Southern Weekend investigative report on the Juyuan Middle School

The Juyuan Middle School was one of the “worst” tragedies of the Wenchuan earthquake: the entirely school collapsed and took the lives of the hundreds of people that were inside it. Recent media attention in China has been focused on why certain buildings managed to stay upright while others completely collapsed. Shoddy construction, lack of transparency and oversight, corruption, “quotas” from above that had to be met–this report from Southern Weekend lays out many of the facts and the background and shows, at least in my mind, that so much of the problem is systemic. This means that while certain heads may roll and justice may be meted out in some kind of quasi-rational fashion, the thornier issues is how you “pull out the weeds” in the system. It is perhaps this natural disaster which will, more than anything else, throw light on the true “price of progress” of these last thirty years of economic development. Here’s my rough translation of the SW piece, with a lot of muffed up proper names and government bodies, but hopefully of some use to someone out there.

*The original link is the following, and includes links to many more Wenchuan earthquake stories, interviews, and features*

[Mourning for a School]–Ministry of Housing and Urban Redevelopment confirms that collapsed schools were flawed–An investigation into the tragedy of Juyuan Middle School

“The death of so many children ought to make our
our urban planning officials, our archictects, and our structural engineers all reflect deeply.”

Juyuan Middle School’s location, architectural sturcture, consturction prociess, and consturction materials all had problems,” said Chen Baosheng, a Ministry of Construction disaster relief team member and professor at Tong Ji University.

Public opinion of late has focused on the investigatoin into the collapse of Juyuan school, but this has been the first official statement on the matter.

Ju Yuan school has two buildings which collapsed during the May 12 earthquake, causing the deaths of 278 students and teachers and leaving 11 missing. It was here that Wen Jiabao shed tears and bowed three times to pay his respects to the deceased.

However, the buildings around Ju Yuan school did not collapse, suffering damages which made them dangerous to be in but no more. The parents found this hard to accept. “How come the only building to collapse was the school? You can’t blame this on natural disasters,” said Zhao Deqin. Her twin daughters were among those that died in Juyuan school, and this forty-something mother has since turned as frail as an old woman.

In the rubble where the school used to be, brittle blocks of cement were easily broken, and the wires found in plank beams were especially thin. It was hard for the earthquake relief team that found this to contain their anger: “These are just metal wires inside the cement, not steel!”

Ju Yuan school wasn’t the only the school like this–Du Jiang Yan elementary school met a similar fate. The newly built school had half a building collapse during the earthquake, taking with it 239 lives. However, the kindergarten behind the collapsed building was fine and hardly had cracks on the wall. Just on the outside of the school, older buildings constructed in the 1980s were also unscathed, while another elementary school only about 100 meters away suffered minor damage to the walls.

In the rubble of the new school, a Southern Weekend reporter discovered that there was not a single steel beam or wire to be found inside the plank beams.

A similar situation occurred with the Du Jiang Yan Xiang’E middle school. When the earthquake hit, the school collapsed in a very short time, and out of 420 students only about ten managed to escape. Yang Huaqing lost the last of his bloodline: his grandsons Yang Liang, Yang Ke, his nephews Li Pan, Li Yang all died that day. Yang Huaqing also believes that Xiang�E’s shoddy construction was to blame for the tragic loss of life that day.

The schools that collapsed during the earthquake were Beichuan middle school, Mao Bei Vocational middle school, Mao Bei elementary school, JuYuan middle school, Xin Jian elementary school, Xiang’E Bei middle school, Ping Tong Township elementary school, Hong Guang elementary school, Dong Hu elementary school, Mu Yu middle school, Hang Wang township’s Number One middle school and technical school, Hong Bai middle school, Hong Bai elementary school, Mianzhu County Fuxin Number Two elementary school, etc. As of the 14th of this month, the still incomplete statistics from the Ministry of Education state that 6898 educational rooms collapsed (Wenchuan, Beichuan numbers not included). When Southern Weekend asked about new statistics of collapsed buildings and the death toll, we were told that by the Sichuan Province Information Office chairman Hou Xiongfei that they were still tabulating new figures.

