Earthquake orphans from Sichuan province play at a gala park in Seoul. They are among twenty children orphaned during the earthquake to visit the South Korean capital as guests of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries.(Photo: (Source: China Daily)

BEIJING, May 19, 2009 -- The Sichuan earthquake has shaken the country's government into taking a zero-tolerance attitude toward physically weak and shoddy school structures nationwide.

As part of a three-year campaign, the State Council, or the Cabinet, has begun a "school building reinforcement project" to ensure all structures housing schools are capable of withstanding natural disasters, the Ministry of Education said on its website yesterday.

The country's local government heads have been warned of harsh consequences following any incident involving unsafe structures in their administrative regions or any mismanagement with regard to the construction of school buildings.

Under the plan, quality supervision teams will travel across China to ensure "each and every primary and secondary school is strong enough and equipped to fight off disasters such as fires, thunder storms, typhoons, earthquakes, floods and landslides".

The central government announced it would set up an 8-billion-yuan ($1.2 billion) special fund to support the project, especially in less developed central and western China, where natural disasters are frequent.

The 8.0-magnitude earthquake in Sichuan on May 12 last year destroyed or damaged 11,687 schools, leaving 5,335 students dead or missing and 546 disabled, according to official figures.

Parents of the quake victims alleged the school buildings were constructed with poor quality material and were not well equipped to handle disaster situations. The State Council recently vowed to ensure all new school buildings are "safe, reliable and built under strict government supervision".

Nearly 228 million students study at about 400,000 primary and secondary schools in China, Yu Weiyue, director of division of school management at basic education department of the education ministry, told China Daily.

"Our work will mainly focus on the schools in the rural areas of central and western China," he said.

In a bid to promote the nine-year compulsory education system in the early 90s, the government went on a school-building spree across the country, but the lack of financial resources led to a number of bad quality structures, especially in the less developed areas.

Though a series of reinforcement and reconstruction projects for rural school buildings have been carried out since 2001, "quite a number of the reconstructed buildings have not matched up to anti-quake standards, the ministry said.

In addition to the 8-billion-yuan fund, the government has asked all provinces to provide more financial support to the project and has invited sponsorship from the society.

A special working group will watch over the implementation of the reinforcement project, and especially keep an eye on the use of funds, the ministry said, adding the whole process will be transparent.

"We need an independent third party to supervise all the post-quake construction and management," activist Ai Weiwei, a professional artist who challenges the official earthquake death toll, told China Daily.