China says 5,335 students died in last year's quake - The Communist government had resisted releasing the figure. Activists say it appears to be too l

China says 5,335 students died in last year's quake - The Communist government had resisted releasing the figure. Activists say it appears to be too little and too late.
By Barbara Demick
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
6:33 AM CDT, May 7, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/la-fg-quake-china8-2009may08,0,3829974.story


Zheng Rongchong grieves for her daughter Liu Wenbo, 10, who was among as many as 129 students killed in the collapse of Fuxin No. 2 Elementary School. Audio Slide Show >>> (Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times / May 22, 2008)

Reporting from Beijing - A Chinese provincial official said Thursday that 5,335 students died in last year's Sichuan province earthquake, but to activists who had pushed for the release of the figure, it appeared too little and too late. (Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Chinese government had reported 5,355 students were killed in last year's earthquake.)

Parents of the dead children have been complaining for months that the Chinese government was withholding the death toll to prevent the public from learning how many schools collapsed due to shoddy construction during the May 12 quake.

Others estimate that the students accounted for as many as 9,000 out of about 70,000 total earthquake fatalities. Beijing artist Ai Weiwei, who has sent volunteers into Sichuan to collect names, has so far counted more than 5,000 students, with many hard-hit towns still untallied.

"Many people will doubt the accuracy of this figure,'' said Yang Licai, one of the volunteers. Still, he applauded the government for releasing the number. "Whether or not it's the right figure, it is progress. The Chinese government recognizes that it needs to be more transparent and respond to the public's demand to know the truth.''

Beijing is under pressure to show how much it has changed since the last natural disaster of this magnitude – the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan, for which no credible death toll has ever been released. Last month, the Chinese government in its first-ever public assessment of its own human-rights situation made the release of the earthquake victims' names a goal for the year.

Parents for months have been clamoring for more information.

"Revealing the death toll of students is very important to us parents,'' Chen Yujian, a truck driver from Shifang, who lost his 17-year-old son in the earthquake, said today. "I hope now they can go further and publish the names of all the students, their age and where they died, and let the public see it in an earthquake memorial museum.''

The figure of 5,335 dead was given by Tu Wentao, head of Sichuan's Education Department, in response to a reporter's question at a news conference in Chengdu, the provincial capital. Another official, Yang Hongbo, head of the province's Construction Department, disputed allegations that a disproportionate number of schools collapsed during the magnitude 7.9 earthquake.

"Experts who investigated this agree that it was impossible for buildings to withstand a seismic event of this magnitude,'' Yang said at the news conference.

Some studies suggest otherwise. A survey of 384 buildings by engineers from Beijing's Tsinghua University found 44% of schools damaged beyond repair, as opposed to 13% of government buildings.

The collapse of the schools is the most politically sensitive aspect of the earthquake. Many parents and volunteers have been harassed, detained and in some cases beaten while asking questions about the schools.

The Foreign Correspondents Club of China on Wednesday complained of three separate incidents this week in which Western journalists reporting on the upcoming anniversary were roughed up and had camera equipment broken.

Responding to those allegations, Hou Xiongfei, a Sichuan province propaganda official, said today that some "journalists are not going to the disaster area to report, but are inciting the crowd and asking people to organize. … We do not welcome those kinds of people.''

barbara.demick@latimes.com Eliot Gao and Nicole Liu of The Times' Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.