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November 18, 2011
After a Horrific Crash, a Stark Depiction of Injustice in China
By MICHAEL WINES and IAN JOHNSON
BEIJING — Days after a nine-seat van crammed with 62 kindergartners slammed into a coal truck in northwest China this week, killing 21 children and two adults, the 21st Century Business Herald — a state-run, reliably nationalistic newspaper — did something extraordinary.
It published a chart.
In one column, the paper recounted recent school-bus accidents in which about 60 children had died. In an adjacent column, it listed the sums that selected Chinese government departments had lavished on new cars in 2010.
No Chinese citizen needed a pencil to connect the dots.
Since the accident on Wednesday in Gansu Province, China’s Twitter-like microblogs and other social media sites have been alight with heartbreak and outrage over the tragedy — and they have been subsequently red-carded by government censors for unpatriotic emotion.
But there are few more devastating statements about what gnaws at modern Chinese than the state-run newspaper’s two columns of numbers.
As China sped toward its new status as the world’s second largest economy, the already yawning gap between the rich and poor grew wider. By sociologists’ calculations, income inequality here is not that far from levels that have spurred social unrest in other nations.
But some things are not easily reduced to statistics. There is an argument, buttressed by the Gansu tragedy, that what truly eats at people here is not so much the rich-poor gap as the canyon that separates the powerful from the powerless.
“Most Chinese aren’t angry about rising inequality,” said Martin K. Whyte, a Harvard sociologist who specializes in research on Chinese social trends. “It’s not rich versus poor. It’s the system of power and procedural injustices that they’re upset about.”
And in fact, many episodes in the litany of scandal and misfortune that has consumed Chinese Web surfers in recent years had little to do with money.
After a young man fled last year from a hit-and-run accident by invoking his father’s rank as a deputy police chief, the phrase “My father is Li Gang” became a national catchphrase for using connections to escape responsibility.
After a much-publicized high-speed rail crash in the eastern city of Wenzhou killed 40 people in July, online critics and journalists contended that corruption had enriched powerful officials at the expense of safety or had encouraged cover-ups of officials’ misbehavior.
The Railway Ministry admitted to high-level corruption and fired several officials, although a government report is two months overdue, and scores of victims have yet to be compensated.
By many accounts, the awful van accident in Gansu Province only underscored the impotence that some Chinese feel in the face of authority.
For years, China’s roads have been among the world’s most dangerous. Statistics for 2009, the most recent available, show that 67,759 people died on the road in China, a 7.8 percent decline over the previous year. That capped a decade of steadily declining road fatalities.
But another study, by the World Health Organization, cast serious doubt on the official Chinese figures. Comparing policy data with hospital records, the study concluded that the real death rate from traffic accidents was roughly twice the official figure. That would make China’s roads the most dangerous among middle-income countries.
The dangers facing students in substandard school buses were known to government officials. In July 2010, the national government ordered that buses carrying primary school students meet strict safety standards that included emergency exits, seat belts and data recorders to track drivers’ behavior. Unregistered minibuses were outlawed.
Some were skeptical that the new standards would have much effect. “The biggest problem of China’s school bus industry is not the lack of a standard, but the rampant use of illegal vehicles,” a prescient vehicle-rental businessman from Beijing, Zhang Jie, told China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper, at the time.
Without enforcement, he said, new standards would represent “just a piece of paper” and data recorders expensive decorations.
Five months later, 14 students died when a three-wheel farm truck being used as a school bus tumbled into a river in Hunan Province. And in September, police officers in Hebei Province stopped an eight-seat van in Qian’an with 64 preschoolers stuffed inside.
“The government should not wait for more fatal crashes to occur to take whatever steps are needed to ensure that the nation’s children are as safe as they can be,” China Daily stated then.
On Wednesday, just two months later, the van badly overloaded with the 62 children, along with a teacher and the driver, careened down a foggy street and crashed head-on with a coal truck. The van was demolished, killing 23 passengers, and injuring everyone else on board.
The government took swift action, as it often does in cases of public embarrassment. The Education Ministry ordered a national inspection of school buses, and four local officials were suspended pending an inquiry.
The news ignited indignant postings on China’s major social media platform, Sina Weibo. One of the country’s most influential bloggers, the social scientist Yu Jianrong, wrote that school buses were notoriously overcrowded, while government officials built themselves palatial offices and bought luxury cars.
Microbloggers posted photographs of an elaborate new government office building in Qingyang, the poor town where the accident occurred.
A post on the blog of Caixin, a business magazine known for its rule-bending investigations, reported that the building’s garage and ventilation systems alone cost more than $2.2 million.
By Thursday, the discussion in China’s blogosphere had turned sharply against the government. A microblog post by local officials in Gansu Province that hailed the swift official response to the disaster was hooted down by critics and was subsequently withdrawn.
Commentators asked why countries like the United States had enormous, high-riding school buses instead of shoddily built microvans.
The magazine News Weekly posted a rhetorical question on its blog: “Why doesn’t the flower of the nation have a proper flower pot?” and posted next to it a picture of a big yellow school bus.
Other bloggers were even more blunt.
“Qingyang is nothing but a representative of tens of thousands of places in China. It’s no more than the tip of an iceberg,” wrote one poster who called himself Kuaile de Jingling Laodie.
“No matter how poor we are, or how much hardship there is, we cannot let the leaders suffer.”
Li Bibo contributed research.
