A truck laden with fireworks exploded on an elevated expressway in central China on Friday, unleashing a blast that threw vehicles 30 yards to the ground below and killing at least nine people, state news reports said.

The truck was on an expressway near Sanmenxia in Henan Province in morning fog when the truck erupted, causing an 87-yard section of the Yichang Bridge to collapse, according to the Web site of Dahe Daily, a newspaper in Henan, which quoted rescue officials at the site. Earlier, officials had raised the possibility that a bridge collapse set off the explosion.

Fireworks are a tradition of China’s traditional Lunar New Year celebrations, which begin on Feb. 9, and the explosion was a reminder of the dangers brought by the crush of people and goods on the move before the holiday.

[...]China Central Television reported that one eyewitness injured in the accident said that because of an earlier accident before the explosion, traffic had been snarled on the expressway and a number of vehicles had crashed into one another.

Initial coverage reported at least 26 were killed in the explosion and a further 15 injured, though more recent coverage claims lower numbers of casualties.

This incident highlights safety concerns surrounding the traditional use of fireworks in Spring Festival celebrations. From The Guardian:

The accident is a stark reminder of safety hazards often associated with Chinese new year celebrations, which begin this year on 10 February. 5,945 fire accidents were reported during the first day of last year’s spring festival alone, according to Xinhua.

In 2006, 367 people were killed at a temple fair in Henan when a storeroom of fireworks exploded, according to the Associated Press. Six years earlier, an explosion at an unlicensed fireworks factory killed 33 people, many of them children.

The Chinese government outlawed fireworks from 1993 to 2005, but ultimately lifted the ban under intense public pressure.

In 2010, a lunar holiday fireworks explosion caused damage and death in Guangdong province, and in 2011 state media reported two dead and 223 more injured over the holiday period in Beijing. After air pollution readings hit record levels in Beijing recently, safety is no longer the only argument for curbing the traditional celebratory use of fireworks. People’s Daily reports:

Air pollution concerns have prompted Beijing authorities to ask residents to set off fewer fireworks during the upcoming Spring Festival.

“To improve the air quality and create a favorable environment for you and your family members, please set off fewer fireworks or no fireworks, in order to reduce emissions of pollutants,” an official with the Beijing Office on Fireworks and Firecrackers said Friday.

The official said the office has closely followed Beijing’s air quality reports and issued the proposal to citizens via media.

[...]After an hours-long firework-ignition spree on the eve of the Lunar New Year in 2012, the density of PM2.5 increased sharply to hit 1,593 micrograms per cubic meter at the Chegongzhuang monitoring station, located downtown, or 1.5 times higher than the most polluted day so far this year in Beijing. ( The prolonged smog that shrouded many parts of north and east China in January sparked debate over fireworks during the Spring Festival.

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Post tags: accidents, chinese new year, explosions, fireworks, lunar new year, road accidents, Spring Festival
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Coal mining in China is widely considered one of the world’s deadliest jobs. Government statistics record that in the first nine and a half months of last year, 1,146 Chinese coal miners died in work-related accidents, about four deaths per day—and most analysts assume official numbers represent significant underreporting. […]

Still, not all Chinese coal mines are equally dangerous. Following the Xiangshui tragedy, Guizhou’s Deputy Governor Sun Guoqiang told local reporters, with surprising candor, that state-run mines are more deadly than private mines—because state-run firms can rely on connections and official favors to evade safety regulations. He called the situation “grave.”

[…] The robustness of the link [Fisman and Wang] found was striking: Connected Chinese companies averaged five times as many fatalities as similar unconnected companies. What’s more, the arrival or departure of a highly connected executive was marked by, on average, the death rate per 10,000 workers rising by 10 or falling by 6.4, respectively, in the following year. In a research summary published in the January/February 2013 issue of Harvard Business Review, they dubbed it “the unsafe side of Chinese crony capitalism.” “A fivefold difference I personally find to be stunning,” says Fisman. “I would have expected maybe a 10 percent bump, not 500 percent—this is a case where the fact of a connection is not as surprising as the magnitude of it.”

