HANWANG, China — Local governments in southwest China’s quake-ravaged Sichuan province have begun a coordinated campaign to buy the silence of angry parents whose children died during the earthquake, according to interviews with more than a dozen parents from four collapsed schools. Officials threaten that they will get nothing if they refuse to sign, the parents say.
Chinese officials had promised a new era of openness in the wake of the quake and in the months before the Olympic Games. But the pressure on parents is one sign that officials are determined to create a facade of public harmony rather than undertake any real inquiry into allegations that malfeasance contributed to the high death toll in the quake.
The officials are so intent on getting parents to comply that in one case, a mayor offered to pay the airfare of a mother who left the province so she could return to sign the contract, the mother said.
Payment amounts vary by school but are roughly the same. Parents in Hanwang said they were being offered the equivalent of $8,800 in cash and a per-parent pension of nearly $5,600. The New York Times
