Chinese Parents Call Off Quake Memorial After Official Warning

By Edward Wong | The New York Times
June 13, 2008

Parents who lost children in a particularly horrific school collapse during the May 12 earthquake in Sichuan Province scrapped their plan for a one-month mourning ceremony on Thursday after local officials warned them not to go through with it, two of the parents said.

In telephone interviews, the two parents said the group's members were told not to contact one another and not to stay in the town of Juyuan, the site of the collapse of a middle school that left hundreds of children crushed to death.

Officials spoke to some parents on Wednesday night to persuade them to cancel the memorial service, said the two parents, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal by the government.

On Thursday, the government used buses to take different groups of parents to different sites outside town, the two parents said. There, the parents were given food and water.

Officials have offered the parents who lost a child the equivalent of $1,740 on behalf of the central government and $435 on behalf of the local education department, the two parents said. The parents have been told that they will get more than $4,600 from the central government, but that the money will be distributed in stages.

Government officials could not be reached on Thursday evening for comment.

An estimated 10,000 students died in school collapses during the 7.9-magnitude earthquake that ravaged southwest China. In late May, parents from several schools began holding vigorous protests to denounce corruption and to call for investigations into the collapses. The protests spiraled into the biggest political challenge to the government in the aftermath of the earthquake.

So starting last week, local officials and police officers began clamping down on the protests. More than 100 parents who lost children in Juyuan protested in front of the courthouse in the nearby town of Dujiangyan on June 3, only to be surrounded by police officers. Several crying mothers clutching framed portraits of their dead children were hauled off to a neighboring building while journalists were barred from covering the event.

Police officers and soldiers also set up cordons around the most prominent collapsed schools and prevented journalists from approaching.

The night before the June 3 protest, officials in Juyuan persuaded six of seven parent leaders not to attend the rally, one mother said.

Chinese journalists said the central government had ordered Chinese news organizations to stop reporting on the school collapses.

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