This is heart cracking. It is impossible to look into the face of these moms. Today there came an opportunity my 18 year-old son to travel to Sichuan province this summer to help with the clean-up, and I hope we can organize the visa work and the airfare. China and the United States share much, and much more to learn. One thing to share is that transparency and accountability are the bedrock of a stable state. And only liberty can provide the muscle.
China Restricts Protests
And Media in Quake Zone
Police Break Up Rally
On Children's Deaths;
New Rules Over Access
By MEI FONG
June 3, 2008 2:00 p.m.
MIANZHU, China -- Chinese officials clamped down on protests by parents angry over the deaths of their children in last month's earthquake, with police breaking up at least one demonstration and attempting to prevent media access to other quake-stricken towns Tuesday.
Associated Press
Dozens of parents who lost children to the May 12 quake protested outside the court house in Dujiangyan, China Tuesday.
In some cases, local officials cited what they said were newly imposed media regulations, although they gave scant and sometimes contradictory information on these new rules. The new measures appear to scale back some of the media freedoms granted after the May 12 earthquake, which so far has killed almost 70,000 people.
In the hard-hit town of Dujiangyan, police hauled away more than 100 parents of children killed in a school during the quake who were protesting in front of a courthouse, the Associated Press reported. An AP reporter and two photographers, as well as two Japanese reporters, were detained briefly when as they tried to observe the event, the report said.
Several eyewitnesses said the parents wanted to go into the courthouse and file a lawsuit but they were blocked by hundreds of police. "The government has been talking about the investigation for such a long time. We still have no answers," said Ms. Wang, who lost her niece at Juyuan Middle School and declined to give her full name. She accompanied the girl's mother to the court in Dujiangyan Tuesday morning, where she says there were about 200 to 300 parents, each holding pictures of their lost children.
The clamor of grieving parents -- who say poor construction led to their children's deaths -- has emerged as a sensitive issue for Chinese authorities. Just two months before the media glare surrounding the Beijing Olympics, they are juggling the demands of disaster-relief work with the need to manage growing pockets of unrest among parents, many who lost their only child when schools collapsed in the quake.
Columbia University Prof. Xiaobo Lu, who studies Chinese politics, said it was just a matter of time before the Chinese government pulled back from its relatively liberal attitude toward news coverage of the Sichuan quake. "In the back of the authorities' mind, there is a fear of looming unrest. Their approach is to address the problem in a way they can control," said Prof. Lu.
The restrictions appeared tightest in areas where collapsed schools killed hundreds of students, places that have become the scenes of increasing protests by parents over the past week.
A Wall Street Journal reporter present during a peaceful protest in Hanwang town on Tuesday was questioned repeatedly by police there, with one officer attempting to stop the reporter from taking photos. Later on, propaganda officials tailed the reporter by car out of town and pulled the reporter over for questioning.
On the same day, police also blocked roads to Wufu, another town with a school that collapsed while surrounding buildings survived, and prevented several Chinese reporters from entering the town, according to people present.
The Chinese government is investigating the causes of collapse at many of these schools, but parents are chafing at the delay in results, which could take several more weeks.
The anger appears to be fueled, in part, by the disclosure that family-planning officials were offering to give annual sums of $144 per parent as partial compensation for their loss, which many felt was too low.
When the magnitude-7.9 quake occurred on May 12, hundreds of foreign and domestic news organizations swarmed to Sichuan to cover the disaster, initially with few or no restrictions.
Now, the new rules appear to limit access to the areas where parents have been protesting. Yan Hua, an official from the Mianzhu propaganda department, told a reporter that as of Monday, journalists were required to obtain permission from the local-government office in Deyang and media passes issued by the Foreign Affairs Office of the Sichuan Provincial People's Government were no longer valid.
A spokeswoman from the Foreign Affairs Office of the Sichuan Provincial People's Government confirmed that the department is issuing new media passes, but she said the passes would cover all Sichuan -- so reporters wouldn't have to seek individual permission from the province's various municipalities.
While the new regulations were put into place Monday, she said, the new passes aren't yet available and further details about how to obtain them would be posted on the Sichuan government's Web site. But a check of the Web site Tuesday evening offered no further information.
Highlighting the often-contradictory information about the new media rules, Qin Gang, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told reporters in Beijing Tuesday: "I don't know of any new regulations there. The principle remains unchanged for transparency and openness."
Meanwhile, the parent protests appear to be escalating. On Tuesday, parents from Dongzhi school protested in Hanwang, outside a subsidiary of Shanghai-listed Dongfang Electric Corp.
The state-owned company is one of China's largest power companies and had built the school before it was transferred to the local government in 2006. Parents clustered outside the factory gates shouting things such as "Your company is rich! Why didn't you build a better school?"
Liu Wenzhong, whose 17-year-old son, Yu Dan, was killed, stood at the gates of the company, crying. A burly policeman patted him on the back and said, "You should calm down. We can solve this, the issue can be solved -- but not this way."
Authorities Delay Draining of Quake Lake
Meanwhile, Xinhua said authorities have delayed for two days a bid to divert water from a huge lake formed when the quake sent landslides tumbling into a river in Beichuan, in northern Sichuan.
Water levels in the lake had been rising steadily and threatened to flood surrounding areas, prompting authorities to evacuate nearly 200,000 people already uprooted by the quake. But Xinhua said with little rain forecast for the next several days, rescue workers were not likely to start draining off the water until Thursday. The work had been expected to start Tuesday.
Workers have already used heavy earth-moving equipment to dig a runoff channel to remove the water. The government is worried the newly-formed lake could burst, sending a wall of water through a valley.
In an indication of how difficult rescue conditions are in parts of Sichuan, there is still no sign of a helicopter that crashed nearly three days ago while ferrying survivors. Thousands of soldiers have been combing remote mountains in search of the military helicopter.
The Russian-designed Mi-171 transport was carrying 19 people, 14 of them people injured in the quake, when it flew into fog and turbulence and crashed Saturday near the epicenter of the temblor in the town of Wenchuan, state media reported.
--The Associated Press contributed to this article.
Write to Mei Fong at mei.fong@wsj.com
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