After a Horrific Crash, a Stark Depiction of Injustice in China
By MICHAEL WINES and IAN JOHNSON
BEIJING — Days after a nine-seat van crammed with 62 kindergartners slammed into a coal truck in northwest China this week, killing 21 children and two adults, the 21st Century Business Herald — a state-run, reliably nationalistic newspaper — did something extraordinary.
It published a chart.
In one column, the paper recounted recent school-bus accidents in which about 60 children had died. In an adjacent column, it listed the sums that selected Chinese government departments had lavished on new cars in 2010.
No Chinese citizen needed a pencil to connect the dots.
Since the accident on Wednesday in Gansu Province, China’s Twitter-like microblogs and other social media sites have been alight with heartbreak and outrage over the tragedy — and they have been subsequently red-carded by government censors for unpatriotic emotion.
But there are few more devastating statements about what gnaws at modern Chinese than the state-run newspaper’s two columns of numbers.
As China sped toward its new status as the world’s second largest economy, the already yawning gap between the rich and poor grew wider. By sociologists’ calculations, income inequality here is not that far from levels that have spurred social unrest in other nations.
But some things are not easily reduced to statistics. There is an argument, buttressed by the Gansu tragedy, that what truly eats at people here is not so much the rich-poor gap as the canyon that separates the powerful from the powerless.
“Most Chinese aren’t angry about rising inequality,” said Martin K. Whyte, a Harvard sociologist who specializes in research on Chinese social trends. “It’s not rich versus poor. It’s the system of power and procedural injustices that they’re upset about.”
And in fact, many episodes in the litany of scandal and misfortune that has consumed Chinese Web surfers in recent years had little to do with money.
After a young man fled last year from a hit-and-run accident by invoking his father’s rank as a deputy police chief, the phrase “My father is Li Gang” became a national catchphrase for using connections to escape responsibility.
After a much-publicized high-speed rail crash in the eastern city of Wenzhou killed 40 people in July, online critics and journalists contended that corruption had enriched powerful officials at the expense of safety or had encouraged cover-ups of officials’ misbehavior.
The Railway Ministry admitted to high-level corruption and fired several officials, although a government report is two months overdue, and scores of victims have yet to be compensated.
By many accounts, the awful van accident in Gansu Province only underscored the impotence that some Chinese feel in the face of authority.
For years, China’s roads have been among the world’s most dangerous. Statistics for 2009, the most recent available, show that 67,759 people died on the road in China, a 7.8 percent decline over the previous year. That capped a decade of steadily declining road fatalities.
But another study, by the World Health Organization, cast serious doubt on the official Chinese figures. Comparing policy data with hospital records, the study concluded that the real death rate from traffic accidents was roughly twice the official figure. That would make China’s roads the most dangerous among middle-income countries.
The dangers facing students in substandard school buses were known to government officials. In July 2010, the national government ordered that buses carrying primary school students meet strict safety standards that included emergency exits, seat belts and data recorders to track drivers’ behavior. Unregistered minibuses were outlawed.
Some were skeptical that the new standards would have much effect. “The biggest problem of China’s school bus industry is not the lack of a standard, but the rampant use of illegal vehicles,” a prescient vehicle-rental businessman from Beijing, Zhang Jie, told China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper, at the time.
Without enforcement, he said, new standards would represent “just a piece of paper” and data recorders expensive decorations.
Five months later, 14 students died when a three-wheel farm truck being used as a school bus tumbled into a river in Hunan Province. And in September, police officers in Hebei Province stopped an eight-seat van in Qian’an with 64 preschoolers stuffed inside.
“The government should not wait for more fatal crashes to occur to take whatever steps are needed to ensure that the nation’s children are as safe as they can be,” China Daily stated then.
On Wednesday, just two months later, the van badly overloaded with the 62 children, along with a teacher and the driver, careened down a foggy street and crashed head-on with a coal truck. The van was demolished, killing 23 passengers, and injuring everyone else on board.
The government took swift action, as it often does in cases of public embarrassment. The Education Ministry ordered a national inspection of school buses, and four local officials were suspended pending an inquiry.
The news ignited indignant postings on China’s major social media platform, Sina Weibo. One of the country’s most influential bloggers, the social scientist Yu Jianrong, wrote that school buses were notoriously overcrowded, while government officials built themselves palatial offices and bought luxury cars.
Microbloggers posted photographs of an elaborate new government office building in Qingyang, the poor town where the accident occurred.
A post on the blog of Caixin, a business magazine known for its rule-bending investigations, reported that the building’s garage and ventilation systems alone cost more than $2.2 million.
By Thursday, the discussion in China’s blogosphere had turned sharply against the government. A microblog post by local officials in Gansu Province that hailed the swift official response to the disaster was hooted down by critics and was subsequently withdrawn.
Commentators asked why countries like the United States had enormous, high-riding school buses instead of shoddily built microvans.
The magazine News Weekly posted a rhetorical question on its blog: “Why doesn’t the flower of the nation have a proper flower pot?” and posted next to it a picture of a big yellow school bus.
Other bloggers were even more blunt.
“Qingyang is nothing but a representative of tens of thousands of places in China. It’s no more than the tip of an iceberg,” wrote one poster who called himself Kuaile de Jingling Laodie.
“No matter how poor we are, or how much hardship there is, we cannot let the leaders suffer.”
Li Bibo contributed research.
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