The real story continues to be China's central government suppression of domestic and international media reporting on Sichuan's use of tofu in school construction.
While the poor innocent teacher 范跑跑 is being ridiculed and scorned, corrupt officials responsible for 豆腐渣 (such as the headmaster of Juyuan Middle School in Dujiangyan) are the true cowards running to flee the scene of their crimes against schoolchildren.
A nation of more than 1 billion people should have enough competent investigators to quickly conclude that cost-cutting construction is the sole reason for the collapse of so many schools.
Do we have to wait until after the Olympic torch relay passes through Mianyang to see the light of justice? I challenge China's officials to promptly conclude all relevant investigations and prosecutions in July instead of August.

I agree with Spelunker, a lot of people online are coming to the conclusion that the Runner Fan story is doing a very nice job of drawing attention from the ongoing story on the ground in Sichuan.

I have seen quite a few home made vertical posters hanging from residential buildings calling for proper investigations into the Sichuan school issue,so i guess this is a issue that the government doesn't want to mention too much in the media.

Here's an update from Mianzhu; looks like China's government is not up to my challenge to conclude investigations by the end of July.
Instead local officials are trying to purchase silence from the angry parents using the auspicious number 8, which coincides with the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on August 8:

New York Times July 17, 2008
Hundreds of parents protesting shoddy school construction that they said led to the deaths of their children in the May earthquake were harassed by riot police officers on Tuesday and criticized by local government officials, the parents said Wednesday.

Local officials were also trying to buy the silence of the parents by offering them about $8,800 if they signed a contract agreeing not to raise the school construction issue again, several parents said.

The confrontation between the parents and the police officers erupted on Tuesday morning as 200 parents protested outside government offices in Mianzhu, a city in the earthquake-ravaged Sichuan Province, said Liu Guangyuan, a protester who lost a son when a school collapsed.

It was the latest in a series of protests held by grieving parents, many of whom lost their only child in the earthquake. With an eye to the approach of the Olympic Games in Beijing next month, however, the Chinese authorities have ordered the police to crack down on the rallies. Chinese news organizations have also been told by the central government not to report on the schools, and all journalists have been barred from approaching the collapse sites.

The parents in Mianzhu on Tuesday were demanding that the government offer a full report on why Dongqi Middle School collapsed, killing at least 200 of the school’s 900 students.

In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, many local governments promised to investigate the school collapses, but parents across Sichuan Province complained that they had yet to receive any reports.

Zhang Longfu, whose daughter died in another Mianzhu school that collapsed, said parents at that school had also been offered $8,800 plus a pension upon retirement in their 60s if they signed a contract acknowledging that their children died in the schools because of the earthquake and agreeing not to disturb reconstruction efforts.

Read the full article at the NY Times website:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/world/asia/17china.htm