Nine Chinese parents whose children died when their classrooms crumbled in the Sichuan earthquake last year said yesterday they will keep pursuing the government until they know why their school gave way.
Questions about shoddy construction methods have become a flashpoint for government critics after the 7.9-magnitude quake killed nearly 70,000 people in May, including many students crushed to death when their schools fell.
The parents arrived in Beijing from Sichuan this week to petition the Communist Party’s Central Committee for Discipline Inspection.
They said they represented the families of 126 children who died when the Fuxin No. 2 Primary School in Mianzhu city collapsed.
“It has already been eight months since the earthquake, but there is still no news on what happened,” said Liu Xiaoying, 35, as she waited in line early yesterday for the committee’s petition office to open. “This will allow our children to rest in peace.” Liu’s 12-year-old daughter and only child, Bi Yuexin, was among the children who died when the school’s three-story classroom building collapsed.
“We are hoping that the party’s central committee will investigate the question of building construction quality because we believe it had to do with the deaths of our children,” Liu said as she held out her mobile phone to show a picture of her daughter.
“No other building around the area collapsed. The teachers’ office didn’t fall. Even a Qing dynasty mud wall didn’t fall,” she said.
Thousands of children are believed to have died in their classrooms during the quake but there is no official toll. The government says 70,000 people died in Sichuan province and 7,000 classrooms were destroyed, but has avoided releasing a detailed breakdown of the fatalities.
While the government has promised an investigation and strict punishment for those responsible for the bad construction, there have been no public attempts to hold anyone to account. Marches and sit-ins by grieving parents held within months of the quake were broken up by police, with some parents briefly detained.
This was the second time the parents have traveled to Beijing to seek help from higher authorities. Nothing came of their first attempt two months ago, said another parent, Chen Qiying.
“The last time there were four of us. Today, nine of us came. Next time there will be even more,” said Chen, the mother of Chen Yida, who was 10 when he died in the same school.
It was not immediately known if the parents’ petition was accepted because their mobile phones were turned off later yesterday.
In September, a Chinese government scientist acknowledged that a rush to build schools in recent years likely led to construction flaws that caused so many of them to collapse — the first official admission that low building standards may have been behind the student deaths.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema