In almost every town and village rocked by China's massive earthquake distraught parents point to the ruins of a school where their only child died.

Angry citizens have deluged the Government with demands for an explanation and the Government vowed yesterday to punish anyone found to be responsible for shoddy construction.

Yang Rong, the standards director at the Ministry of Housing and Urban - Rural Development, said that officials had been ordered to investigate why so many school buildings crumbled.

Officials revealed that Monday's 7.9-magnitude earthquake destroyed 6,898 classrooms - and that is before figures have emerged from the two hardest-hit areas of Wenchuan and Beichuan in the steep-sided hills in the north of Sichuan province.

Education and housing officials took the rare move of fielding questions online from Chinese citizens over the many children among the official death toll, which is expected to hit 50,000.

President Hu Jintao flew to the battered province of Sichuan as a 5.5 aftershock wreaked new havoc in the worst affected area, setting off landslides that blocked roads only just cleared to allow rescuers to enter. The tremor spread panic among some of the 4.8 million people estimated to have lost their homes in the quake.

Premier Wen Jiabao said that the damage could exceed the devastating 1976 tremor in the northeastern city of Tangshan that killed up to 300,000 people.

In a rare, real-time online exchange with ordinary Chinese, officials' measured answers were met with the kind of furious comments that have echoed across the internet since the quake left whole villages destroyed.

One said: “China's Government buildings at every level are more magnificent than those of developed countries, the schoolrooms are worse than Africa's, who's to blame!!!” Education officials in many provinces made promises to tear down and rebuild schools if they were not earthquake-safe. “There may have been shoddy work and inferior materials during the construction of some school buildings,” one official said.

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