China Releases Student Quake Death Figures

We must applaud the Chinese government for such speedy of these numbers. Ai Weiwei, after months of efforts, is still not able to supply a final figure. This shows that the Chinese government's effort is so much more effective and efficient. Ai Weiwei is certainly no Chinese government.

And the Chinese government has also declared that there was no quality problems with those collapsed buildings. This shows the tremendous advance in structural engineering in China. The Chinese government official news media has show people able to break up concrete with their bare hands to show the lack of structural strength of these concrete. Since this is no quality problem, that must be the norm in China. The structural engineering skill to use such concrete in a multistory building and not causing quality problem must be exceptional and complicated. The other possibility, that the government media created such lies to confuse the people, is, of course, unthinkable.

[...] students made up 16 percent of Sichuan's population as of 2007, according to official estimates cited by Time [...]

Head counting has never been an easy thing in a country with a population of over a billion.
While the official figure may not be trustworthy, I doubt the denefits of launching a so-called open inquiry to hold the government accountable on how they did the caculation.
Such open inquiry takes time and requires tremendous resources, as we've seen in numerous examples in the rich, much open and less populated West.
The question then is where do you want this time and these resources to be used? Do you want to waste them in the challenging of the corrupted officials or developers who may have already died in the quake? Or do you want to use them to build new and more solid structures?

Justice may have already been done anyways why keep searching for it?

Mr. Ai has got a lot of publicity these days ... his image and voices are everywhere ... BBC, ABC, whateverBC ... including Austin's blog.
Perhaps all of these so-called couveries are from the same source?

Austin's analysis of the disproportional thing is interesting.
Assuming Austin's source of information is accountable, and assuming Austin's math is as good as many Chinese, the conclusions that we can potentially draw from this analysis are as follows:
1. The Chinese governments are lying ... I suppose this is the conclusion Austin, many of his western media friends, and perhaps many parents of the student casulties, have come up with;
2. The school structures are perhaps more solid than many other buildings in the quake zone;
3. Thanks to the open spaces within the territories of the schools(sports field, play ground, etc);
Perhaps Austin should do a little bit more invesitation on this by checking if the death rate of the teachers is also proportionally low as suggested by the government data ... the teachers were with the students at the time when the quake hit, not the parents, not other people who were outside of the schools.

By; Jordan C. Fan, Prophet of Environment.

As far as China and all Chinese people are concern, the death of those Chinese students have served a very meaningful purpose that schools will learn from past disastrous experience and improvement will be made that will save tens of millions of lives of children. Those children's death will be remeber and honoured. Further finger pointing such s those made by foreign journalist will simply make matter worse. You, foreign journalist who took the opportunity to cause troubles just for something to write about should be ashame of yourselves.

[...] China Releases Student Quake Death Figures (china.blogs.time.com) [...]

The following article provides a very good counter-argument to the western perspective.

Check this article out:

http://chinablogs.wordpress.com/

It's a very interesting article. Worth a read