collapsed’.3 The steel main beams had been considerably smaller than normal, and the school’s prefabricated architectural structure was poorly equipped to deal with earthquakes.
‘[In this type of structure,] the steam beams don’t have connecting beams,’ said Chen. ‘So when an earthquake hits, the connectors between the walls and the beams, the area between the posts and the boards, and the connectors between the boards all get severely damaged. It’d be surprising if such a building didn’t collapse under the force of a strong earthquake.’
Yi Ancheng, the former principal of Juyuan Middle School, revealed that the school’s classrooms had been made from cement and gravel stone dating back to the 1950s. When construction began in 1986, she had applied to the village party secretary for funds to construct a new classroom building, but her school was granted only 10,000 yuan for the project. In the 1990s, when construction projects were put under the management of the education department of the municipal government, which became directly responsible for the projects’ quality control, the department’s engineer simply borrowed the blueprints from another school, Congyi, and changed the name to Juyuan Middle School, in order to save cash. After that, the Juyuan village authorities passed the building job to a local contractor. ‘As the village government only had a budget of 10,000 yuan, 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,’ Yi said.
In 1998, another principal of the school, Lin Mingfu, filed a report on the dangerous condition of the building with the Dujiangyan education department, claiming that it had serious flaws. He was told to use steel wires to secure the part of the roof that was about to collapse. These few wires, as it turned out, were the only things that were holding the building together when the earthquake hit.
Lin Mingfu said that the four-storey classroom building had been constructed to satisfy the national aim of the ‘nine-year compulsory education’ initiatives. He noted, ‘If the higher levels of government had a demand, our local leaders had to promise to carry it out.’ The government’s demand for another building at Juyuan Middle School had to be met, despite the village’s lack of sufficient funds. In this situation, cost-cutting was inevitable. All of the elementary schools that collapsed in Dujiangyan had been built in 1993–94, the middle of the period of ‘nine-year compulsory education’ initiatives.4
I pointed my camera at the rubble and took a number of shots.
‘What are you doing over there?’ said an aggressive male voice behind me. I turned round and saw two police officers. Knowing what this could mean and certainly not wanting to lose my photographs, I pretended that I knew nothing about the site that I was photographing.
‘What is this?’ I asked innocently. They were fooled. Another mindless tourist.
‘It is just a collapsed building. Please leave. There is nothing here for you to tour around,’ one of them said, waving his hand to invite my immediate departure. They also found John with his camera, and asked him to leave the area, too.
We walked on past private houses and shops and realized that all the other buildings in the village had survived the earthquake. They stood strong and intact. The Juyuan Middle School had been the only building hit.
Out of sight of the police officers, I tried to chat with a fruit seller, Mr Zhu, at the edge of the village. Here is what he said:
The surviving students out of the 1,000 at Juyuan Middle School have been moved to study in a school at another village. My neighbour’s niece is among the survivors. The contractor, Juxing Construction, that built the school also built the hospital in Dujiangyan city centre, and as you probably know, that also collapsed. It was no coincidence. But where is the investigation? The authorities dared to ignore our wishes to find out the cause of the tragedy. We all know that the local government helped make this tragedy possible. But you can’t trace the responsibility here, can you? Not if you are resourceless peasants. The company director of Juxing disappeared immediately after the quake. No one can find out where he is. The local government allows few to come into the village, because they don’t want the truth to get out.
Throughout Sichuan, the local authorities have tried to stop international journalists from visiting the collapsed schools and the nearby areas.
In December 2008, the Chongqing Daily News wrote the following report:
A group of migrant workers have travelled thousands of miles on improvised motor tricycles. They all worked in a plastic factory in Dongguan, Guangdong province. Recently, their boss suddenly disappeared, taking all the factory’s money with him. The workers decided to go home without being paid. They found ten discarded motorcycles in the factory and refashioned them into three-wheeled mobile homes … When the riders were stopped by Chongqing traffic police on an expressway yesterday, they had been on the road for ten days.
This happened just after the financial crisis hit the West. Guangdong, in the manufacturing south – the factory of the world – was seeing a significant decline in the number of orders from multinationals, and Chinese investments in US financial markets had shrivelled up. China’s exports had declined by 15.2 percent since 2008; in March 2009 they were 17.1 percent lower, down to $90.45 billion. (During the same period, China’s imports dropped by 43.1 percent. The country’s foreign direct investment also began to decrease from 2008, falling by 5.73 percent in the last month of that year.) With a third of China’s economy based in exports, many Hong Kong–run and local manufacturers were going bankrupt, and when I arrived in Chengdu, half of all toy factories and one third of all shoe factories in China were being shut down in the south. Employers were fleeing as their factories closed down, one after another, all over Guangdong.
But local governments sided with the companies. The Guangdong provincial procurator instructed its officers not to arrest factory employers suspected of ‘white-collar crime’ and in January 2009 Guangdong’s justice department announced ‘Six Nos’, rules that established protections for businesses, in order to ‘help enterprises through the economic crisis and promote enterprise development’: no freezing company assets ‘at random’; no monitoring or closing down company finances ‘at random’; no blocking enterprise communications; no reportage or news coverage that damages enterprises’ reputation; no ‘casual’ arrests of company chiefs; no measures that would have negative impact on enterprises’ production activities. Currently, there is no law in China to punish employers who flee without paying wages. In most cases, migrant workers can do nothing but return home with empty pockets.
By January 2009, an increasing number of Guangdong’s migrant workers were heading home, to Sichuan, Hunan, and Hubei. Despite the official statistics showing the national unemployment rate at 4 percent, the real figure was much higher. The majority of rural migrants are not registered in the cities. In Sichuan province, the unemployment rate was now said to be 4 percent, and 3 percent in Chengdu. These figures did not include migrant workers, either.
In the spring of 2009, I went to Jintang county, two hours south of Chengdu. By then 70,000–80,000 people had returned from Guangdong province, following the continuous layoffs and closure of factories since winter 2008, and the streets felt bleak: There were few residents around, and little trade in the shops. Even fewer rickshaws and unlicensed taxis were parked along the street. Many of the unlicensed cab drivers were migrants who had returned home from Guangdong. I spoke to one of them, Mr Zhong, as he scouted for potential customers on the main street.
Mr Zhong, in a strong Sichuanese accent, told me that he worked as a security guard in a company called Yin Yu Lights, the largest manufacturing firm in Heshan city, in the Gonghe township in Guangzhou. The company is part of the Hong Kong Zhen Ming Li Group, with a head office based in Hong Kong, and it employs over 10,000 people from all over China, including a large number from