In the face of such a tragedy, Ministry of Construction expert Chen Baosheng said, “With so many children dead, the relevant government , planning officials, architects, and structural engineers ought to reflect deeply on this matter.”

As for Ju Yuan middle school, Chen believes that the problems began with the choice of location. The main buildings were north-south and parallel to the faults, which is why they were easily razed by the force of the earthquake.
The same structure, if placed in east-west and therefore perpendicular to the direction of the fault, would have suffered damages, but not collapsed.

Chen also believes that the Ju Yuan plank boards had problems. A quality plank board ought to have a 4mm-diameter thick beam of reinforced steel–this kind of plank board, can be pulled from the bottom or pushed from the top but should, like a rubber band, bend but not break, and therefore help proof the building against earthquakes. However, the planks he’s seen in the wreckage are like “something that someone just hurriedly put through a wire-drawing machine, without considering its capacity, so that when each layers pressed against each other, the thing naturally just collapsed.”

Chen Baosheng also estimates that the main steel beams in the collapsed buildings had a diameter of 1.2 centimeters, which is also much less than the normal number.

Chen explained that Ju Yuan school’s had a synthetic architectural structure, which is poorly equipped to deal with earthquakes. The steam beams don’t have connecting beams. So when an earthquake hits, the connectors between the walls and the beams, the distance between the posts and the boards, and the connectors between the boards all get severely damaged. “It’d be surprising if the building didn’t collapse under the force of a strong earthquake” said Chen.

*Inadequate Educational investment*

“This is the lowest possible way of doing things–just stuff the children into a building and you’re done” said He Rong, head of the Chengdu City Board of Education.

Juyuan Middle school Principal Yi Ancheng remembers when the collapsed buildings were being constructed.

70 year old Yi remembers they started construction in 1986. At the time, the funding for village level elementary schools came from the townships itself; villages in poorer areas could hardly pay the wages for the teachers, much less construct new schools. Only until 2002, did village elementary schools receive funding on the county level.

At the time the classrooms at Ju Yuan were made using cement and gravel-stone from the 1950s, and were already quite dangerous. Yi applied to the then village Party-secretary Ma Rujun for funds to build a new classroom building. The local elementary school received a 10,000+ yuan sum for the construction. “Ma Rujun read my report and thought that a middle school building was more important than an elementary school building, so he took back the 10,000 yuan and gave it to us to construct our building,” Yi recalls.

Yi also filed a report with Li Yunsen, head of the local Board of Education. Dujiangyan city’s board of education had planned to building a three story, twelve-classroom building, with each room occupying 60 square meters. The Board of education would be directly responsible for the quality control on the project. In order to save money, Board of Education engineeer Wang Liangping just borrowed the blueprints from Congyi middle school and changed the name to Ju Yuan middle school. “After completing the paperwork, the invedstors–the Juyuan village government–gave the job to a local contractor surnamed Liu,” said Yi.

At the time the village government only had about 10,000 yuan in funds, “the cost of the construction had to be minimized as much as possible, and the contractors still wanted to squeeze a profit out of it, so you can just imagine what the resulting quality was.”

A later principal of the school, Lin Mingfu, had filed a report regarding the dangerous situation of the building to Dujiangyan education officials in 1998, saying that this building, constructed in 1986, had serious flaws. Officials told Lin to use some steel wires to hold up the part of the roof that was about to collapse rather than add anything to really buttress it. These few wires wrapped together are what held the building together until the day that it collapsed.

Juyuan Middle school also lost a four-story building constructed in 1996. According to Lin Mingfu, this building was built to meet the goals of the “nine-year compulsory education” measures.

