Chinese High Speed Rail kills at least Scores

At least they did it faster than Amtrack, which itself has no great reputation for staying on the tracks.

Hawkee, How bout letting the Chinese get on with the rescue and recovery work before you start auditioning as Pat Robertsons replacement

FOR MONTHS, it has been increasingly obvious that China’s shiny new high-speed rail system is not the triumph of national planning that Beijing or Western admirers claimed. The Chinese government this year fired top rail officials for alleged wrongdoing , an implicit recognition that corruption and debt plague the project. Many of those who questioned the economics of high-speed rail in China also argued that authorities were cutting corners on safety in their rush to build the world’s largest bullet-train network. Those accusations, too, received tacit confirmation when China announced in April that it would cut the trains’ top speed by 30 miles per hour.

Too late: Last Saturday, China’s high-speed rail produced the long-feared catastrophe. Two bullet trains collided in the eastern province of Zhejiang, leaving more than three dozen people dead and scores more injured.


The terrible collision is not only a human tragedy but also a major blow to the credibility of the communist government, which had hoped to sell its trains to other countries – including the United States. Authorities blamed a lightning strike for causing one train to stall out, after which a second train rear-ended it, causing four cars to plunge off a bridge. Unlikely on its face, this scenario does not explain why no fail-safe mechanism halted the second train after the first stopped. That’s what would have happened in Japan, where bullet trains have operated for half a century with zero fatalities.

The Ministry of Railways in Bejing then promised a “serious” and “honest” investigation. Communist party officials immediately undermined that pledge by instructing Chinese media not to report the matter aggressively but rather “to use ‘in the face of great tragedy, there’s great love’” as the major theme. “Do not question. Do not elaborate. Do not associate.”

A flood of skeptical, even angry, comment on the Chinese Internet suggests that the damage-control effort isn’t working. As more and more Chinese are realizing, the tragedy’s lessons are not only technological but also political. China’s high-speed rail system epitomizes the inherent flaws of authoritarian governance, not its strengths.

After a minimum of public discussion and despite contrary expert advice, the nation’s unelected rulers decided to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a mode of transportation that many, if not most, ordinary Chinese cannot afford to use. As the cash flowed, well-connected officials lined their own pockets. Plan-fulfillment and national prestige took priority over passenger safety as officials muzzled reporters who dared to say otherwise.

In short, the high-speed rail program operated pretty much as you would expect in a one-party state with a controlled media and no effective checks and balances. The only mystery is why people in the West who should have known better looked at high-speed rail in China and saw a model for the United States — instead of an accident waiting to happen

It has been four days since one high-speed train rear-ended another in East China causing the death of at least 35 people, and injuring some 200 others.
Only three weeks earlier, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway was boasting about being the longest and most quickly constructed in the world, as it was inaugurated with great fanfare. Yet numerous failures occurred within days of the operation, capped by the deadly accident that confirmed the Chinese public’s doubts about the security of the country’s high-speed rail, and sparking a crisis at the Chinese Ministry of Railways.
Up to now, both the state media and the Ministry of Railways claim that the accident was caused by lightning that struck and stalled the first train. Three senior officials were soon fired. Public opinion is outraged at the way the rail authority and other public officials have dealt with the incident.
It took 24 hours before the Ministry of Railways scheduled any sort of press conference to address the deadly July 23 incident that occurred near Wenzhou City. But when dozens of reporters arrived at the conference, only four designated media were allowed to enter the venue. There were more “leaders” present than reporters.
Moreover, in the conference, nothing about the accident was explained. All we learned is that Long Jing, the Secretary of the Shanghai Railway Bureau, was sacked by Sheng Guangzu, Minister of Railways, who has taken office only a few months ago.
It seems that everybody knows that Long Jing is just a scapegoat.
Truth from survivors' cell phone
The Railways Ministry spokesman and other public officials were said to have left the venue via the rear door at the end of the conference when the reporters swarmed forward to ask questions. The reporters were immediately pushed away by security guards. Even today no list of the dead has been issued.
After the fatal incident occurred, it was the surviving passengers themselves, stuck in the train carriages, who transmitted the news through their cell phones. It was more than one hour before the government media responded to the incident and started releasing very limited information about it, while CCTV, a state television channel, released the news hours later when messages were already widespread on the Internet. Yet what CCTV gave us was just clichés. It did not address clearly how the crash happened, instead the “instructions of the leadership” were delivered fulsomely and none of their names were left out.
On Sunday morning, less than 12 hours after the accident, the search and rescue team rashly announced that there was no more sign of survivors and started moving the fallen carriages. Large machinery was brought in to cut and crush the fallen carriages. Yet numerous passengers continued to be found still alive.
The most chilling question to imagine: What if the carriages being discarded still contained living passengers? In a 1998 crash in Germany the search and rescue lasted for 72 hours, while in China it is barely 12.
China has invested heavily in building a train network in this most populous region of the world. It will stretch to more than 12,000 kilometers of track by the end of 2012. When President Hu Jintao paid a visit to the US last January, China’s largest train manufacturer, CSR Corp, signed letters of intent for ventures with General Electric (GE), aiming to gain the business of supplying America’s high-speed rail investment plan unveiled by President Barack Obama early this year.
However, behind the apparently “leaping” development of high-speed rail, many serious problems are emerging. The Ministry of Railways has long been considered to be a closed and kingdom-like “Power Ministry”. It even has its own separate police and court system, as some media call it: “competitor and referee in one.”
In addition to scandalous corruption cases involving the former Minister of the Railways and a Deputy Chief Engineer in the past six months, a series of safety incidents of this much-hyped rail system have taken place and caused many serious questions. Just last month, Zhou Yimin, one of the former Deputy Chief Engineers, revealed to the press that due to Liu Zhijun, the former Minister currently under corruption investigation, when China bought the EMU CRH380 prototype vehicles from German’s Siemens, it was clearly stressed in the contract that “the maximum speed is 300 kilometers per hour”, while Liu wanted to create “the world’s fastest train” at the expense of its original safety design.
Zhou Yimin further pointed out that both Japan and Germany, which have joint venture relations with the Chinese train manufacturers, have sharply criticised China’s claim of its capacity for running at 350km. They say that safety factors are being sacrificed. Although Japan and Germany have experimented safety speed tests of over 400 km/hr, “the experimental speed and the operating speed are two different things, yet China pretends that it has a break-through in its technology”, Zhou said. Widely circulated rumors on the Chinese internet also say some engineers working for the Ministry claim that they’ll never take the high-speed rail to avoid risking their own lives.
China’s high-speed rail construction and testing time were compressed in order to “lead the world” or to coincide with certain meaningful dates, for instance the inauguration of the most feted Beijing-Shanghai line to celebrate the Chinese Communist Party’s 90 years anniversary. Even the drivers’ training time has been compressed to just ten days

However in Spain it was completely the opposite. I was staying with a host family and was required to kiss the family and all the friends I had met every day. Not only was this different, but they ate at different times, the way they spent time with their friends was different (I found that in England it wasn't that dissimilar to Japan), their sense of humour and everything was different.