SICHUAN, China – It is easy to be seduced by the glitz of the new Beijing, the modern face and the charm offensive turned on for the Olympic Games. But travel 1,300 miles south west of Beijing, and a tragedy is being played out that shows how little some things have changed.

A week before the Olympics opened I travelled to Sichuan province with a Nightly News team, to revisit parents who had lost a child in the May 12 earthquake. It was my third visit there since the quake, which killed 70,000 people.

It was the deaths of so many children, an estimated 10,000 of them buried under the rubble of their schools, that had triggered scenes of raw grief in the days that followed, as devastated parents searched for their missing child. Their anguish so acute because for most this was the only child they were allowed under China's one child policy.

In the weeks that followed, anguish turned to anger, as parents demanded to know whether shoddy construction was to blame for the collapse of 7,000 classrooms. As I discovered this month, they are still waiting for answers.

As soon as we arrived in Mianzhu we were surrounded by police, demanding to see our documents. "The story's over," they told us, before ordering us to leave, escorting us out past the Fuxian No. 2 Primary School, where 127 children died. The police had sealed the school entrances with ugly gray walls, and painted slogans beside the gate – "Be grateful to the Communist Party."

The story isn't over, though the authorities clearly wish it were; and gratitude towards the communist party is not something widely shared among parents, whom the authorities are now trying to silence - urging them to put the quake behind them and move on.

‘They disappeared in one moment’
When we first visited Fuxian school soon after the quake, parents had turned the rubble into a shrine covered with scores of photographs of the children. The police have ordered the photographs removed and, as with schools across the quake zone, the authorities were clearing the debris - and with it, parents feared, any evidence of possible shoddy construction.

It was at Fuxian school that we'd first met Sang Min, standing in silent grief, cradling a photograph of her eleven year old son Feng Junwei, who died under the wreckage of his school. She still keeps his photographs close to her.

"Every time when I miss him, I take his photograph out and talk to him. I know he can't hear, but it makes me feel better," she told me during our most recent visit.

Also at Fuxian, we'd met Yuan Changhui, whose 12-year-old daughter also died. She'd dreamed of being a doctor.

"It took us so many years to bring up our children," she told me. "They disappeared in one moment."

Sign here…
Yuan Changhua also lost her husband, a mineworker, who was buried underground when the mine collapsed during the quake.

The authorities have offered parents compensation - 60,000 Yuan, which is almost $9,000, a lot of money here, but there's a catch: they have to sign an agreement not to protest.

We saw a copy. It reads: "From now on, under the leadership of the party and the government, we will obey the law and maintain social order."

It goes on: "We sincerely appreciate the help and care from the party, government and party."

Both Sang Min and Yuan Changhui have signed. They felt they had no choice.

"They said we had to sign it," Yuan Changhui told me. "What else could we do." Shaking her head, and wiping away tears she said it was "impossible" parents would ever learn the truth about the schools.

At the same time, the authorities have moved to silence local bloggers, who have catalogued the damage to schools, and suggested local corruption may have resulted in corners being cut on construction. One, a school caretaker named Liu Shaokun, travelled the region posting photographs of collapsed schools. He has been arrested and sentenced to one year re-education through labor.

"He's just a volunteer in the quake zone. How much influence does he have?" his wife told me.

Closure
The government has told parents they are allowed to have another child, though most we spoke to said it was much too early to decide.

The last we saw of Sang Min, she was boarding a train from Sichuan for a factory job in southern China. She could no longer wait for answers, and needed an income. The shock that turned to anger had now given way to exhaustion and emptiness.

It's unlikely, though, that the closure officials are demanding of parents will come by government edict.

On Tuesday - the three-month anniversary of the quake - all eyes were on the incredible spectacle of the Beijing Olympics, a world away from the grieving parents of Sichuan.

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In just the last week, we have witnessed the sad reality of reporters in the official Beijing Olympics Main Press Center going online to do research for their stories only to discover that numerous sites they relied on had been blocked. The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that its own Olympics blog had been blocked by the Chinese government and that hundreds of other sites would be censored, not in the hotels or in Olympic housing, but in the press tents. As of Wednesday, MSN's Taiwan site, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Huffington Post, and numerous Falun Gong and Free Tibet sites remain blocked not only for the Chinese people, but for the Olympic press as well.

