By Edward Wong
Monday, December 22, 2008
DEYANG, China: Parents whose children died in the collapse of an elementary school during the May earthquake that devastated western China have filed a lawsuit against government officials and a construction contractor. The lawsuit is the first filed by grieving parents angered by what they say is shoddy construction that led to the deaths of their children.
The lawsuit was filed Dec. 1 in a court here in the city of Deyang, in Sichuan Province, the region hit hardest by the May 12 earthquake that left 88,000 people dead or missing. It was the deadliest natural disaster in China in more than three decades. The parents who brought the lawsuit said in interviews last weekend that they were waiting to hear whether the court would allow the case to go forward.
Soon after the earthquake, government officials estimated that 7,000 classrooms had collapsed across the quake zone, killing up to 10,000 schoolchildren. The parents who filed the lawsuit Dec. 1 are the fathers and mothers of children who died in the collapse of Fuxin No. 2 Primary School, where at least 127 students were crushed to death.
The issue of school-building collapses has become the focal point for the greatest political challenge to the Chinese government in the aftermath of the earthquake. In the weeks after the earthquake, grieving parents took to the streets in towns across Sichuan to demand that local officials investigate the construction of the schools.
In some cases, crying parents were hauled away by the riot police. Later in the summer, local governments promised compensation payments to parents if they signed agreements stating they would no longer demand investigations or complain about school construction.
Many of the parents of Fuxin No. 2 Primary School signed such agreements, but some decided in the autumn to go ahead with the lawsuit. The school is in the town of Fuxin, near the city of Mianzhu. The lawsuit names as defendants the town government of Fuxin, the education department of Mianzhu, the school principal and the company that built the school.
Chen Xuefang, one of the plaintiffs, said in a telephone interview that the parents were demanding compensation equivalent to $19,000 per dead child. Over the summer, the local government had offered parents the equivalent of $8,800 in cash and several thousand more dollars in post-retirement pension payments if the parents agreed to drop the issue of the collapsed schools.
Zheng Rongqiong, whose 10-year-old daughter died in the school, said in a telephone interview that parents of 57 dead children were taking part in the lawsuit. Officials from the city of Deyang, who oversee the administration of Mianzhu, have been pressuring the parents to drop the lawsuit, she said, but the parents have refused.
Some parents have declined to join the lawsuit because they believe there is little or no chance of winning and money spent on lawyers will be wasted, said Zheng, who is 35. The plaintiffs have contributed nearly $150 each to help pay for the travel expenses of a lawyer from Shanghai who has agreed to represent them.
"We hope that once we win this lawsuit, it will point out all the people responsible for the deaths of our children," Zheng said.
An official at the Mianzhu education department said Monday that he was aware of the lawsuit but declined to discuss it over the telephone. A woman at the offices of the town government of Fuxin said by telephone that she had no immediate response to the lawsuit.
In legal cases that involve politically sensitive issues, judges and lawyers in China often come under great pressure from government officials to keep the cases from going forward, so there is little chance that the parents in the Fuxin lawsuit will get a full hearing in court.
One parent said a court official met with several parents Dec. 8 to say that the court would not accept the case. No formal answer has come yet.
In similar legal action, parents in three provinces filed lawsuits this fall against dairy companies after tens of thousands of children across China fell ill and at least four died from drinking milk and baby formula tainted with a toxic chemical called melamine.
The milk scandal, once it was revealed in September, infuriated many Chinese and quickly became a huge political embarrassment to the Communist Party because local officials had been involved in covering up the poisonings. No lawsuits have yet been heard.
After the earthquake, the central government assigned a committee of experts to look into the school collapses, but the committee has yet to issue a final report. In September, an official from the committee, Ma Zongjin, said at a news conference in Beijing that a rush to build schools during the Chinese economic boom might have led to shoddy construction that resulted in the student deaths. He said more than 1,000 schools had one of two major flaws - they were built on the earthquake fault line or they were poorly constructed.
Government officials at all levels have tried to suppress discussion of the school collapses. A documentary that asks tough questions about a school collapse in the rural town of Muyu in northern Sichuan has attracted intense scrutiny from the central government.
The director, Pan Jianlin, showed the film, "Who Killed Our Children?", at the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea in late October. Afterward, he told Reuters, people contacted his relatives and friends to tell them to pressure him to stop his work.
Aside from the parents of children killed in the Fuxin school, those of students who died in other schools are still looking for ways to push the government to do a full and open investigation.
This autumn, the father of a child killed in Dongqi Middle School in the town of Hanwang said by telephone that some parents were planning to travel to Beijing to file a petition with the central government. Exactly how they would go about doing it, he said, was still unclear.
Huang Yuanxi contributed research.
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