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We studied all publicly traded Chinese companies in safety-regulated industries, including petroleum and natural gas extraction, mining, chemicals manufacture, and construction—a total of 276 firms. We added up the annual fatalities in each firm from 2008 to 2011, using company-reported statistics, government data, and press reports. After examining the employment histories of the firms’ top (C-suite-equivalent) leaders, we defined a company as “connected” if at least one executive previously held a high-level government post.

Our results showed that on average, the rate of worker deaths is five times greater at connected companies than at similar companies that lack political connections. The finding that connected companies have much worse records was remarkably consistent from year to year. Moreover, deaths per 10,000 workers rose by almost 10, on average, during the year following the arrival of a connected executive at a previously unconnected firm, and fell by 6.4 during the year following a connected executive’s departure. To investigate whether our results were skewed by underreporting, we narrowed our focus to include only major accidents, or ones that caused three or more deaths—events that would be very hard, if not impossible, to shield from discovery. The same pattern prevailed.

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At least 10 people, including five children, died when their overloaded minibus plunged into a mountain valley in southern China on Friday, state media reported, the latest in a string of such accidents which have sparked public anger.

The nine-seat vehicle was carrying 20 people when it ran off the road in Guangxi region, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Ten survived, including a three-month-old infant who was in critical condition, it added.

The deaths of 18 nursery school children in a bus crash in November last year caused a wave of fury and prompted Premier Wen Jiabao to pledge more money for rural bus services, especially for those carrying children.

Chinese state media reports aside from the ten killed, another ten have been injured, according to Xinhua:

The 10 injured are receiving treatment, including a three-month-old infant who is in critical condition, the spokesman said.

The infant’s mother, 24-year-old Wei Yuefang, said she and her family were in the minibus heading for the home village of Bahaotun in Qibainong township to attend a wedding.

She said she was carrying her sleeping daughter when the accident happened, adding that they were thrown out of the vehicle while it was falling into the valley.

The cause of the accident is under investigation.

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Xinhua says an initial investigation found that the seven-seater van — carrying 15 children and two adults — was speeding on a rural road that was undergoing repairs and ended up in a 3-meter (yard)-deep pond Monday morning.

Three children died at the scene, while eight others died later in hospital.

Most of the victims were the children of migrant workers and lived with their grandparents.

Xinhua said Tuesday that the privately run kindergarten had operated without a license and officials have ordered it closed.

According to the BBC, four of the children survived the crash in Jiangxi:

Many vehicles in rural parts of China are badly maintained.

In November last year, the deaths of 18 young children in a bus crash caused public outrage and led authorities to promise more money for school bus services.

It is unclear what caused this latest accident, but police have detained the driver of the van.

State broadcaster China Central Television suggested the van was travelling too fast and had swerved to avoid a parked vehicle before crashing.

The Ministry of Education also commented on the recent string of incidents involving children, from the Wall Street Journal:

In a circular issued on Tuesday, the ministry described such events as “heartbreaking” and singled out the Monday crash involving a school van from a privately owned kindergarten in China’s southeastern Jiangxi province.

The ministry’s statement outlined steps aimed at increasing protection offered to young children, calling for increased safeguards against traffic accidents, greater security at schools and stepped-up vigilance during the winter months to prevent death and injury from fires, carbon monoxide poisoning and accidents related to ice skating.

The ministry said schools should carry out safety education programs ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday—a period when skating and fireworks-related accidents are common.

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Two workers were killed and 13 injured when a furnace at a steel plant owned by Baoshan Iron & Steel (Baosteel) fell, spilling molten iron, the third fatal incident at a Baosteel plant this year.

The workers were clearing slag from the structure when the furnace fell at the plant in the Baoshan district of Shanghai, Baosteel said in a brief statement posted on its microblog site late on Monday.

