Quake-Bereft Chinese Sow New Baby Boom

A year after disaster, Ai Weiwei leads efforts to account for the dead

(NEWSER) - China today marked one year since the Sichuan earthquake that left nearly 90,000 people dead or missing. But the government has still not published results of an investigation, and parents whose children died in shoddily constructed schools have faced police intimidation. The parents have found an unlikely advocate, Time reports: Ai Weiwei, a star artist who has relentlessly pressed for information. More»

(NEWSER) - The devastation is still raw from the earthquake that snuffed out thousands of young lives in rural China a year ago, reports the Los Angeles Times, but many grieving parents have found new hope in the form of another baby. More than 10% of new mothers in one Sichuan Province hospital had lost children in the quake—a grief that was only intensified by China's single-child policy. More»

But government warns parents to silence criticism

(NEWSER) - A Chinese official admitted today that shoddy construction led to the collapse of some schools during last May’s earthquake, which killed thousands of children. “The structures were not necessarily reasonable and the materials were not necessarily strong enough,” the chairman of the government’s quake probe conceded, reports the BBC. More»

Tan Zuoren sentenced to 5 years on subversion charges

(NEWSER) - A Chinese activist who blamed shoddy construction for the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake has been sentenced to 5 years in jail for subversion. Tan Zuoren was charged for a document he wrote on the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, but supporters believe he was prosecuted because of his efforts to draw attention to poorly built schools, the Wall Street Journal reports. More»

Police stake out whistleblower's studio, shut down blog

(NEWSER) - The Chinese artist who has made investigating the deaths of children in the Sichuan earthquake a personal crusade is facing a government crackdown, reports the CBC. Ai Weiwei's widely read blog has been deleted, and plainclothes police officers are staking out his studio in Beijing. Ai has relaunched his blog on an American server but said, "I don't know how long it will last before it is blocked." More»