Southern Weekend interview with Sichuan education official Lin Qiang

This interview is with an outspoken education official from Sichuan named Lin Qiang and was featured in a recent issue of Southern Weekend, a newspaper based out of Guangzhou, known (in the past), for some more independent, hard-hitting news and coverage of events.

Lin Qiang had been chosen to be a torch-bearer and was also invited to watch the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, but has forgone these privileges out of a deep sense of shame and remorse for what he believes was the unnecessarily large of loss of life from the earthquake. He has some somewhat harsh words to say about the system and the behavior of officials in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Here’s my rough translation for what it’s worth.

Southern Weekend (SW): To be a torch bearer and also be able to watch the Olympics is a great honor, but you have chosen
forgo this honor, which is quite surprising. What considerations went into your decision?

Lin Qiang (Lin Qiang): It’s mostly because of my mood. Right now, my heart feels very heavy.

SW: Why is that?

LQ: So many schools collapsed and so many innocent children were lost as a result of the earthquake, and I think that anyone with a modicum of conscience would find this hard to accept, and more so for one who is a education official.

SW: So what you meanb is that as an educatoinal official, you believe that you hold a certain responsibility fo rwhat happened?

LQ: Of course, The shcools collapsing is a societal event, so the entire society bears responsibility. Howeever, the educational system bears a greater responsibility. As an educational official, I ought to feel a great sense of guilt.

SW: When did you start feeeling this sense of guilt?

LQ: From the very moment that I began witnessing these tragic events.

SW: Can be a bit more specific about the circumstances?

LQ: I was perhaps one of the first Sichuan education officials to arrive at the epicenter. I received orders on the morning of the 13th and sent a group of disaster relief experts to Beichuan. By the time that we got to the disaster relief control center inside a Beichuan middle school, it was already 5 am on the morning of the 14th. The relief team immediately launched into action, and I couldn’t really do much else, so I took a video recorder and walked around the county town. At that point the roads from the relief center to the county town were not yet cleared, and no motor vehicles could get through, so most of the disaster relief teams were confined to the Beichuan middle school. I wanted to see for myself what was happening in the county town.

SW: What was the most shocking thing that you’ve seen?

LQ: I saw a parent crying. A five story building collapsed, pinning his child down. There were no rescue teams around, and the parent watched the life slipping away from his child, and could do nothing about it. Four hours before I arrived, the child had died right before their parent’s eyes. The parent kept crying and murmuring “that’s my baby, my baby had such good grades in school.”

SW: Were you at all mentally prepared for this kind of situation?

LQ: There is no way you could be prepared for this kind of thing. I felt horrible.

SW: What was your first reaction?

LQ: The first thing I did was to take all the money that I had on me–I was in a hurry and didn’t have that much on me at the time, maybe just a couple thousand yuan–and I took it out and gave it all to him, and he said, no, my child is dead, what would I need money for. The people around us took the money and put it in his pocket. I knew that the money had no meaning for him, but this was the only “relief” that I could offer, at the time, there was nothing else I could do.

SW: In fact, this was just a instinctive attempt at self-redemption.

LQ: Right. It was an attempt at redeeming myself. At the time I felt especially guilty. As a educational official, I didn’t bear directly responsibility for what happened, but still, my conscience made me feel as I’d somehow wronged the child and the parents.

SW: You actually don’t have to be that self-critical, it was a level 8 earthquake, there was nothing much that you could do about that. For example, the Ministry of Education of Sichuan province just released their five main reasons why the buildings collapsed. One was that the earthquake was just much more powerful than they had expected. Secondly, the earthquake unfortunately happened while the kids were at school. Thirdly, the schools have crowded classrooms and corridors. Fourthly, the schools and dormitories are rather old and backwards. Fifthly, the schools were properly earthquake-proofed and therefore flawed from the beginning.

LQ: Yes, of course it was a natural disaster, but natural disasters don’t always lead to human tragedies, and to blame the tragedies on nature is just morally lazy.

SW: So, when you arrived at the scene, were you witnessing a tragedy or a natural disaster?

LQ: For the most part, I think it was a tragedy. It wasn’t as if those students were meant to die, and it’s not as if that school that they were at was meant to collapse. I took a picture of another school, which was just about 7-800 meters away from Beichuan middle school, which didn’t collapse, and in which no one died and only three people were injured.

SW: Why was there such a difference?

LQ: The reason is quite simple. The schools that did not collapse were Project Hope schools created by the Central Academy of Sciences. There was oversight from the donors, thus ensuring the quality of construction. The schools that collapsed were mostly not, when built, subject to that kind of oversight and control. There was no way to guarantee the quality of their construction.

SW: That is to say, it wasn’t purely the natural disaster that killed these people. It was a lack of oversight and a systemic inertia that ended up enlarging the deadly effects of natural disaster.