One of the goals of the nine-year compulsory education measures was having proper classroom buildings. Li Mingfu recalls: if the higher levels of government had a demand, our leaders had to promise to meet it.” One of those demands was that Juyuan middle school construct another classroom building, so even though the Juyuan government didn’t have enough funds, the construction had to happen nonetheless.

Li Mingfu recalls, the blueprints were designed by the Dujiangyan engineer Wang Liangping. The contractors were Juyuan township, Sanba village branch party secretary Zhu Chaohong. Zhu recalls that when the blueprints were drawn up that the diameter of the main structural posts were only two-third or even just one-third of the normal size. “At the time I asked, aren’t these too thin? Isn’t this going to affect the quality of construction,”

According to Zhu, his price for contracting was 400-500 per square meter. But he is not willing to reveal the entire sum paid for the building, even though this price no doubt put much financial pressure on the township government. Li Mingfu recalls that in order to finance this building, the government went into debt for several years.

This method of going into debt to contractors and credit societies in order to meet the goals of “nine-year compulsory education” measures and cost-cutting construction methods are not at all unusual in the less developed areas of China. Sichuan Province met its “Nine-year” quotas and goals between 1992 and 1996, but even so, as late as last year, Dujiangyan’s government was still issuing work reports that mentioned the problem of debts stemming from their “9-year” projects.

As of the end of 2005, Sichuan Province still had 8.1 billion yuan of debt from “9-year” projects and as of the end of 2007, that number had been reduced to 4 billion.

This is an almost common phenomenon–during the “9-year” period, the funds withheld would sometimes amount to half the cost of the construction. Some local schools, have not, to this very day, received their allotted funds for these projects. Because of the shortage of funds, building contractors would often attempt to get construction materials on credit–and just obtaining it was a matter of great face, but there was no way you could guarantee its quality,” said a building contractor that mostly focused on schools. “This was the lowest level of operation possible–just get the students into some kind of building,” said Chengdu city Board of Education head He Rong. He Rong recalls that “most of the time there weren’t any serious standards, and sometimes the blueprints weren’t even ready, you just got a construction team together and started building.”

After completing the “9-year” projects, Chendu’s Board of Education began to perceive that these buildings were potentially dangerous and in 1997 began a series of “9-year improvement” projects, but nevertheless, the funding situation had not improved, and each day that there wasn’t enough money was another day where the benefits of the project failed to materialize.

After 2002, after county level educational investments were set up, educational building funding became more secure. He Rong believes that because of this, most of the buildings in the affected area built after 2002 did not collapse. Taking Dujiangyan as an example, Dujiangyan elementary schools that collapsed were all built in 1993-4, in the middle of the “9-year” projects period, moreover, Xinjian elementary school, which served large numbers of handicapped, special education, and lower income students and was located on the edge of town, always had its difficulties in getting construction funds.

Xiang’E Middle school’s collapsed building also dates from the “9-year” period. Local residents remember that construction stopped in 1995 because of quality issues, but in 1996, after Dong Jiaxiang became the local Party-Secretary, construction resumed, and many villagers were even asked to donate money to help finance it.

The earthquake leveled these three schools to the ground. Faced with the massive loss of life and damage caused by the earthquake, He Rong, who was filing a report to his superiors, broke down in tears.

Afterwards, He Rong said, “actually, if, at the time, there was 10 million yuan, these buildings might have been constructed the right way, and there wouldn’t have been such a great loss.”

He Rong explained that many of the schools in Sichuan are still using buildings hastily constructed in the “9-year” project years, and that many other underdeveloped provinces face similar issues. He suggested that the government ought to do a thorough countrywide investigation of all the classroom buildings in affected areas constructed during that period.

He also has counterexamples to prove that even with limited funds buildings of inferior construction are not your only choice.

