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China says 5,335 children dead or missing from quake
Wed May 6, 2009 11:33pm EDT
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By Ben Blanchard
BEIJING (Reuters) - China on Thursday put the official number of dead and missing schoolchildren from last year's devastating Sichuan earthquake at 5,335, far lower than the number compiled from news reports at the time. The number was announced by Tu Wentao, the province's education department head, at a news conference in the provincial capital Chengdu, the official Xinhua news agency said.
Many parents blame shoddy buildings for the deaths, pointing to apartments and government offices that survived while nearby schools fell.
The May 12 quake killed around 80,000 people in total.
A compilation of reports from Xinhua and local newspapers at the time put the number of dead and missing children and teachers at around 9,000.
Ai Weiwei, a prominent artist and building designer who has been compiling his own student death toll, told Reuters he did not believe the government numbers.
"First, these numbers far from reflect reality. Second, they are irresponsible," he said by telephone.
Ai said his volunteers had confirmed 5,200 deaths, and that there were probably another 1,000 or so who had also died. The total figure may be around 7,000, he added.
"They did not conduct a proper survey," Ai said of the official findings. "This reflects badly on the government's credibility."
The government's Tu also said that 3,340 schools needed rebuilding following the quake, in which 546 children were injured and handicapped.
"Sichuan province has pledged to have 95 percent of the students back in school buildings, rather than tents or prefabricated structures, before the end of this year. All students should be in regular school buildings by next spring," Xinhua added.
One survey by engineers from Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University and two other universities assessed 384 buildings across Sichuan.
Of 44 school buildings counted, 57 percent (25) were damaged beyond repair. Of 54 government buildings, 13 percent (7) were in that state of damage, as were 25 percent of shops and housing.
Chinese experts have assigned blame on shoddy construction, inadequate standards for such a powerful quake and lax enforcement of them, and brittle walls of aged school buildings.
Yet some parents who have pressed the government for redress have ended up being harassed or even detained.
And foreign reporters operating in the disaster zone have been roughed up, a measure of the stability-obsessed government's sensitivity to both protest and criticism. Continued...
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