A while back, I had a long enjoyable chat till dawn with my roommate, Maxime De Techtermann, about the democracy in China and India,he spoke highly of the high-speed railway in China, and set it as an example, 'Last year I paid a visit to China for business communication, instead of airplanes (cause the airport is too far away from the downtown), I took a train from Shanghai to Beijing. Over 1300km in 5 hours, Ricky, this is gorgeous, Chinese government finally do something good despite the clever foreign economic strategy. That’s the forceful advantage of despotic government. You can profit massively from this in 10 years.'
A collision between two trains on July 23rd near the coastal city of Wenzhou-famous for its east-jews businessmen, not only killed at least 35 people (most of the people believe it’s over 60), but also unleashed a torrent of online criticism of the network and the railway bureaucracy which has whipped up a new wave of public anger toward the Ministry of Railways —toward the government more generally — and brought a new and crazy sharing of information online, even as authorities have moved quickly to stem media coverage.
For many Chinese, one of the most frustrating aspects of this story has been the government’s apparent unwillingness to answer the most basic questions, and its tendency to fall back on fuzzy responses.
Then to turn around society is making a progress more or less, especially the rising of civic awareness, it's not rational yet and sometimes is lack of analysis and independent or critical thoughts in most cases, but 'half a loaf is better than no bread'. 信不信由你，反正我信:)
Yes, we can. But what you should notice is that, for months, doubts and accusations have also swarmed on China’s high-profile push to develop its high-speed rail system. But harder questions — about corruption, waste, quality, safety, service and intellectual property — were submerged , pushing claims of technological superiority to win political points, which is a everyone-knows secret.
Fortune or misfortune, we got a tragic opportunity to prove now.
A collision between two trains on July 23rd near the coastal city of Wenzhou-famous for its east-jews businessmen, not only killed at least 35 people (most of the people believe it’s over 60), but also unleashed a torrent of online criticism of the network and the railway bureaucracy which has whipped up a new wave of public anger toward the Ministry of Railways —toward the government more generally — and brought a new and crazy sharing of information online, even as authorities have moved quickly to stem media coverage.
For many Chinese, one of the most frustrating aspects of this story has been the government’s apparent unwillingness to answer the most basic questions, and its tendency to fall back on fuzzy responses.
Actually, 3 accidents have already happened in a row in July due to the same reasons, all eyes on china’s new high-speed rail, the questions are: why there was no contingency plan, why passengers had not been compensated, why backup power systems had not been used . Responses from the Ministry of Railways were not forthcoming at first, as then claimed that ‘it was only natural that the high-speed rail needed time to work out the kinks.’
The tension between real answers and propaganda seemed to boil over at yesterday’s press conference with Wang Yongping(王勇平), the Ministry of Railways spokesman. Especially when Wang was asked yesterday how it was possible that a five-year-old girl was found alive after officials had declared an end to the search and rescue, Wang responded: ‘That was a miracle. ‘shouts erupted among the reporters, “It is NOT a miracle! It is NOT a miracle!” The reporters didn’t want to hear more nonsense. They wanted to know exactly why the girl had not been found earlier, and what her discovery revealed about the nature and handling of the search and rescue itself.
The internet has proved a powerful public monitor in China, especially since Twitter-like services, which called sina-weibo, began to take off 2 of years ago. I have to say, Twitter-like sina-weibo is not a perfect information resources, cause the numerous of rumors and analysis-less opinions, but at least, it’s a progress of civic awareness.In this case, it has provided real-time, uncensored insights into a disaster that the authorities would doubtless have preferred to be covered in another style by trusted party organs like the Xinhua News Agency.
This accident is a tragedy.I convince accidents in general are unavoidable, and they happen everywhere. But this accident can be entirely avoidable if railway authorities had taken the design and construction of the trains more seriously, or alternately, if they had listened to the warnings coming from all areas of society over the past few weeks and stopped the operation of high speed trains until the obviously serious problems could be fixed.
Then to turn around society is making a progress more or less, especially the rising of civic awareness, it's not rational yet and sometimes is lack of analysis and independent or critical thoughts in most cases, but 'half a loaf is better than no bread'. 信不信由你，反正我信:)
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