China Admits Cutting Corners Led To Student Deaths

I wonder if Sen. Barack Obama is still willing to stand behind his statement that the US should emulate the Chinese infrastructure model.

The school collapses have become the most politically sensitive issue to emerge in the aftermath of the earthquake. This summer, grieving parents held street protests to challenge local governments and demand that officials conduct proper investigations into construction quality. Local officials felt so threatened by the parents that they ordered riot police to break up protests — officers even dragged away crying mothers — and offered the parents compensation money in exchange for them dropping their demands.

Many schools in the earthquake zone crumbled while buildings around them remained standing. According to some estimates, as many as 7,000 classrooms collapsed and up to 10,000 students may have died. In all, nearly 70,000 people died in the quake and 18,000 are considered missing; officials now say those still missing are almost certainly dead. The quake was the deadliest natural disaster in China in more than three decades.

At a news conference in Beijing on Thursday, Mr. Ma said more than 1,000 schools suffered from at least one of two major problems: they were built on the fault line and collapsed like many other buildings around them, or they were poorly built.

This second problem “is the construction quality of the building itself — its structure is not completely sound or its materials are not very strong, which is possible,” Mr. Ma said. “Recently, we’ve built school buildings relatively fast, so some construction problems might exist.”

That's on top of the fact that the Chinese were diverting water from one area of China to provide potable water for Beijing because of severe shortages and widespread pollution of water sources.