According to the Global Times, the injured workers mainly suffered from burns:

The overturned molten metal, which had been heated to 1,600 C, killed two of the workers instantly, Shanghai Television Station reported.

The 13 injured workers arrived at the hospital around 10 am, said Qin Yan, a spokeswoman at the hospital. “Six of them are in critical condition. They have burns over large areas of their bodies and have suffered inhalation injuries,” Qin told the Global Times Monday afternoon. “The other patients have been stabilized.”

The most seriously wounded patient has burns over 99 percent of his or her body, according to Xinmin.cn. The other five have burns over 20 percent to 50 percent of their bodies.
Deslagging is a steelmaking process in which the metal is purified, said Yang Yitao, deputy director of the Department of Materials Engineering at Shanghai University. In this process, workers scatter an agent on the surface of molten metal to absorb impurities, which solidify so workers can manually remove them.

China Daily reports that the Shanghai Administration of Work Safety said it sent an investigation team, which included members of the labor union and police:

Liu Yanqi, an analyst specialized in the iron and steel industry at Haitong Securities in Shanghai, said the accident was Baosteel’s “most serious work safety accident so far this year”.

“Related furnaces will work on shifts, which is estimated to cut production capacity by 20,000tons of crude steel a day.”

In July, a heat-supply vehicle at Baosteel Development Co in Shanghai exploded next to the canteen of a residential block, killing one person and seriously burning another.

In February, at its Meishan Steel Plant in East China’s Jiangsu province, six workers were killed and three critically injured after a gas explosion.

Read more about work safety in China, via CDT.

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In Thursday testimony, expert witness Capt. Nigel Pryke said his analysis suggested the main fault for the crash lay with the captain of the Sea Smooth, a commuter ferry that was carrying passengers from Hong Kong Island to the dock at Lamma Island, an idyllic bedroom community popular with expatriates located off the coast of Hong Kong.

Maritime rules dictate that when two vessels are about to experience a head-on collision, each are supposed to turn starboard, or right, thus avoiding a crash. While the Lamma IV altered its course 13 degrees starboard, Mr. Pryke noted that the Sea Smooth captain turned 16 degrees to the left-hand port side, instead.

While the Lamma IV could have done more to avoid a collision, including by being more attentive to radar readings, Mr. Pryke—whose analysis relied on radar tracking information and other evidence provided by Hong Kong authorities—said that the fault was mostly the Sea Smooth’s.

“Even at the very last moment she could have very easily avoided contact with a small alteration of course to starboard,” he said. The Sea Smooth, he said, “was primarily responsible for the collision,” and human error was “undoubtedly” responsible for the crash—error perhaps fueled by the fact that the captain had been alone in the wheelhouse.

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Ms. Cheng and her husband, Mr. Lui, 43, an employee at Hongkong Electric Co. for more than 10 years, took their two daughters on the passenger boat to view the Chinese national day fireworks, after winning a company lottery.

[…] People were orderly, they weren’t fighting for lifesavers. After taking two, I tried to go back inside the cabin, but I saw an old woman lying on the floor pleading for one of my rings.

I really felt like my life was at the crossroads. Do I give it to her? I didn’t even have time to think it through before I just gave her one. At this point, I was already touching the water.

Then I was quickly pulled deep under water. I think the fact that the other ferry drove away so quickly created some sort of whirlpool that pulled people under very fast. There was also a rope circling my neck, and I was afraid it would strangle me. All I could do at that point was pray. It took me a long time to swim back to the surface, where there was a lot of floating debris. I kept feeling like something was blocking me from getting my head back above the water. […]

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The crash happened Monday evening, a night when Hong Kong’s busy waters were even more crowded than usual, as the city celebrated China’s National Day.

Search and rescue efforts will continue for at least two more days as authorities look for missing passengers, authorities said Tuesday. They did not know exactly many are unaccounted for.

