China shuts down parents protesting quake

updated 3:03 p.m. ET July 8, 2008

WUFU, China - Angry parents whose children were crushed to death in schools that collapsed in China's mighty earthquake are no longer being allowed to march, wave banners and vent their rage in public.

Officials are now using a variety of tactics — threats, money, promises of justice, police muscle — to intimidate, appease or hush up the grieving mothers and fathers who believe that nearly 7,000 classrooms crumbled so easily because corrupt and incompetent officials didn't build them properly.

Two months after the quake, seething anger runs through the town of Wufu, with its green rice fields and concrete farm houses. Wufu became a hotbed of quake protests after the town's Fuxin No. 2 Primary School caved in, killing 127 students.

"Police from Deyang came to our town and warned us not to gather," said Pi Kaijian, a 43-year-old farmer who wore pointy Italian-style loafers and polyester pants rolled up past his calves as he endured the afternoon heat in the courtyard of his house.

"The police met with our parent leaders and said if we gathered, it would be a criminal act and we'd be arrested," said the farmer, whose 11-year-old son died in the school.

Police warnings
In the weeks after the quake, parents in Wufu vented their rage over buildings they say were shoddily constructed by grabbing pictures of their dead children and marching to the government headquarters in Deyang, the nearest big city.

Such protests were tolerated for a time after the 7.9-magnitude quake, but then came the police warnings to stay off the streets.

After winning global praise for acting like an open society and allowing the parents to protest after the disaster, China is reverting to the tactics of a communist police state ready to crush any dissent.

The Deyang police spokesman, who declined to give his name, doubted Pi's account. "This probably isn't true," he told The Associated Press before declining to answer more questions.

The deputy director of the propaganda office of the Deyang police said he was unaware of the alleged threats. "We police haven't been in touch with those parents. We have allowed them to raise their case," the official, who would only give his surname, Luo, told The Associated Press before hanging up the phone after refusing to say more.

The alleged police threats didn't scare the parents, Pi said. But they decided to cool it after officials promised to wrap up an investigation of the school's collapse before July 15, he said.

"They said we would be satisfied with the probe's results, so we decided to be patient and give them some time. But I seriously doubt we'll be satisfied and we'll continue protesting," he said.

Crews continue to clear rubble
Elsewhere in Sichuan's quake zone, crews were busy clearing away rubble left by the quake that killed nearly 70,000 people and left 5 million homeless. Shops were reopening and street markets were bustling as life began returning to normal. Huge developments of temporary homes were springing up in fields covered in a freshly poured layer of concrete.

As they tried to cope with their losses, some parents seemed to be driven by a deep sense of nihilism, a feeling they could challenge the government because they had nothing more to lose now that their only child was gone. They were poor farmers or workers who obeyed China's one-child policy. Many were too old or impoverished to try to have another child.

Without children, their lives seemed to lack the hopes that made the drudgery of rural Chinese life bearable.

Zhou Lekang, a poor farmer in bare feet caked with dried rice paddy mud, beamed with pride when he talked about how his 16-year-old son wanted to be a diplomat and spent his evenings studying English or classical Chinese literature. The man had just saved up enough money to buy his son a computer when the boy started high school.

But his son was among 270 others who died when the school collapsed in the town of Juyuan, about a 45-minute drive from the provincial capital, Chengdu.

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