Chandler Thomas
Soc 202 TR 12:30
11/23/2009
6:42pm
Blog #14
An earthquake that devastated Chinese school buildings took the lives of a number of children who were within the buildings at the time of the catastrophic event. This has brought about the issue of standard school construction and lack of quality school construction. This issue was brought to public light by parents of the dead school children and a rights activist named Huang Qi, 46. He helped and supported these parents during their grieving, and assisted them in pressing their grievances against their local governments. The high toll from this particular natural disaster is being partly blamed on the so-called standard school construction. Out of the 90,000 deaths 5,335 were school children. In an attempt suppress the vestige of dissent towards the shoddy school construction, Chinese officials have given Qi a 3-year jail term convicting him of illegal possession of state secrets; which is commonly used to punish people who defy the government and authorities. The public is viewing this arrest as an outrage, understandably. More than a billion dollars has been allocated to reinforce the existing schools by the central government. He was released and then re-arrested for again acting on the demands of parents who lost children.
This is ridiculous. This country's building codes killed these children because they weren't earthquake safe. This man, activist or not, supported and helped the parents get redemption for the loss of their children due to this situation. So of course the government is going to arrest and silence him immediately. They attempted to fix the situation but don't want to deal with the grieving parents, that's not right.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/24/world/asia/24quake.html?ref=world
1 comment:
This is so upsetting but very common in China. When someone speaks out against authority, especially the government, there are often unfair consequences. I feel so bad for the parents of these children, and I hope that something is done so that this never happens again.
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