One of the two vessels, owned by The Hong Kong Electric Company, was carrying company employees and their families to watch the scheduled fireworks display when it was struck by a passenger ferry traveling from Hong Kong Island to Lamma Island.

Government officials said the collision occurred off Lamma’s coast around 8:20 p.m., plunging more than 100 people into the water.

Despite recent tensions with the mainland due to the proposed education curriculum change, China deployed boats and divers to assist in the rescue efforts. From the AP:

Hong Kong fire services deployed seven boats, including one to support diving operations, and more than 200 rescue personnel, the government said. Four rescue boats and a team of divers also were dispatched from the mainland Chinese province of Guangdong nearby, China’s official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Social media sites lit up with discussion of the tragedy and condolences for the victims and their families. Cellphone footage of the partly submerged boat was posted to YouTube.

The tragedy is a test for the new administration of Hong Kong’s Beijing-installed chief executive, Leung Chun-ying. His July inauguration was greeted by protests, and opposition by students and their parents against the proposed teaching of China-influenced patriotic history forced his government to back off the plan last month.

“All of Hong Kong’s emergency forces are focused here,” Leung said. “Wide-ranging rescue work is being carried out on in the sea, land and in the air.”

According to the New York Times, six people who are suspected to have been operating the vessels unsafely have been detained:

Three crew members were arrested from each of two boats that collided just off the coast of Lamma, one of the largest of Hong Kong’s many outlying islands, at about 8:30 p.m. on Monday, as the city was gearing up for a mammoth fireworks display that marked China’s National Day.

The six were suspected of endangering passengers by operating the vessels unsafely, senior police officials said at a news conference here in Hong Kong that was widely reported on local radio. More arrests may follow, they added.

The Hong Kong government on Tuesday convened a top-level interdepartmental meeting on the accident and pledged a thorough investigation.

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A victim of the Shanghai Metro crash is helped to safety.

Two trains collided on Line 10 of the Shanghai Metro on this day last year, injuring almost 300 passengers. The accident was initially blamed on a signal failure but was later traced to human error. This accident followed the deadly high-speed train crash in Wenzhou just months before. Lax enforcement of safety protocol and shoddy construction both contributed to the accident.

State Council Information Office: Please close all news discussion boards related to the Shanghai Metro tailgating incident. Promptly clean up and delete messages which seize the opportunity to attack the Party, the government, Party leaders and the social system. Promptly remove discussions seeking to mobilize or incite action. (September 27, 2011)

国新办：上海地铁追尾事件请关闭新闻跟帖，及时清理删除借机攻击党和政府、攻击党的领导人、攻击社会制度的信息，及时删除行动性、煽动性的言论。

Since directives are sometimes communicated orally to journalists and editors, who then leak them online, the wording published here may not be exact. The original publication date is noted after the directives; the date given may indicate when the directive was leaked, rather than when it was issued. CDT does its utmost to verify dates and wording, but also takes precautions to protect the source.

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Xinhua cited a Tianjin traffic official as saying the bus was speeding and that many passengers were thrown out of the vehicle when it hit the car and rolled over.

In eastern Anhui province, at least 10 people died and 19 were injured in a 24-vehicle pileup on an expressway as foggy weather reduced visibility, the Beijing News daily said.

Eleven people in a van were killed after a truck crashed into the vehicle in central Henan province, the newspaper said.

Serious traffic accidents are common in China due to often overloaded vehicles and poorly trained drivers who often ignore traffic laws.

Overcrowding also contributed to the deaths of 41 people in a Henan bus fire in July. Operators frequently take on extra passengers outside official stops and stations in order to expand thin profit margins, but this can lead to overloading and bypassed safety checks.

The holiday also saw Chinese railway police catch 1,777 ticket scalpers around the country, according to Xinhua.

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The investigation shows that Metro dispatchers delivered the wrong orders to the second train, giving it the green light instead of telling it to stop. Dispatchers did not even check the position of the first train still parked in the tunnel, a violation of regulations.

