Ai Weiwei. Study of Perspective Tiananmen. 1997

Ai Weiwei has long been known for tweaking the Chinese government with the social and political observations he posts on his blog. This has continued — and even escalated — as we approach the anniversary of the massive earthquake that killed tens of thousands last year in Sichuan province.

Ai and a team of volunteers are documenting all the schoolchildren who died at the time and have been posting their results on the blog. Government censors, in turn, have been removing the listings. When one of Ai’s assistants posted an essay about the abuse he’s faced while investigating the deaths, it too was taken down. (The Internet being the Internet though, the essay lives on in an English translation.)

For Ai, cataloging the deaths is a way to highlight issues such as substandard school construction that surrounded them. Which is precisely why the government keeps censoring him. “The government,” he recently told the New York Times, “is trying to escape from the accountability on this matter by postponing or rejecting the publication of details.”

In fact, when China released its official fatality figures for the earthquake earlier this week, they lacked details like names, ages and places of death. And one number in particular raised eyebrows: 5,335.

That’s the official number of young students killed, the government says, out of the 87,000 total dead. As the Christian Science Monitor notes:

Let’s compare this with other figures the government has put out:

Some 3,340 schools still need rebuilding, according to the Sichuan Province education department, which also announced the death toll. That means, for every school that fell during the quake, only one or two children were killed – even though a much higher number should have been in class when the quake struck that Monday afternoon.

The death of schoolchildren carries political weight aside from the personal tragedy. When schools crumbled while buildings around them survived the quake, charges of corruption arose with government officials and developers accused of sidestepping building codes during China’s economic boom. This past year, human rights activist reported that the government harassed citizens seeking more information about, or trying to publicize, the matter.

As the New York Times reports, the Chinese government recently stepped up its campaign to silence those who push for greater transparency and accounting for the children’s deaths.

Despite the “official” numbers, Ai continues working on his own list. Since December, he and his volunteers have the names of 5,200 and the number keeps growing.

“We never really treat the human life or human rights in the way it should be,” the Chinese artist and cultural critic recently told a reporter from NBC. “The basic public information should always be clearly revealed.”