China

China Releases Student Quake Death Figures

By Austin Ramzy | @austinramzy | May 7, 2009 | +

During a press conference in Chengdu today the Sichuan provincial government announced that 5,335 students died or remain missing after last year’s devastating earthquake. The collapse of a large number of schoolhouses was one of the most significant and sensitive stories in last year’s quake. Many parents alleged that official corruption and shoddy building practices were to blame. It has often seemed like a tally of student deaths, which have been estimated to be as high as 16,000, would never come.

This newly released tally, which the Sichuan education bureau head called “responsible” and “credible,” will undoubtedly be disputed. The artist Ai Weiwei, with the help of many volunteers, has been compiling an independent figure for student deaths. After today’s official announcement he told the AP: “There’s no significance to this announcement because it didn’t give any names or any other information on where they died, which schools or which classes they were in. This is nonsense.” Last month the independent tally that Ai’s group was compiling stood at 4,876, and they estimated could climb to more than 7,000.

As Ai says, there are no details of what the government’s tally represents, but I’ll attempt to put it in perspective. According to China’s 2007 statistical yearbook, students in elementary, middle and high school equaled 16% of the population in Sichuan.  The official figure of 5,335 students dead or missing equals 6% of the total number of dead or missing–86,633. So, per the official count, the number of student deaths was disproportionately small. Even taking the high end of the Ai Weiwei group’s estimate, say 8,000, and you only get 9% of the total casualties, still smaller than the overall proportion of students in Sichuan.

Those deaths are all tragedies, and tallying percentages feels unpleasantly analytical. But I think there’s something interesting here. The official argument, that schools collapsed simply because of the severity of the magnitude 8.0 earthquake, could be true. And so could the argument of parents that some schools wouldn’t have collapsed if they had been better built. But by avoiding an open enquiry, and trying its best to thwart independent investigations by Ai Weiwei and others, the government has ensured its numbers will be questioned, and the anger of many parents of dead students in Sichuan won’t be quenched.

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  • johnsmith9876

    We must applaud the Chinese government for such speedy of these numbers. Ai Weiwei, after months of efforts, is still not able to supply a final figure. This shows that the Chinese government’s effort is so much more effective and efficient. Ai Weiwei is certainly no Chinese government.

    And the Chinese government has also declared that there was no quality problems with those collapsed buildings. This shows the tremendous advance in structural engineering in China. The Chinese government official news media has show people able to break up concrete with their bare hands to show the lack of structural strength of these concrete. Since this is no quality problem, that must be the norm in China. The structural engineering skill to use such concrete in a multistory building and not causing quality problem must be exceptional and complicated. The other possibility, that the government media created such lies to confuse the people, is, of course, unthinkable.

  • http://features.csmonitor.com/globalnews/2009/05/07/quake-count-how-chinas-death-toll-of-schoolchildren-adds-up/ Quake count: How China’s death toll of schoolchildren adds up | csmonitor.com

    [...] students made up 16 percent of Sichuan’s population as of 2007, according to official estimates cited by Time [...]

  • 2morrow2

    Head counting has never been an easy thing in a country with a population of over a billion.
    While the official figure may not be trustworthy, I doubt the denefits of launching a so-called open inquiry to hold the government accountable on how they did the caculation.
    Such open inquiry takes time and requires tremendous resources, as we’ve seen in numerous examples in the rich, much open and less populated West.
    The question then is where do you want this time and these resources to be used? Do you want to waste them in the challenging of the corrupted officials or developers who may have already died in the quake? Or do you want to use them to build new and more solid structures?

    Justice may have already been done anyways why keep searching for it?

  • 2morrow2

    Mr. Ai has got a lot of publicity these days … his image and voices are everywhere … BBC, ABC, whateverBC … including Austin’s blog.
    Perhaps all of these so-called couveries are from the same source?

  • 2morrow2

    Austin’s analysis of the disproportional thing is interesting.
    Assuming Austin’s source of information is accountable, and assuming Austin’s math is as good as many Chinese, the conclusions that we can potentially draw from this analysis are as follows:
    1. The Chinese governments are lying … I suppose this is the conclusion Austin, many of his western media friends, and perhaps many parents of the student casulties, have come up with;
    2. The school structures are perhaps more solid than many other buildings in the quake zone;
    3. Thanks to the open spaces within the territories of the schools(sports field, play ground, etc);
    Perhaps Austin should do a little bit more invesitation on this by checking if the death rate of the teachers is also proportionally low as suggested by the government data … the teachers were with the students at the time when the quake hit, not the parents, not other people who were outside of the schools.

  • jordancfan

    By; Jordan C. Fan, Prophet of Environment.

    As far as China and all Chinese people are concern, the death of those Chinese students have served a very meaningful purpose that schools will learn from past disastrous experience and improvement will be made that will save tens of millions of lives of children. Those children’s death will be remeber and honoured. Further finger pointing such s those made by foreign journalist will simply make matter worse. You, foreign journalist who took the opportunity to cause troubles just for something to write about should be ashame of yourselves.

  • http://manujarch.wordpress.com/2008/05/05/designing-rcc-brick-buildings-in-india-to-resist-quakes/ Designing earthquake resistant buildings. « Manujarch’s Weblog

    [...] China Releases Student Quake Death Figures (china.blogs.time.com) [...]

  • whatdidyoucallme1

    The following article provides a very good counter-argument to the western perspective.

    Check this article out:

    http://chinablogs.wordpress.com/

    It’s a very interesting article. Worth a read

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