The station’s on-duty operator accepted the order, telling the second train to go on, also without checking whether the tunnel was occupied by another train as required.

Among the 12 Metro officials held responsible for the accident, three were fired from their jobs. They were Zhu Limin, the vice director of Shentong Group’s dispatching department; and Tang Zhihua and Kuo Kang, director and vice manager, respectively, of the dispatching center for Line 10.

Shi Jin, a dispatcher of Metro Line 10, has been transferred.

The other officials, including Shentong’s president, chief executive, vice president, the on-duty operator that accepted the orders and the others, have received warnings or been demoted.

The Washington Post called out a notice on subway operating company Shanghai Shentong’s blog, titled “Bitter Experience, Deep Reflection,” [zh] which today proposed a series of steps to prevent future blunders. The directive, translated and summarized by CDT, sets forth the following 5 tasks:

1. Learn profound lessons and strengthen the sense of safety responsibility at all levels

2. Strengthen key posts and equipment safety controls

3. Strengthen driving safety and risk control measures

4. Increase the safety awareness of and training standards for employees

5. Develop teaching materials based on the accident to increase safety education among employees

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Post tags: accidents, high-speed rail, public transportation, Shanghai, shanghai metro
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As Shanghai’s housing prices rise, residents have little choice but to move further and further away from the city center. They rely on the subway lines to get to work, but the lines were built quickly and shoddily. A common feeling among Shanghai’s commuters is that the subway was not designed to serve them, but to enhance the status of Shanghai’s Communist Party leaders.

Before the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, the city opened four new subway lines intended, in part, to ferry visitors to the Expo grounds from airports and other transportation hubs. Many Shanghai residents worried at the time that the lines were being built too hastily to meet safety standards. But city leaders seemed more afraid that the subway lines would be attacked by terrorists during the Expo. Instead of making it a priority to fix problems with the subway’s infrastructure, they installed x-ray machines to scan the bags of passengers.

A year and a half after the Expo, the scanners remain. BBPanda, a user of Sina Weibo, posted this observation shortly after the Sept. 27 crash: “The metro, which can’t guarantee operational security, still has time to check my bag every day. My bag is sure to be safer than your metro.”

Shanghai Daily quoted Tongji University professor Luo Yanyun, who has similar concerns about misplaced priorities in the expansion of Shanghai’s transit system:

Luo said the lack of good management and the poor abilities of Metro staff were concerns with the city boasting it would have the world’s longest Metro track, more than 500 kilometers, by next year.

“The focus still lies on construction now,” said Luo. “The operation management lags behind.”

See also earlier coverage of the accident on CDT: Shanghai Metro Crash Injures More Than 200 and Power Failure, Human Error Blamed for Shanghai Metro Crash.

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Shanghai Shentong Metro Group Co., the government-owned operator of the 11-line system, said an investigation had determined “relevant operators” failed to meet strict standards while guiding trains manually after “a sudden blackout caused the suspension of operating signals.” […]

Authorities didn’t provide further specifics regarding what it said was human error in failing to follow procedures, nor explain why a system like signaling that is supposed to be fail-safe was vulnerable to a power interruption. Human error was also cited as a contributing cause of a deadly high-speed railway accident in the city of Wenzhou about two months ago that has led to wide public doubts about China’s high-speed rail system ….

The state-run Xinhua news agency says 95 people remain hospitalized while 189 others were so far discharged. That figure adds up to 284, according to the state-run China Daily, more than a dozen more than authorities reported the night of the accident … Authorities say head trauma and broken bones are among the more serious injuries. No deaths have been reported.

An expert quoted by Shanghai Daily suggested that staff had been left behind by the pace of the network’s growth.

Luo Yanyun, a professor at Tongji University’s Urban Mass Transit Railway Research Institute, said yesterday: “Using the telephones for dispatch is usually the last choice the Metro operator would make once the signals are cut.”

