The Washington Post reports:

The same question is being asked all over Sichuan, as residents have started to notice that, on street after street, schools collapsed while most government buildings did not. In Mianzhu county, a quarter of the 43 primary and secondary schools caved in, leaving more than 1,000 students dead, while the gleaming government complex remained fully operational and is now a staging area for emergency rescue and cleanup operations.

In total, nearly 7,000 schools have been reported destroyed in Sichuan by the quake; that figure could rise as reconstruction crews reach the hardest-hit areas.

China's leaders have launched an investigation into why so many schools collapsed. Jiang Weixin, the minister of housing and urban-rural construction, said this week that authorities "cannot rule out the possibility that there may have been shoddy work and inferior materials during the construction" of some school buildings.

On Thursday, Mianzhu county announced that it would form a special committee to investigate the construction of the school in Fuxin. The principal, Wang Weiyong, asked parents to be patient and wait for experts to assess what happened here. But Liu Bo, a deputy director of the Mianzhu Education Bureau, said in an interview that he had already gone through the documentation regarding the school's annual inspections and that he believed it was perfectly safe.

"What happened isn't the result of a dangerous building," Liu said. "This tragedy is the result of a natural disaster."

To read more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/22/AR2008052204306.html?wpisrc=newsletter