WE did not notice the cars following us until we drove out of the village onto the dusty track leading to the rice fields. Crawling menacingly in the distance, the cars briefly lost sight of us when we turned a corner but were close enough to catch up again at a moment’s notice.

We had no option but to keep driving. Inside our car, a man I shall call Liu Qiang was explaining why he had texted me and arranged a meeting.

One of hundreds of parents who lost children in schools that collapsed during the Sichuan earthquake in May, he was in a state of deep shock when I met him four days after the quake. Choked with tears and unable to hide his anger, he took me to see his 13-year-old daughter’s freshly dug grave. Before I left, we swapped telephone numbers, and we have kept in contact since.

Ten weeks later we arranged to meet again on a busy street corner, not far from his home, to talk about the Chinese government’s attempts to buy the parents’ silence with spurious offers of free life insurance.

“I don’t want to fall out with the government,” he said firmly. “All I’m asking for is justice for our dead children.”

He had just come from a meeting called by village officials. All the parents who had lost children in the local middle school – more than 100 families were affected – had been asked to attend. He fished out a folded sheet of paper with writing on one side – an application form for basic life insurance handed out at the meeting.

The form asked for details of the dead child and their parents’ ID and mobile phone numbers. It left space at the bottom for the signatures of parents and representatives of the school and a government official. There was no sum of money mentioned; no details of the coverage, to whom it would apply or for how long.

“We were rounded up and ordered to sign the contract if we wanted to collect the government’s gift of free life insurance,” Liu explained. “They also said we would get £5,000 in cash as compensation for our dead children.” Some parents were already signing their forms.

“How do we even know if it is real life insurance?” he said. “If we accept the cash, my wife and I want to use it to take the local government to court over the death of our daughter, but we’re afraid it is not enough to cover the legal fees.

“If we don’t sign the contract, we are afraid we will be left with no children and no money to look after us when we grow old.

“We’re thinking about having another child to safeguard our future. Eventually that child will also have to go to school and we’re afraid if we don’t cooperate with the government now they will cause problems for the child later on.”

Liu’s voice strained as he mentioned the possibility of having a new child so soon after his daughter died. He added quietly that his wife was already 34 and they had little time to decide.

“They’re trying to buy our silence,” he said, his voice cracking. “All the people in our village are poor, but how can the money they are offering make up for the losses we have suffered?”

It is a dilemma felt by all the parents whose children died. At least 10,000 of the 70,000 people who perished in the earthquake were of school age; the government has done its best to play down the number of schools that collapsed.

Sichuan’s bereaved parents refuse to stay silent, however, and, as details of shoddy construction work emerge, a case for corruption is mounting.

One example is Xinjian primary school in Dujiangyan, where more than 400 of the 600 students died. The main building collapsed in less than four minutes, but nearly all the structures around it survived. Bereaved parents have been subjected to a campaign of intimidation and bribery to bully them into silence.

Liu told me that all the parents in his village had been made to give their mobile phone numbers to the police and were warned that their phone lines could be tapped for “security reasons”. Plain-clothes police had been deployed to their village to spy on them and everywhere they went they felt they were being “watched”. One bereaved couple made secret plans to travel to Beijing and petition the government. They were apprehended by police and ordered to return home.

There was no mistaking the two cars gaining speed behind us. I needed to get Liu out of the vehicle before stopping to face them. We sped back to the village, letting Liu slip out onto a busy side street to dissolve into the crowd.

Thirty seconds later I was joined again by the two cars and when we stopped a mile further on, they pulled up, followed by three more. Several uniformed policemen and a number of people in civilian clothing piled out. I was asked to hand over my passport. As they stood writing down my details, one policeman filmed me while several of the plain-clothes men snapped me on their mobile phone cameras.

At the station they let me go after an hour of questioning, but not before I had signed and fingerprinted a letter of apology for going to places “under supervision” by the authorities.

“The Chinese authorities promised when bidding for the Olympics that hosting the Games would improve human rights, but things have got worse, not better,” said Steve Ballinger of Amnesty International. “We want people here in the UK to speak up – online and in letters and faxes to the Chinese authorities – and demand human rights for China.”

Many Sichuan schools were ‘time bombs’

At the Xinjian primary school in Dujiangyan, more than 400 out of the 687 killed were children. A nursery school less than 20ft away was barely cracked. A 10-storey hotel opposite was also largely intact. Parents say the school was known to be unsafe but it was not properly reinforced because of its low importance compared with other schools in the area.

Another school in the same town, catering for children of the Communist elite, was so structurally sound that it was used by officials as their base after the earthquake struck.

Independent evidence from structural engineers confirmed that the materials used to build the school were unsafe and a “time bomb waiting to explode”. The entrance was also too small for emergency vehicles to pass through to reach the site after the accident.

In Wufu village 126 children aged between nine and 13 died. Parents said the school was ruled unsafe 10 months ago and the children moved to a single-storey structure next door. They were moved back again without explanation shortly before the disaster struck.

At least 10,000 of the 70,000 people who died in the earthquake were of school age. The government has promised a full investigation into why the schools collapsed.

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