By Fu Jing in Deyang, Chen Jia in Beichuan, Zhang Haizhou in Mianyang, and Hu Yinan in Beijing

Over-speeding reconstruction and wrongdoings in bidding projects may cause quality issues in Sichuan’s colossal reconstruction project, local officials, developers and residents have warned.

At the end of 2008, the central government said it aims to finish most of the reconstruction work in two years, instead of the originally planned three years, hoping that it would fuel China in cushioning the impact of the global financial crisis.

“Since the central government made that decision, the provincial and local governments have competed to race against time. But I personally believe fast is not always good,” Zhu Ge, an official from Sichuan’s Deyang city, said.

“Some (governments) will ignore construction quality if we hasten to run ahead of the schedule,” he said.

Deyang’s Mianzhu and Shifang are among the 18 most severely hit county-level cities. Hundreds of school, hospital, road and real estate projects have already been implemented across the region.

How fast the officials could push forward the schedule and how socially stable socially a locality is, according to Zhu, are the two most important criteria in assessing the officials’ performance in the quake zones. For example, many local governments have vowed to finish rebuilding the schools by September. But until now, some are still looking for a perfectly safe site.

Chen Yong, a manager of a road construction company in Deyang, said the central government has set up a good example in matching up pairs between aiding provinces and municipalities and the quake zones when it comes to reconstruction.

“But the problem is that the process of bidding projects is not so fair and transparent,” said Chen, who added that some provinces have allowed only companies under their own jurisdictions to bid for the projects.

And since the companies in these aiding provinces are not allowed to directly implement the reconstruction projects in Sichuan, “they have to sub-contract again and again,” said Chen.

For example, Chen said the road project he is building was obtained after four times of sub-contract. By then, nearly half of the planned budget had already been drizzled away – before road construction actually kicked off.

 “This is quite common in Deyang, and our profit is trivial,” said Chen, who declined to disclose his company’s name. “And this may lead jerry-built buildings and roads.”

He said reconstruction has made Sichuan so large a construction site that it is practically impossible for the central and provincial governments to monitor all the points and process. “I am warning that wrongdoings in bidding projects have already caused corruption, big or small,” Chen said.

Elsewhere in Sichuan, Mu Zhiwen, a teacher whose wife died last year in Beichuan, the most severely hit county in the quake, voiced similar concerns.

“We hope the government not to mention that slogan (finishing reconstruction a year ahead of schedule) again,” the 34-year-old ethnic Qiang said in Beichuan, which reopened yesterday.

Mu lives in the dorm of his rebuilt Huangjiang School with his 3-year-old son, while his parents-in-law still reside in prefabricated houses.

But the oldsters announced that they would much rather stay there longer than to move into an apartment ahead of the original schedule.

“There’re bound to be a lot of problems during reconstruction. We hope the buildings will be in good quality and that they not crumble again (because of shoddy construction),” Ma said.

Beichuan accounted for nearly a quarter of the overall confirmed death toll. Almost 20,000 local residents died or were declared missing after the disaster.

Shandong, its aiding partner, has left most of the monitoring to itself in the more than 100 urban projects the province has kicked off or will soon start, its reconstruction chief Wang Hancheng said.

At the same time, the province will, by the end of the year, pass on 720 million yuan to the Beichuan government in rebuilding rural houses, Wang said. Shandong will send a team of around 50 staff to supervise the project.

Urban reconstruction efforts, involving some 118 projects and 6.2 billion yuan, will be solely Shandong’s business, he said. The province will hand the houses, hospitals, schools and industrial parks to Beichuan once they are completed.

Central China’s Henan province, responsible for the reconstruction of Jiangyou city, has launched a bolder, “key-transferring” project, a Jiangyou officer said.

The idea is that Henan will give all the keys to the houses they have rebuilt when reconstruction work is done. Jiangyou does not have to worry about anything, the officer said.

Apart from the most severely hit regions, cities in the quake zone, which do not have an aid partner, have met other issues. Yang, office chief of a vocational school in Mianyang’s Fucheng district, complained that a large chunk of the promised 54 million yuan for rebuilding parts of the school have not been allocated.

“We have received only 7 million yuan from the central government, which is responsible for 1/3 of the money,” he said. “The rest should come from the city. But we haven’t seen any yet.”

Two buildings of the school need to be rebuilt. Without the government funds, the school has been looking instead for social donations and bank loans to fill in the gap.

The Sichuan government has earlier announced that it is facing an investment shortfall of more than 1.3 trillion yuan (US$199 billion) out of a total of 1.7 trillion yuan that is needed to speed up recovery efforts by 2010.

That means more than 75 percent of the total investment in reconstruction would have to come from non-governmental sources, said provincial governor Jiang Jufeng.

“But I have been told once by a local official that I can build a road just for 20-day usage,” said Chen, referring to his recently obtained road project in Deyang. “The four-km road is just a showcase for the one-year anniversary of the quake and as such, a waste of money.”

The central government will release its first white paper on disaster prevention and reduction on May 12, China’s first national disaster prevention day, according to Xinhua.

The Sichuan earthquake last May 12 left close to 90,000 people dead and missing. Economic losses from the disaster range between 700 billion yuan