Distraught parents ask why so many of China's classrooms collapsed in the earthquake, writes Clifford Coonanin Mianzhu
A MAN is angrily pointing at what used to be Fuxing No 2 Primary School, a pile of rubble surrounded by a number of administrative buildings only lightly damaged by last week's earthquake.
Sneakers and schoolbags are sticking out of the wreckage or lying around the site. Jiang Xujun puts down the picture of his dead 10-year-old son Yao briefly to rub the mortar around the bricks of the school, and it crumbles easily.
"Look at this! A natural disaster I could understand, I could live with. But this was negligence. It's only dust holding this building together. The offices are still standing, but the school collapsed," said Mr Jiang.
China entered a second day of mourning for the 40,000 victims confirmed dead in last week's earthquake that devastated Sichuan, with the final death toll expected to rise to over 70,000.
Rescuers were still pulling out bodies, and occasional miraculous survivors, such as 31-year-old Ma Yuanjiang, who was saved from the debris of the Yingxiu Bay Hydropower Plant, where he worked as a director, after a 30-hour rescue effort, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
Five million have been left homeless and the whole region is dotted with tent towns as people move into temporary housing.
But one week after the earthquake that caused huge destruction in Sichuan province, sorrow is turning to anger for many of the survivors, particularly the parents of children who died in schools that were poorly constructed.
A harrowing aspect of the diaster has been the number of children who died while at school during the Sichuan earthquake, which took place at 2.28pm, when many students have an afternoon nap. Nearly 7,000 classrooms were destroyed and the government has promised to investigate why so many schools collapsed.
On the way to Wufu village in devastated Mianzhu, a man asks why are we looking for the school? "It's all gone," he says.
The parents of the scores of children aged between 10 and 13 years, who died in Fuxing No 2 Primary School, are gathered around the gate which is surrounded by large floral wreaths.
The names of the children who died in the school are written in blood on a banner beside the pile of rubble. And the parents are furious.
"The construction was bad. My daughter Lanlan's 11th birthday was coming up soon. We found the body on the day of the quake, my mother was injured but we had to rush to the school, all of us, to help the children. We lifted a heavy slab and found the bodies," said Jiang Yiqing.
Beside her stands Ma Ying, mother of 11-year-old Jing Xingbo.
"They were best friends. I found my boy's body the next day at noon. He was a good boy, a very diligent student. These were our only children. We are desperate, what will we do now? Why are these offices still standing?" asks Ms Ma.
Standing in the ruins of the school in front of a makeshift shrine containing the pictures of the lost children and offerings to the dead, where copybooks lie open on pages with red ticks from the children's lessons, we are suddenly surrounded by weeping, angry people carrying more photographs.
"We counted 127 dead children, there were 300 in the school. But no officials have come by to confirm our statistics, or to give their condolences.
"This building is at least 20 years old, and we always knew it was bad, but did they listen to us? It collapsed immediately when the quake struck. Our kids would be alive today if this building had been properly built," said one father, surnamed Xiong.
This is mostly a farming community, and the vast majority of children who died were single children of the one child policy, another source of sorrow.
"Where were the teachers? At 2.28 they were napping in the offices, and they all ran away. The students died immediately. This was a three-storey building and there is no steelwork," said Huang Xinlai, grandfather of Fu Hao.
One of the workers on the site hands him one of Hao's copybooks. It's too much for him, and the elderly man doubles up with grief, crying and wailing.
"I feel a terrible sorrow. We dug for our children for such a long time," said Mr Huang.
Many of the schools were built quickly in tandem with China's economic rise, feeding an insatiable need for education as the rural poor try to educate their children out of poverty. The government spent billions of euro renovating the schools in recent years, but earthquake-proofing was often not high on the list of priorities when building the large schoolrooms.
Mr Xiong said no one has any plans for the future around here.
"We want justice for our children. Our government has building standards for buildings, why did this building collapse?
"Bad construction work here has cost a lot of people's lives. Including my son Xin. They had such terrible injuries when we found them," he said.