开展了“交钥匙”工程。该工程的用意，按一位江油市相关政府官员的话来讲就是，江油方面不需要管任何事情，一切援建工作都由河南进行，“他们把房子建好了，把钥匙交给我们，就这样。”
而对口支援安县的辽宁省，则采取了“一半援建工程待自主完成后转交，一半拨款安县，由地方直接建设”的方针，安县政府新闻办主任周保全说。
在极重灾区之外，受灾程度较轻、没有对口支援单位的四川各市也遇到了不同的问题。在绵阳市涪城区的一所专科院校，一位姓杨的办公室主任抱怨说，去年政府保证给予的5400万重建资金，至今只有很少到账。
“我们只从中央财政拨款拿到了7百万。中央财政应该出总款额的1/3，”他说。“其余的都应该从地方财政那里出，但我们一直索要未果。”
该校需加固或重建的，是一座教学楼和一栋宿舍楼。在资金迟迟未到的情况下，校方已督促开发商垫钱开工，并屡次申请银行贷款和在社会上“化缘”。但杨主任说，进展一直不顺利。
四川省省长蒋巨峰在3月表示，该省142个受灾县至2010年的重建规划涉及资金约1.7万亿元，但在实施过程中，仍存在1.3万亿元的巨额缺口。
该省副省长魏宏称，这些未落实的资金 –超过重建资金总额的3/4 – 将从银行信贷、社会资金和资本市场三方面寻求支持。
“有个地方官这么跟我说过，你建路能用个20天就行了，”在提及他目前正在德阳施工的路建工程时，陈勇如此表示。“这4公里的路就是给（地震）一周年做个样子看看的，就是浪费钱。”
去年5月12日的四川地震导致近9万人遇难或失踪，经济损失在7000亿元和9785.5亿元之间。 May 10 四川：重生之痛By Fu Jing in Deyang, Chen Jia in Beichuan, Zhang Haizhou in Mianyang, and Hu Yinan in Beijing
Over-speeding reconstruction and wrongdoings in bidding projects may cause quality issues in Sichuan’s colossal reconstruction project, local officials, developers and residents have warned.
At the end of 2008, the central government said it aims to finish most of the reconstruction work in two years, instead of the originally planned three years, hoping that it would fuel China in cushioning the impact of the global financial crisis.
“Since the central government made that decision, the provincial and local governments have competed to race against time. But I personally believe fast is not always good,” Zhu Ge, an official from Sichuan’s Deyang city, said.
“Some (governments) will ignore construction quality if we hasten to run ahead of the schedule,” he said.
Deyang’s Mianzhu and Shifang are among the 18 most severely hit county-level cities. Hundreds of school, hospital, road and real estate projects have already been implemented across the region.
How fast the officials could push forward the schedule and how socially stable socially a locality is, according to Zhu, are the two most important criteria in assessing the officials’ performance in the quake zones. For example, many local governments have vowed to finish rebuilding the schools by September. But until now, some are still looking for a perfectly safe site.
Chen Yong, a manager of a road construction company in Deyang, said the central government has set up a good example in matching up pairs between aiding provinces and municipalities and the quake zones when it comes to reconstruction.
“But the problem is that the process of bidding projects is not so fair and transparent,” said Chen, who added that some provinces have allowed only companies under their own jurisdictions to bid for the projects.
And since the companies in these aiding provinces are not allowed to directly implement the reconstruction projects in Sichuan, “they have to sub-contract again and again,” said Chen.
For example, Chen said the road project he is building was obtained after four times of sub-contract. By then, nearly half of the planned budget had already been drizzled away – before road construction actually kicked off.
“This is quite common in Deyang, and our profit is trivial,” said Chen, who declined to disclose his company’s name. “And this may lead jerry-built buildings and roads.”
He said reconstruction has made Sichuan so large a construction site that it is practically impossible for the central and provincial governments to monitor all the points and process. “I am warning that wrongdoings in bidding projects have already caused corruption, big or small,” Chen said.
Elsewhere in Sichuan, Mu Zhiwen, a teacher whose wife died last year in Beichuan, the most severely hit county in the quake, voiced similar concerns.
“We hope the government not to mention that slogan (finishing reconstruction a year ahead of schedule) again,” the 34-year-old ethnic Qiang said in Beichuan, which reopened yesterday.
Mu lives in the dorm of his rebuilt Huangjiang School with his 3-year-old son, while his parents-in-law still reside in prefabricated houses.
But the oldsters announced that they would much rather stay there longer than to move into an apartment ahead of the original schedule.
“There’re bound to be a lot of problems during reconstruction. We hope the buildings will be in good quality and that they not crumble again (because of shoddy construction),” Ma said.
Beichuan accounted for nearly a quarter of the overall confirmed death toll. Almost 20,000 local residents died or were declared missing after the disaster.
Shandong, its aiding partner, has left most of the monitoring to itself in the more than 100 urban projects the province has kicked off or will soon start, its reconstruction chief Wang Hancheng said.
At the same time, the province will, by the end of the year, pass on 720 million yuan to the Beichuan government in rebuilding rural houses, Wang said. Shandong will send a team of around 50 staff to supervise the project.
Urban reconstruction efforts, involving some 118 projects and 6.2 billion yuan, will be solely Shandong’s business, he said. The province will hand the houses, hospitals, schools and industrial parks to Beichuan once they are completed.
Central China’s Henan province, responsible for the reconstruction of Jiangyou city, has launched a bolder, “key-transferring” project, a Jiangyou officer said.
The idea is that Henan will give all the keys to the houses they have rebuilt when reconstruction work is done. Jiangyou does not have to worry about anything, the officer said.
Apart from the most severely hit regions, cities in the quake zone, which do not have an aid partner, have met other issues. Yang, office chief of a vocational school in Mianyang’s Fucheng district, complained that a large chunk of the promised 54 million yuan for rebuilding parts of the school have not been allocated.
“We have received only 7 million yuan from the central government, which is responsible for 1/3 of the money,” he said. “The rest should come from the city. But we haven’t seen any yet.”
Two buildings of the school need to be rebuilt. Without the government funds, the school has been looking instead for social donations and bank loans to fill in the gap.
The Sichuan government has earlier announced that it is facing an investment shortfall of more than 1.3 trillion yuan (US$199 billion) out of a total of 1.7 trillion yuan that is needed to speed up recovery efforts by 2010.
That means more than 75 percent of the total investment in reconstruction would have to come from non-governmental sources, said provincial governor Jiang Jufeng.
“But I have been told once by a local official that I can build a road just for 20-day usage,” said Chen, referring to his recently obtained road project in Deyang. “The four-km road is just a showcase for the one-year anniversary of the quake and as such, a waste of money.”
The central government will release its first white paper on disaster prevention and reduction on May 12, China’s first national disaster prevention day, according to Xinhua.
The Sichuan earthquake last May 12 left close to 90,000 people dead and missing. Economic losses from the disaster range between 700 billion yuan (US$ 102.6 billion) and 978.6 billion yuan (US$ 143.5 billion), according to official estimates. May 08 Reporter Guidelines for Covering the Beijing Olympics
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?” May 07 5,335 students killed in quake
By Chen Jia in Chengdu and Hu Yinan in Beijing
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 1st 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 |
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