(Photos and footage on site)
Chinese web users and journalists have defied censors to unleash unusually high levels of criticism towards the government in the wake of a horrific train crash on Saturday, July 23. Many fear that human safety is being sacrificed in the country’s rush to modernize.
According to official accounts, the Chinese response to the crash in the outskirts of the eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou was exemplary. The disaster “reflects the superiority of socialism”, the newspaper China Philanthropy Times said, praising the swift government reaction and hundreds of spontaneous blood donors who flocked to the site.
Yet this view isn’t shared by thousands of users of China’s popular Twitter-like Sina-Weibo service, many of whom released pictures and videos of the crash long before official news agencies did. In the past few days, micro-bloggers have questioned whether the true death toll may be higher than the official one of 39, and argued that the high-speed rail system is being developed too fast, to the detriment of security standards.
Above all, thousands have criticised what they say is the local authority’s rushed response to the crash, and the national government’s apparent indifference. It was Weibo users who revealed that the railway ministry buried parts of wrecked trains near the site instead of sending them to be examined to determine the causes of the malfunction. The ministry said the trains contained valuable “national level” technology that could be stolen and thus must be buried, but web users fear they are hiding evidence of construction flaws. On Thursday, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported that the wreckage was dug out again and brought to a nearby train station for further investigation. [...]
Yet this view isn’t shared by thousands of users of China’s popular Twitter-like Sina-Weibo service, many of whom released pictures and videos of the crash long before official news agencies did. In the past few days, micro-bloggers have questioned whether the true death toll may be higher than the official one of 39, and argued that the high-speed rail system is being developed too fast, to the detriment of security standards.
Above all, thousands have criticised what they say is the local authority’s rushed response to the crash, and the national government’s apparent indifference. It was Weibo users who revealed that the railway ministry buried parts of wrecked trains near the site instead of sending them to be examined to determine the causes of the malfunction. The ministry said the trains contained valuable “national level” technology that could be stolen and thus must be buried, but web users fear they are hiding evidence of construction flaws. On Thursday, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported that the wreckage was dug out again and brought to a nearby train station for further investigation. [...]
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