Luo said the method depended on human control and thus was “of relative poor safety. It will affect normal operation but the accident should have been avoided.”

Luo added: “I have been calling for the government to set up a whole safety analysis and evaluation system on the subways.” […]

Luo said the lack of good management and the poor abilities of Metro staff were concerns with the city boasting it would have the world’s longest Metro track, more than 500 kilometers, by next year.

“The focus still lies on construction now,” said Luo. “The operation management lags behind.”

While Shanghai Metro’s apologies on Sina Weibo lacked a certain elegance, its president’s Japanese-style contrition scored relatively highly. From Evan Osnos at The New Yorker:

… [O]fficial China has very little affinity for the public-bow-of-abject-apology, which Japanese corporate executives have raised to a form of public theatre. So it was a surprise on Tuesday when the president of the Shanghai Metro, Yu Guangyao, began a press conference about China’s latest train crash with a nicely executed bend in the fifteen-degree range. “I’d like to offer deep apologies to the city’s residents and passengers for the commuting inconvenience that this has caused them,” he said. “I’d also like to convey my deep solicitude to injured passengers.” […]

Bowing to the public as an apology may have its benefits. A few years ago, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao made the rare gesture of bowing before a train station full of stranded passengers in Hunan, after heavy snowfall paralyzed the transit system. “I cannot find enough words to express my condolence,” Wen said, winding up to the thirty-degree option. As Li Yuan of the Wall Street Journal points out, early reviews of the Shanghai bow are grudgingly positive. “Learning to bow to apologize is at least a sign of progress,” Sina Weibo user Jiajianvwudeatongmu wrote Tuesday. “When have you seen any government official or leader bow?”

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A rear-end collision took place today at around 2:30pm or 3pm at the Laoximen metro stop on Line 10 (some reports say Yuyuan Gardens Station, but we’re taking the most recent reports.) Due to a signal failure in Xintiandi Station, the trains reportedly had switched to manual control, which is where things went wrong.

We’re still waiting for clear info on exactly what happened, but one of the trains was reportedly sitting at Laoximen Station for 30 minutes before the collision happened ….

Update 6 [5:48pm]: Shanghai Metro reports that the total number of injured passengers now stands at 212, with 3 seriously injured ….

Update 9 [5:56pm]: Shanghai Party Secretary Yu Zhengsheng (俞正声) is already on his way to visit injured passengers at the Jiaotong University-affiliated Shanghai Number 9 People’s Hospital ….

Update 10 [6:11pm]: According to multiple Chinese sources, Shanghai CASCO Signal Corporation (上海卡丝柯信号有限公司), the company that provided signals for Line 10, also provided the signal technology involved in the Wenzhou rail disaster. (h/t to @MrBaoPanrui)

See also Charles Custer at Penn Olson on the social media reaction to the accident:

News of the crash spread quickly on the site as passengers like Weibo user Ji Fashi used their phones to spread word of the incident, as well as upload images they had recorded, including the photo above. Other users have been busy spreading these first-person reports; the picture above, for example, has been retweeted at least 45,000 times, and probably way more than that given that many people have re-uploaded the photo from their own accounts rather than passing along the original upload.

The accident quickly rocketed to the top of Sina’s trending topics list, where it has remained all afternoon, accruing over a million comments in the space of a few hours. As with the train crash, many Weibo users are furious, and someone dug up an old Xinhua piece from 2005 titled “Shanghai Will Never Have a Subway Accident” that hasn’t helped calm anyone down.

Update: The New York Times has a good overview of the crash and its context:

State news media reported that the line’s signal system failed around 2:10 p.m. and that supervisors were directing subway trains by telephone before the accident occurred.

It was not the first time that the line has encountered problems.

Two months ago, a signaling problem on the same line caused one train to take a wrong turn; some passengers even reported that the train began to run backward, posing the threat of a collision, according to a report in the state-run news media.

