A DONATION of 23 school buses to Macedonia has sparked online fury in the wake of a spate of fatal traffic accidents involving children in buses and minivans ("Anger over donation of buses to Macedonia," Shanghai Daily, November 29).

In an accident on November 16, a nine-seater minivan crammed in 64 passengers. Later a head-on collision with a truck led to the death of 19 preschoolers and two adults. Forty-three students were injured in the crash in Zhengning in Gansu Province in the northwest.

Ten days later, in another accident in Dandong, Liaoning Province, 35 primary school students were injured when the bus carrying them rolled over.

In a tragedy in Lingshi, Shanxi Province, on September 26, seven junior middle school students were killed after a minivan crashed into a truck.

On September 9, in Shaoyang, Hunan Province, a small ferry with a capacity of 14 actually took 48 passengers and sank in a river, killing 12 people, including nine students.

On March 16, an overloaded kindergarten van rolled into a pond, killing four and seriously injuring three children.

Last December 27 in Songjiang Township in Hengyang, Hunan Province, a modified tricycle carrying 20 children to school plunged into a creek, killing 14 children.

These bloody accidents are tragic indeed, but to be fair, the ire against the donation to the small Balkan country may be misdirected, because the safe transport of children to schools is not the concern of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

But anyone seeing pictures of the fatal crash in Gansu - the littered shoes and schoolbags, the pools of blood on the makeshift seats - can find it hard to contain their anger, and feel frustrated for being unable to do anything about it.

According to a survey by the Ministry of Education, currently the number of vehicles conveying kindergarten, primary and middle school students totals 285,000, but only 29,000 met relevant safety standards.

Following the recent accidents, Premier Wen Jiabao said on November 27 that he had directed relevant departments to draw up regulations on school bus safety within one month.

Such regulations are easier drawn up than implemented. Experience shows mere regulations never go very far.

On July 1 last year, China published its first compulsory safety and technical regulations for school vehicles.

Regulations prohibit overloading, require safety belts, at least two emergency exits and black boxes.

As we can see, these standards are strictly ornamental.

The Shandong Business News reported recently that "In Jinan [capital of Shandong Province] none of the school buses could meet the standards."

The China News Service website said the same failings are true of school buses for primary school students in Shanxi Province. In recent years the coal-rich province has become known for turning out a huge number of billionaire coal mine owners.

What our schools lack is funding.

Awash in money

Since the government has little inclination to spend on education, public education becomes a private business with low profit margins. To lower the costs, the operators use second-hand, retired motor vehicles, or even tricycles to convey children, and overloading is generally the norm.

This lack of money should be blamed on chronic shortage of education spending.

As early as 1993, the state set the target of increasing its educational spending to 4 percent of national GDP. But in 2008, the spending still fell short of the global average of 3.5 percent. The latest target date is next year.

The Chinese government does not lack money.

China Youth Daily reported recently that last year the government spent 80 billion yuan (US$12.5 billion) to purchase motor vehicles for official use. This accounted for 14 percent of all government procurement costs, and is growing fast, averaging a growth of 10 billion yuan a year.

It was revealed that this February the Financial Department of Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region (a poverty-stricken region bordering Gansu Province) splurged 9 million yuan on 25 Audi A6 units.

While some Western governments are on the brink of bankruptcy for short of money, some Chinese governmental departments are hard put to invent enough excuses to squander a huge amount of money before a deadline.

It has been reported recently that with China's financial year ending on December 31, government officials are trying hard to splurge their spare cash of about 3.5 trillion yuan. Those who fail to spend it will have their budgets for next year cut.

In this "spending frenzy," to inflate the costs, officials sometimes pay several times more than the market price for some e-gadgets.

Restaurants are plying a better-than-usual business, and overseas travel agents are overwhelmed with junket proposals from Chinese officials eager to learn from advanced overseas experience.

In this context, Zheng Yuanjie, a writer of children's books, recently proposed that some official cars be auctioned off to buy school buses.

Naturally our public servants do not show much interest in linking the school bus safety issue with the sensitive topic of lavish spending on official cars as perks.

China has been talking about the official car reform for 18 years, and there is no indication it will stop talking about it any time soon.

The lost lives of 19 pupils on November 16 in Gansu did prompt local Zhengning County officials in Gansu Province to suspend purchase of new cars for public servants next year.

In the current uproar over school bus safety, there has been a lot of praise in the media for US school buses, which are generally believed to be so well constructed that a heavy, military-type Hummer vehicle was badly damaged in a collision while the bus was intact. It is said a student in a American school bus is 13 times safer than sitting in a car driven by the parents.

In the United States, about 26 million primary and middle school students, half the total, go to school in half a million school buses.

But in discussing the school bus safety issue, there should be a clear perception of the Chinese social context.

In the United States, suburban and rural residences were and are often so scattered that they are inaccessible to public transport, while in China people tend to live in densely populated villages or communities.

Why school bus?

At least for kindergarten and primary school students, education used to be provided locally.

That has been changing, as a result of the pervasive decay of education in rural areas.

In a campaign euphemistically called "rural-urban integration," rural educational establishments have been eradicated, forcing pupils, or even toddlers, to travel long distances to schools in towns or counties.

The rising migration to urban areas accelerates the general decay of rural infrastructure.

In the accident last December 27 in Hengyang, Hunan Province, children in one village had to travel to a neighboring village about five kilometers away for schooling, because the local school was eliminated some years ago due to the exodus of peasants to cities as migrants.

Deqing County in Zhejiang Province has been greatly praised recently for being the first in China to provide standard school buses - at a cost. A third grade migrant student needs to pay 1,800 yuan for one semester for tuition, transport and lunches. They are refused enrollment by local schools for not having local hukou (permanent residence certificates).

In Zhengning in Gansu, site of the tragedy on November 16, the government had outsourced the responsibility of providing kindergartens to businessmen.

Without any subsidies, these private operators can only survive by cutting whatever costs possible, for instance, by cramming 64 people into a nine-seater minivan.

After the accident led to the arrest of the kindergarten operator Li Jungang, his wife made an appeal, not for her husband.

"I hope the government will pay more attention to the education of preschool kids by setting up more kindergartens, so that they can be educated near their home and avoid such tragedies in the future."