LQ: Natural and man-made disasters have always “worked hand in hand”. I wasn’t so aware of this point before, when I had thought that the worst that could happen was economic damage and not a huge loss of human life. But having witnessed this tragedy first-hand, to say that it was “extremely brutal” (translators note: hard to translate Chinese idiom here) is not at all inappropriate. This was a real blow to me and really shook me to my soul. From that moment on, I just couldn’t stomach any more denying of responsibility (or pushing it onto others). If, in front of the departed souls of the children and these broken homes, we still adhere to the ‘rules of the game’ where officials protect each other so that we’re all ok–that would just be unconscionable and utterly shameless. At the point we would have lost our humanity, to say nothing of being an educator.

SW: So you decided to forgo your right to be a torch-bearer and watch the Olympics?

LQ: Yes. On a certain level, I’m guilty for what happened and therefore ought to serve penance for it. I ought to kneel in front of the dead children, their families, and this society, instead of being given honorific robes. But I have no other way of redeeming myself, so have decided to forgo my role as torch-bearer instead.

SW: Will your request be approved?

LQ: I still don’t know. But I hope that this small request will be respected. And I know that I am not just forgoing my role, I am also hoping that Mr. Zhang Yimou will be able to understand and feel the mood around the country and the severe blow it has dealt all of us and make the appropriate adjustment to his preparation for the opening ceremonies.

SW: In what regard do you think he should make adjustments?

LQ: I think that it still ought to big, but less flamboyant, more solemn and down to earth, and should somehow express the people’s feelings of compassion and sympathy towards all living beings. I would think under present circumstances, it would be hard to imagine an opening ceremony that didn’t somehow express this. Of course, it’s not just a matter of the opening ceremonies, the entire mood of the Olympics ought to be adjusted. Our pain and our sorrow–but also our strength and perseverance–ought to be the main thrust of the Olympics.

SW: That sounds like a good idea, but how do we implement it?

LQ: Let’s begin with the selection of the torch-bearers. Let’s try to give as many of the chances to be torch-bearers and watch the opening ceremonies to the heroes of the earthquake relief efforts or the families of the victims and the NPC officials from the hard-hit areas, thus expressing the Chinese peoples’ spirit of perseverance and making the passing of the torch into a symbolic transmission of life and spirit.

SW: Your thinking on this has real value. But is this way of thinking representative of the educational system?

LQ: To be honest, it probably doesn’t, it’s more just my personal views.

SW: I’ve heard some people say, in the past people used to always criticize China for this and that, but now they can all shut up, because after this earthquake, the Chinese educational system has had some exceptional achievements, teachers have helped rescue people, and even sacrificed their own lives trying to protect their students; many students were brave as well and tried to rescue their classmates. This heroic actions and deeds prove that the Chinese educational system is in fact successful.

LQ: These opinions are quite common in the administrative system, but that fact points a very big problem with the system. If you look at it from another, more human perspective, you would reach the opposite conclusion. Sure, those teachers are heroes, and those children are heroes, but heroism doesn’t always require that sacrifice your life.

If we, administrators and officials in the educational system, had done our jobs and not let corruption gain a foothold, then maybe more dorms and schools would be as sturdy as the Project Hope school in Beichuan, and those teachers and children wouldn’t have had to die, and we could avoided all these tragedies. The people that most deserved and needed protection didn’t get it, and instead died unnaturally–this should be a great source of shame for all of us who work in the educational system. We ought to reflect, we ought to feel a deep sense of remorse, and not use these heroes or the tragedy itself to slough off our own responsibilities and make ourselves look good.

SW: I notice that you tend to emphasize the words “bei min” (pity, sympathy, compassion)

LQ: The reason why I do that is because that’s what the educational system lacks the most.

SW: What specific instances of this are there?

LQ: As of now, we still have not yet actively attempted a systemic analysis of why our buildings collapsed or any serious inquest (including the collecting of evidence) into responsibilities of what happened. Furthermore, we haven’t even offered a formal apology to the families of the deceased–all of these feelings of responsibility and measures designed to protect human life must not concern us too much–these are specific instances.

The parents who lost their children in the earthquake have tears in their eyes and yet are constantly searching through the rubble to construction materials that can serve as evidence for future investigations. As an educator, and as a civil servant, we ought to feel a great sense of shame and remorse and yet be grateful for their actions. We ought to respect them, and we ought to support them. However, not many people in the educational system are willing to think like that, and even less people are willing to do that. Of course, everyone is very busy, trying to arrange the university examinations for people in the affected areas, finding and rewarding model workers among those involved in disaster relief, gathering statistics and date on the damage, and planning the eventual reconstruction. But no matter what, you cannot deny that the departed souls of the children, their parents, and this entire society–demand an explanation. If a tragedy of this scale cannot occasion any reflection or explanation on our part, and if we always put our own reputations and futures ahead of the lives of children, then how can we ever really lift our spirits or improve the system? How can we ever guarantee that tragedy will never strike again?