The Shanghai Metro insisted that the equipment supplier for line 10 was not the same as the supplier of the equipment that failed in the Wenzhou accident. But a news release found online shows that the equipment used on the line 10 signal was produced by Casco, a joint venture between the French company Alstom and a Chinese company. Casco produced the signaling equipment for the high-speed line in Wenzhou ….

And according to Xinhua, Tuesday’s crash came after the third signal failure on line 10 during the past three months.

Shanghai Daily recalls earlier problems with Casco’s equipment on the Shanghai Metro:

Casco’s record of signal problems dates to late 2009. A signal circuit glitch led to two trains on Metro Line 1 colliding on December 22, 2009 with no casualties. Casco was punished for that incident.

Staff from the company had wrongly laid out wire in a signal circuit in 2001 when the line was extended.

In an incident in July, also on Line 10, a train that should have been heading for Hangzhong Road instead took the other track at a Y-shaped intersection and ended up at Hongqiao Railway Station.

Yu Guangyao, the board of chairman of Shanghai Shentong Metro Group, which runs the Metro, said his firm got reassurances from Casco after the glithes in July ….

Shentong told Shanghai Daily after July’s accident that the error occurred when the operators were upgrading and testing the new CBTC signaling system. But it was a test on a train full of passengers.

As Shanghaiist reports, Casco also provided equipment for subway lines in Beijing, Dalian, Tianjin, Shenzhen and Changchun, with more projects underway across China.

Shanghai Metro has evidently struggled to strike the right balance in its public response. Withing six hours of the accident, Sina Weibo users saw a contrite apology posted and then quickly deleted, followed by a more optimistic one which soon disappeared as well, to be replaced by a variation on the first. From China Real Time Report:

…Lawyer Yuan Yulai wrote, “The current [social] system won’t allow normal human feelings.” Another lawyer, Cui Xiaoping, said, “The original statement was deleted because it didn’t follow the [appropriate] propaganda style ….”

About five hours after the accident, Shanghai Metro posted that the No.10 line has resumed service. And an hour after that, an apology posting similar to the original version was restored.

It’s not clear why the postings were deleted and reposted. But blogger Lengyun wrote, “You can compare the wording of the two postings then you should be able to understand the thinking of the propaganda system.”

Others worried how whether Shanghai Metro conducted a thorough inspection of the system, given how quickly service resumed. Blogger Wenyifuxingzhifan said, “we don’t need apology. We need safety.”

ABC News has more on Chinese netizens’ reactions to the crash:

Because Twitter is blocked in Mainland China, many people have turned to its Chinese counterpart, Sina Weibo, to vent their anger.

“Last time one train on Line 2 went into the wrong direction,” a Sina Weibo user named “China” wrote. ”They said they were fine-tuning it, and there would be no crashes. How could they explain it now?”

“Accidents one after another, what happened to China!” Sina Weibo user “Jiaboshi” wrote.

“Faulty products are threatening our lives!” “Kanlai9851″ wrote.

The users’ thinly veiled subtext referred to the deadly Wenzhou high-speed train crash in July that killed 40 passengers and injured 192. The Wenzhou crash is seen as somewhat of a watershed moment for the Chinese micro-blogging social network when it, despite being heavily monitored and at times even censored, exploded with outrage.

See this video of the crash aftermath via China Daily:

Sources:

- “Breaking: Rear-end collision on Shanghai metro line 10, injuries reported” from Shanghaiist
- “Subway Crashes in Shanghai, Weibo Explodes” from Penn-Olson
- “Shanghai Subway Accident Injures Hundreds” from the New York Times
- “The Case of the Disappearing Shanghai Subway Apology” from the Wall Street Journal’s China Real Times blog
- “Shanghai Subway Crash Enrages Chinese ‘Netizens’” from ABC News

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Post tags: accidents, public transportation, Shanghai, subway, weibo, wenzhou, Yu Zhengsheng
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