Beijing  - After Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao flew by helicopter over destroyed towns and cut-off villages in China's Sichuan province last May, he vowed to "spare no effort" in searching for earthquake survivors.

"My fellow Chinese, facing such a severe disaster, we need calm, confidence, courage and efficient organization," Wen said.

One year later, the ruling Communist Party has won international plaudits for the speed and efficiency of its emergency response to the Sichuan earthquake, which left 87,000 people dead or missing.

But for some residents of badly hit areas, questions remain about why they are still waiting for permanent housing, new jobs and for official lists of the dead and missing.

The local officials, many of whom also lost friends or relatives in the earthquake, have borne the brunt of the complaints from the 5 million people left homeless in Sichuan.

Just two weeks after the quake, a widely circulated photograph showed Jiang Guohua, the party secretary of Mianzhu city, kneeling in the middle of road to make a melodramatic appeal to grieving parents not to take their protests to a higher level.

Tang Kai, a senior planner for the housing ministry, last week said China still faced a "grim situation" in its reconstruction efforts in Sichuan.

Tang said permanent houses for rural residents will be finished by the end of this year, but that work has begun on only 40 per cent of new urban homes, with just 9 per cent completed.

Many rural residents have also seen the land that they relied on for meagre incomes buried under debris or taken by the government for rebuilding.

"Our farmland has gone to provide land for the new Beichuan town, and I don't have a job to support my family until new jobs are created here," farmer Huang Renjun told the South China Morning Post last week.

Most of the homeless residents of Sichuan's quake-hit towns are still living in densely packed prefabricated homes.

Mu Hong of the National Development and Reform Commission recently said the government aimed to finish all reconstruction work by September next year, one year earlier than originally planned.

Mu said the government had spent 360 billion yuan (about 53 billion dollars) for reconstruction work by April, about one-third of the planned total of 1 trillion yuan for more than 200,000 projects.

Days before the first anniversary, the Sichuan provincial government issued its first official total of 5,335 for the number of children who died or remain missing following the collapse of hundreds of schools in the quake.

But the gestures of openness by the central and provincial governments came too late to help Feng Xiang, the vice director of publicity for Beichuan, one of the most devastated towns in Sichuan.

Feng, 33, whose son died in the quake, committed suicide on April 20.

"You face pressure both from the general public and supervisors," Li Minghong, the party chief of nearby Caoshan village, told the official Xinhua news agency.

"Officials who lost their families, children in particular, feel even more pressured psychologically when they cannot share their grief with others," said Li, who lost his 17-year-old daughter.

Yet many bereaved parents in Beichuan and other areas where school buildings collapsed are continuing to demand answers from local officials, despite often facing threats and harassment.

Artist Ai Weiwei said he was not satisfied with the government's total as it was "not based on a real name list" of dead and missing children.

"I think they were forced (to release the number) by pressure from civil society and the media," Ai told dpa.

Ai and his team of volunteers have identified about 5,200 children who died in the quake and have vowed to continue their work.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other groups have accused the government of harassing bereaved parents and preventing reporters from reaching some quake-hit areas of Sichuan.

"Parents of student quake victims, who are trying to understand how and why their children died, deserve answers and compassion, not threats and abuse," Sophie Richardson, HRW's Asia advocacy director, said in a statement.

Like the parents and officials, many children who survived the quake were deeply traumatized. UNICEF reported last week that it had set up 40 "safe spaces" in Sichuan to encourage bonding among young children affected by the quake.

"After the earthquake, the children did not want to come to the kindergarten any more," UNICEF quoted Tang Xiaoping, a former teacher who runs one of the "safe spaces," as saying.

"They did not want to see me either, saying that seeing me means the earthquake is coming," Tang said.

Many children were unusually quiet when they first began attending her "safe space," Tang said. "They just refused to interact with the rest of the world." (dpa)