Opinion: In China, local government’s handling of earthquake raises questions
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Aftershocks and rescue attempts continue to make their way through China‘s battered Sichuan region even as the death toll rises from Monday’s 7.9 earthquake, but some inside China are beginning to ask why the country — particularly in its more rural areas — was so ill prepared. Take Melissa Block’s NPR report of a high school that collapsed earlier this week, trapping hundreds of students:
The school, just outside the city of Dujiangyan, was expanded from two stories to four, which may have contributed to its collapse... A man shows a piece of cement from what he says was a pillar. He breaks it in half to show how soft it was — how unable it was to withstand the force of the earthquake. Other residents say the local education bureau knew the school was dangerous and had allocated money for it to be torn down and rebuilt. But locals say instead the building was renovated and given a coat of whitewash.
Residents seem equally outraged at local government’s crisis management. Block explains:
We’re hearing a lot of complaints from people here about local officials. They’re saying the central Chinese government is good, they’re doing a good job, but the local officials, they say, are very bad, they’re corrupt, and they only do things for show — they don’t care about the people.
It makes Francis Fukuyama’s Apr. 29 Op-Ed look practically prophetic.
*Photo: Vincent Yu / Associated Press