The extraordinary expertise of an "Olympic Host" : Silencing the Mothers who have lost their only
child -- Voice seeking answers for parents about school collapse in China is silenced

International Herald Tribune
Voice seeking answers for parents about school collapse in China is silenced
By Jake Hooker
Friday, July 11, 2008

BEIJING: Three weeks after the earthquake in Sichuan Province, five bereaved fathers whose children
died in collapsed schools sought help from a local human rights activist named Huang Qi.

The fathers visited Huang at the Tianwang Human Rights Center, an informal advocacy organization in
the provincial capital of Chengdu, where he worked and lived. They told him how the four-story
Dongqi Middle School had crumbled in an instant, burying their children alive.

Huang soon posted an article on his center's Web site, 64tianwang.com, describing their demands.
They wanted compensation, an investigation into the schools' construction and for those responsible
for the building's collapse to be held accountable if there indeed was negligence.

A week later, plainclothes officers intercepted Huang on the street outside his home and stuffed him
into a car. The police have informed his wife and mother that they are holding him on suspicion of
illegally possessing state secrets.

"They've been using this method for a long time," said Zhang Jianping, a contributor to the Web site
who has known Huang since 2005. Nobody knows the grounds for his arrest, but many people have the
same idea. Zhang said, "It may be because the schools collapsed, and so many children died."

In the days after the earthquake, the authorities allowed reporters and volunteers to travel freely
in the disaster zone. Some commentators even saw the dawning of a Chinese glasnost. In an interview
with National Public Radio that aired in May, Huang said he believed that the human rights situation
in China had greatly improved.

"He actually thought things were heading in the right direction," said John Kamm, who is pressing
for Huang's release and is the executive director of the Dui Hua Foundation, which has helped free
prominent Chinese political prisoners. "That's one of the tragedies of his detention."

A volunteer at the Tianwang center, Pu Fei, 27, was detained minutes after Huang. He said that the
officers who interrogated him demanded that he hand over the password needed to post information on
their Web site. They also wanted to know whom Huang had met and where he had gone in the disaster
zone. Pu was detained in a hotel for two weeks and then released.

Pu and other volunteers said the authorities might have singled out Huang because he disseminated
information about parents whose children had died in collapsed schools a group whose protests
began to snowball into something like a movement in early June.

There is no official figure on how many children died in schools during the powerful May 12
earthquake. Seven thousand schoolrooms collapsed, according to Chinese government estimates.
Thousands of students may have died, if not more, leaving behind bereft parents looking for answers.

During the brief period of openness in late May and early June, parents marched with photos of their
children and gathered at the wreckage of schools to hold memorial services. They held sit-ins
outside government buildings. In one town, the top Communist Party leader got down on his knees and

begged parents to stop a march, but they refused.

But with the Olympic Games in Beijing approaching, the issue increasingly looked like a time bomb
for the authorities, and they scurried to defuse it. The Propaganda Department banned coverage of
destroyed schools in the domestic press. Paramilitary police officers blocked foreign reporters from
demonstrations. Activists who tried to gather and publish information about school construction were
detained.

On June 2, The Sichuan Economic Daily published an article saying that substandard construction
methods contributed to the deaths of 82 students at a middle school in Yinghua Township. Afterward,
an editor at the paper said, two reporters and an editor who worked on that article were fired.

Two fathers of children killed in schools said in separate interviews that officials had told them
public gatherings and petitioning the government were no longer permitted. Zeng Hongling, a local
crusader who wrote three articles lashing out at the government's earthquake response, was detained
on suspicion of inciting subversion, according to the Information Center for Human Rights and
Democracy, a group based in Hong Kong.

Huang, who was detained on June 10, has not yet been formally charged with any crime. But if he is
convicted on the murky charge of holding state secrets, it will not be his first time being jailed
for a political crime.

In 1998, he and his wife, Zeng Li, founded the Tianwang Center for Missing Persons, an organization
that focused on cases of human trafficking. Its name later changed to Tianwang Human Rights Center
as its mission expanded.

In 1999, she and Huang helped the police rescue seven girls who had been sold into prostitution. The
case gained the Tianwang center favorable attention in the state-run news media.

Huang also exposed a racket through which thousands of migrant workers sent to work on ocean-going
fishing boats had been forced to pay for mandatory appendectomies at a government-run clinic. He

published an article on his Web site. His wife said that Huang's report stepped on the toes of
high-ranking local officials who profited from the arrangement.

Huang continued to post articles about other taboo topics.

In March 2000, he wrote about a practitioner of the banned spiritual group Falun Gong who was beaten
to death in police custody. The Chengdu police shut down his Web site days later, so Huang moved its
content to a server in the United States.

Later that year, he posted an account of a 15-year-old boy who was detained in Chengdu during the
1989 pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing. The boy later died in police custody.

The police arrested Huang shortly thereafter. He was held for an extended period without trial, and
he was ultimately convicted on charges of inciting subversion and was sentenced to five years in
prison. Zeng, who has lived apart from Huang since 2006, said the experience changed him.

"When he came out, you could see scars on his head," she said. "He became irritable, and he would
forget things."

To the surprise of some friends, Huang took up where he had left off when he got out of prison. He
revived his dormant Web site, found citizen journalists throughout China to contribute articles and
resumed his role as an activist. "He started helping petitioners , people who had been harmed,
people whose homes has been demolished, people whose rights had been abused," Zeng said.

State security agents watched him, Zeng said, but they did not interfere with his work.

Then the earthquake hit, and foreign reporters flooded the devastated towns. Huang knew the terrain
of Sichuan well and did his best to help. He accepted interviews with the foreign press. He and his
volunteers rented a truck and handed out bottled water, instant noodles and crackers to refugees. In
June, he helped reporters from a British television channel contact parents whose children had been
killed in schools destroyed by the earthquake. And he began acting as a clearinghouse of information
for reporters.

Huang kept in touch with the five fathers whose children had died at Dongqi Middle School. They
joined a group of experts to investigate the wreckage for clues as to why the building crumbled.
Huang posted a short article on his Web site saying that, according to the experts, the school was
structurally unsafe.

It was one of his last postings before his detention. Huang's lawyers and family said that the
Chengdu police have denied their requests to meet with him on the grounds that his case involves
state secrets. Officers with the Wuhou District Public Security Bureau declined to comment, saying
they were not authorized to speak with the media.

A conviction for the crime of possessing state secrets can carry up to three years in prison.

It is unclear whether the pressure to arrest him came from central authorities in Beijing or from
local officials, who regarded his criticism of the collapsed schools as threatening. Pu said that
some of the officers who interrogated him spoke with a northern Beijing accent, which is unusual in
Sichuan, an area with a strong dialect.

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