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Back in 2001, Wang Wei, the head of Beijing's 2008 Olympic bid campaign famously told the International Olympic Committee "We will give the media complete freedom to report when they come to China." The motto of the Beijing bid delegation was "New Beijing, Great Olympics," promising a slow but steady improvement of human rights in China and hinting at democratization. The IOC, a body who historically awards the Games to cities that are not only ready, but cities that also need to develop, practically salivated at the idea of a Beijing Olympics and all that it would represent. As ESPN's Jim Caple wrote in an editorial Tuesday:

The four other finalists for the 2008 Olympics were Paris; Toronto; Osaka, Japan; and Istanbul, Turkey; each is a fine, attractive city, and all are most certainly less controversial than Beijing. We would not see "Free Saskatchewan" protests leading up to Toronto. But that's precisely the point: Whether it was the IOC's intention or not, due to all the surrounding sagas, Beijing has made the Olympics interesting again.

And this couldn't be more true. Beijing has certainly made the Games "interesting." But as the Games draw near, what has been most "interesting" is not China's coming-out party, but how China has reneged on all of its promises for the Summer Games, pulling off a swindle of Olympic proportions.

In just the last week, we have witnessed the sad reality of reporters in the official Beijing Olympics Main Press Center going online to do research for their stories only to discover that numerous sites they relied on had been blocked. The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that its own Olympics blog had been blocked by the Chinese government and that hundreds of other sites would be censored, not in the hotels or in Olympic housing, but in the press tents. As of Wednesday, MSN's Taiwan site, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Huffington Post, and numerous Falun Gong and Free Tibet sites remain blocked not only for the Chinese people, but for the Olympic press as well.

If you cling naively to any hope that the IOC will swoop in like Superman and demand the Chinese keep their pre-Olympic promises, don't hold your breath. The IOC, we learned this week, struck a deal with the Chinese government to allow sensitive non-Olympic-related websites to be blocked during the Games. IOC press chief Kevan Gosper told the press, "I regret that it now appears BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee) has announced that there will be limitations on Web site access during Games time. I also now understand that some IOC officials negotiated with the Chinese that some sensitive sites would be blocked on the basis they were not considered Games related." Rather than stand up to China on press freedom during the Olympics, our international Olympic body shamefully cowered and became complicit with the censors.

But that wasn't even the worst incident in the world of press freedom this week.

On Monday, two Japanese reporters covering a grenade attack that killed 16 people at a border patrol station in western China's Xinjiang province were beaten by local Chinese police. One told his network in Japan, "My face was pushed into the ground, my arm was twisted and I was hit two or three times in the face." While the Chinese government apologized Tuesday, the event shows that Chinese officials, on both local and national levels, have been trained to react violently, particularly when it comes to what they consider dangerous press freedom. Perhaps the Japanese reporters should have known better than to cover a terrorist attack in the Olympic host country four days before the Olympics.

China makes no mistake about it. They're not going to let a little thing like the Olympics change their ways. The news story receiving the least attention this week that deserved the most was from China's state news service Xinhua titled "Press freedom shall not go above laws." Xinhua, which is merely a mouthpiece for the government, justifies all crackdowns on subversive websites (like the Philadelphia Inquirer) on the basis that Chinese law outranks freedom of the press. Here is a piece from the story:

Journalistic freedom, at any time, is a relative but not absolute conception. Even for the media in the United States, contempt of court and violation of citizen's privacy are banned by laws....

The openness to media complies with both international conventions and the Chinese laws. Just like other countries, China regulates the Internet according to law.

The Chinese laws forbid anyone to spread illegal information, such as preaching an evil cult like the Falungong, or do anything that harms national interests through the Internet.

It appears China is actually for an unfettered freedom of the press, as long as that freedom doesn't conflict with Chinese law, which expressly limits the freedom of the press.

We have all been duped. The IOC, NBC, reporters working in China, those who love the Olympics, all of us. The Chinese government made essential and unequivocal promises they had no intention of keeping in order to win the right to put on the show that starts Friday. By not demanding a free press during the Games, the rest of the world has conspired with China, allowing it to conduct business as usual, shutting off anything and everything thought to "harm national interests." We have given China the immense power to censor, not just for its own people, but now for ours.

And two weeks from now, after the Games have ended, China will be more powerful than it's ever been.