According to Agence France-Presse, the Chinese government says, “almost 7,000 schools were destroyed and more than 11,000 pupils and their teachers were killed” when the earthquake measuring 8.0 on the Richter scale struck. The “fragility of schools that crumpled into bloody piles has aroused widespread claims that corruption had fatally compromised building strength,” reports Reuters. On 27 May, a government news agency, Xinhua, reported that two fresh aftershocks caused more than 420,000 houses to collapse.

The Financial Times (FT) reports that “the quality of much of China's infrastructure is open to question amid an unparalleled national building boom; while the nation boasts rich engineering expertise, corruption is widespread and construction standards often loosely applied”.

Susan Tubbesing, head of the California-based Earthquake Engineering Research Institute told AP that: "China has been taking earthquake safety very seriously in the past 10 to 20 years...From what I understand, the codes China has adopted in the past 20 years have been good, solid, seismic codes."

However, the same article quotes Ren Bing, an architectural designer at the Hong Kong-based China Construction International, who believes “anti-earthquake standards are not as strict in places like Sichuan as in Shanghai.” Bing claims that it is because “profit margins are thinner on smaller projects in less prosperous places” that developers have been encouraged to cut corners (AP).

In response to the claims, the government said “it would investigate why so many school buildings had collapsed during the earthquake and would punish anyone found responsible for poor construction standards,” writes the FT.

As for relief efforts: “The calamity has prompted a huge outpouring of public sympathy both at home and abroad, with 13.9 billion yuan [US $2 billion, €1.3 billion] raised to date,” writes Reuters. “But with corruption a big problem in China, officials were keen to stress they would keep a close watch on the money to see none of it is misused.”