On the internet, the so-called “best Project Hope” school–Beichuan county’s Liuhan Project hope school, which was built at a cost of 400 rmb per square meter, and was built in 1998. The Juyuan middle school buildings contracted out to Zhu Chaohong in 1996, according to Zhu, made for 400-500 yuan per square meter. If you take into account inflation during those two years, Zhu Chaohong’s building costs were clearly higher than that of the Liuhan school.

Then why could a lost-cost school like Liuhan elementary become earthquake-proof?

According to Li Chengpeng, Liuhan school’s construction was strictly monitored and supervised, and if they found too much gravel mixed in, they would request the workers to wash it out. When some parties attempted to block donations and funds, those responsible for the construction were forced to break off relations with them, reclaim the funds, and transfer it to the construction contractors–and with the money in hand, they were able to ensure the quality of the construction.

However, according to a long-term labor contractor, during the “9-year” period of the 1990s, the whole process of contracting out construction work as well the subsequent quality supervision was a mess. Most of the construction work on schools was undertaken by the local board of education or village/township level government departments, so there was no real public bidding for contracts. Many of the county-level education departments had their own construction and architectural teams, who carried out much of the work that needed to be done. “The cadres would use their own guanxi to contract out the work to people they had good relations with, even if those people had never done anything related to construction before!” said this labor contractor. All that had to be done was to find a local company that has a level three or above construction qualifications, and, upon paying a management fee, “borrow” (the term used in the business) these qualifications, find some local experts and some migrant workers, and construction could begin.

“At the time there was basically no such thing as a engineering superviser.” After the old schools were demolished, in the rush to get the children into a new school the construction process was forcibly sped up, and “if there were no obvious problems with the buildings, the government construction departments would be hard-pressed not to let the building pass inspections.”

Zhu Chaohong, who oversaw the construction of Juyuan Middle School’s four story classroom building, denies things happened this way. Zhu told Southern Weekend that the reason he was able to secure this contract was because his company, the Dujiangyan Juxing Construction Company was the only that was qualified to undertake this kind of work. Zhu claims that after 2000, most of the schools in Juyuan township were built by his company. Then why didn’t some of the other Juyuan school buildings collapse? Zhu’s explanation: This means it wasn’t a matter of the construction process, but of the blueprints. After 2000, most of the school buildings in Juyuan Township were designed by Dujiangyan Design Center, and Juyuan Middle School building constructed in 1996 was designed by the head of the Design center, Zhang Zhongshan.”

“I think you should investigate whether or not the blueprints were flawed. If they weren’t, then the problem must be with my construction. If it is indeed my responsibility, then I will definitely bear full legal responsibility for what happened” Zhu said emphatically over the telephone.

The day before, Zhu Chaohong had repeatedly avoided reporters’ phone calls. When a reporter went to the township government to find him, he managed to walk out without the reporter noticing. When the reporter discovered what happened and tried to find him, he had already disappeared.

At the time that the Middle School buildings were constructed, the name of Zhu’s company was Juxing Construction Company,” but according to sources, this company declared bankruptcy in 2000, made some internal changes and then established itself as Juxing Construction and Installation Company”, and continued to work on construction projects. According to these sources, some of the partially-collapsed buildings in the Dujiangyan Hospital were also built by this company. Local residents said that in the past, Zhu Chaohong used to like to drive around town in his Mercedes-Benz, but after the earthquake and the tragedy at Juyuan Middle School, he hasn’t been seen around and his mobile phone is always turned off.

Dujiangyan Board of Education Party-secretary Zhou Zebang told a Southern Weekend reporter “If there were any problems with the construction process, the government will fully investigate it.”

Ministry of Education spokesman Wang Xuming said on May 26, “The Ministry of Education’s position on the collapsed schools is quite clear; we are going to cooperate with all the relevant departments in order to undertake this investigation. There will be no tolerance for any irresponsible cutting of corners, especially the “tofu shreds” (translators note: this refers to a particular method of making construction materials on the cheap) or any form of corruption or bribery. Perpetrators will be severely punished.”