Voices
Combating corruption online
By Linda Gibson (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-03-09 10:16
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 A boy hangs around outside a school for migrant workers' children in Cuigezhuang, Chaoyang district. The school has been vacated by order of Cuigezhuang village committee. Wang Jing / China Daily |
Whenever I did something bad as a child, if it was found out I could be sure that I would be admonished and punished.
This is an admonishment and wagging finger to the Cuigezhuang village committee, which has also done something wrong.
Committee officials decided to raze the kindergartens and primary schools serving more than 14,000 children, most of them from migrant families, so they can profit from real estate development projects.
After the president of one of the primary schools resisted by refusing to vacate the building, he was "persuaded" to leave - thugs broke in twice, destroying furniture, student records and teaching materials.
By Sunday Feb 28, up to seven kindergartens and five primary schools had been cleared. Another 10 are on the list.
Supposedly, the children will be transferred to other schools. But that could be unlikely, as village officials announced before the Spring Festival that every non-residential building in the town was to be removed. And public schools are too crowded to take more migrant children.
In fact, more than 30 schools for migrant workers' children in Daxing, Haidian and Chaoyang districts are slated for demolition, according to the Beijing News.
Sixth grader Li Jie told a China Daily reporter that he had already been transferred to different schools four times in the past six years.
At the same time as schools are being destroyed, forced demolitions are also driving artists out of their homes and studios on the outskirts of Beijing.
Small businesses and individual homeowners have also been targeted, typically at short notice, with no appeal and inadequate compensation.
There's a pattern here. Some officials and developers eager to get their hands on the money to be made from real estate, target people who are unable to fight back and protect themselves.
Even people who don't care whether migrant workers' children go to school should be angry about this - and worried - because there's no telling who's next.
The National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) meet this month in Beijing, and corruption should be at the top of their agenda.
Bribery related to construction projects and real estate development is one of the most prevalent forms of corruption. For the third consecutive year, people surveyed online ranked corruption as the issue that worries them the most.
Mass protests, often initiated by netizens, have resulted in investigations and convictions.
Individually, nobody can successfully resist greedy officials. But when thousands of individuals, or tens of thousands start wagging their fingers online at those who benefit from corruption, higher-ups have to take notice.
Anybody who says they worry about official corruption can do something useful about it right now.
Go to the websites of the NPC and the CPPCC. Send an e-mail, something along the lines of, "I want forced demolitions stopped immediately and investigations of all construction projects and real estate deals that resulted in forced demolitions."
If these injustices aren't stopped, then shame on us all.
