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Earthquake orphans from Sichuan province
play at a gala park in Seoul. They are among twenty children orphaned
during the earthquake to visit the South Korean capital as guests of the
Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries.(Photo:
(Source: China Daily)
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BEIJING, May 19 -- The Sichuan earthquake has shaken
the country's government into taking a zero-tolerance attitude toward physically
weak and shoddy school structures nationwide.
As part of a three-year campaign, the State Council,
or the Cabinet, has begun a "school building reinforcement project" to ensure
all structures housing schools are capable of withstanding natural disasters,
the Ministry of Education said on its website yesterday.
The country's local government heads have been warned
of harsh consequences following any incident involving unsafe structures in
their administrative regions or any mismanagement with regard to the
construction of school buildings.
Under the plan, quality supervision teams will travel
across China to ensure "each and every primary and secondary school is strong
enough and equipped to fight off disasters such as fires, thunder storms,
typhoons, earthquakes, floods and landslides".
The central government announced it would set up an
8-billion-yuan ($1.2 billion) special fund to support the project, especially in
less developed central and western China, where natural disasters are frequent.
The 8.0-magnitude earthquake in Sichuan on May 12
last year destroyed or damaged 11,687 schools, leaving 5,335 students dead or
missing and 546 disabled, according to official figures.
Parents of the quake victims alleged the school
buildings were constructed with poor quality material and were not well equipped
to handle disaster situations. The State Council recently vowed to ensure all
new school buildings are "safe, reliable and built under strict government
supervision".
Nearly 228 million students study at about 400,000
primary and secondary schools in China, Yu Weiyue, director of division of
school management at basic education department of the education ministry, told
China Daily.
"Our work will mainly focus on the schools in the
rural areas of central and western China," he said.
In a bid to promote the nine-year compulsory
education system in the early 90s, the government went on a school-building
spree across the country, but the lack of financial resources led to a number of
bad quality structures, especially in the less developed areas.
Though a series of reinforcement and reconstruction
projects for rural school buildings have been carried out since 2001, "quite a
number of the reconstructed buildings have not matched up to anti-quake
standards, the ministry said.
In addition to the 8-billion-yuan fund, the
government has asked all provinces to provide more financial support to the
project and has invited sponsorship from the society.
A special working group will watch over the
implementation of the reinforcement project, and especially keep an eye on the
use of funds, the ministry said, adding the whole process will be transparent.
"We need an independent third party to supervise all
the post-quake construction and management," activist Ai Weiwei, a professional
artist who challenges the official earthquake death toll, told China Daily.
(Source: China Daily)
Special Report: Reconstruction After Earthquake
