The mainland should upgrade the standard of buildings and schools in earthquake-prone areas and better enforce those standards, the UN resident co-ordinator for China, Khalid Malik, said yesterday.
Thousands of children were killed in the May 12 Sichuan earthquake when the schools they were attending collapsed within seconds, while many nearby buildings remained standing. Grieving parents attributed the deaths to shoddy construction caused by corruption and lax regulation.
Speaking after giving a briefing in Hong Kong to local non-governmental organisations, consulates and central government representatives on post-quake reconstruction in Sichuan, Mr Malik said the problem was not only about upgrading standards, but also about 'making the standards work' .
But while the United Nations had tried to bring in experts from around the world to share their experiences on improving building standards with mainland authorities, Mr Malik said the ultimate task of monitoring those standards belonged to local authorities.
'We share our experiences, monitor what we do in our own programmes, and work with local institutions ... [but] monitoring the construction and housing is the responsibility of the local authorities,' he said.
The collapse of so-called 'tofu' schools has remained a sensitive topic on the mainland, even though a state-commissioned expert committee on the quake concluded this month that substandard construction materials and the bad design of school buildings were partly to blame for the heavy death toll.
The exact figure of dead students, however, has never been disclosed by the authorities.
