Word: hu
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...built out of tofu," says Hu Yuefu, 44, of the school building that collapsed in the magnitude 7.9 quake and killed his 15-year-old daughter Huishan. He believes local government officials and the building contractors are responsible. As he speaks, a crowd gathers around to listen and offer their support. "I hope there is an investigation," Hu says. "Otherwise, there are a thousand parents who would beat them to death...
...Some parents in Sichuan argue that the problem goes beyond shortchanging schools. They allege that local officials are responsible for allowing unsafe buildings to go ahead. "The government and the construction companies collude with each other," says Hu, whose daughter's corpse was pulled out from the Juyuan Middle School two hours after it collapsed on Monday. "It's in their interest to build them poorly...
...That's why President Hu Jintao called for an "all-out" response, and why Premier Wen Jiabao was on an airplane to the earthquake zone even before the aftershocks subsided. On the night of May 12, millions of Chinese watching state-owned television stations were repeatedly shown video footage of Wen rallying rescue forces, issuing orders in a driving rain, poring over maps and venturing into the ruins to assure victims still trapped that they should "hold on a little longer" as help was on the way. By the second day of the crisis, an exhausted Wen sometimes appeared...
...problems did not exist. In 2003, authorities covered up the full extent of the deadly SARS outbreak for weeks, a decision that critics said delayed efforts to fight the virus and may have increased the number of deaths. But lessons have been learned from that episode, which came during Hu's first months in office. The earthquake received blanket coverage by the Chinese media, with TV stations broadcasting almost hourly updates of the number of fatalities along with sometimes gruesome video of rescue operations, including scenes of grieving parents hovering near bloody corpses of children killed when schools collapsed...
President Hu Jintao called for an "all-out" response, and the government rallied some 100,000 relief workers, including military, police and medical teams. Premier Wen Jiabao flew to Sichuan, and state-owned television showed him rallying rescue forces, even venturing into the ruins to urge victims still trapped in the rubble to "hold on a little longer." It's hard to know how much the tragedy will change China, but this much is certain: with the media allowed unprecedented freedom to report the humanitarian effort, the Chinese will be able to judge their leaders' performance as never before...