Chinese authorities came under fire yesterday after the worst subway train accident in 42 years raised fresh concerns that the world’s second-biggest economy is sacrificing safety in the rush to develop.
Officials were still investigating the cause of Tuesday’s crash in Shanghai in which 270 people were injured, 20 of them critically.
It came just two months after a deadly collision between two high-speed overland trains in Wenzhou set off a wave of criticism of China’s ambitious rail building plans.
The Global Times newspaper, owned by Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, called the managers of China’s cities “backward” and said that increasing speed should not come at a cost to public safety.
“The tragedies in Wenzhou and Shanghai keep reminding people that China cannot afford failure,” it wrote in an editorial.
“Shanghai has already had the appearance of a developed city, but accidents such as the subway collision and the Shanghai fire last November [in which 53 people died] reveal that it is still a developing city at its core,” the Global Times said.
The Shanghai government and an outside investigative team were examining the crash, which occurred after the failure of the signal system forced staff to direct trains by telephone.
Chinese Internet users took to popular microblogging sites to criticize the government for its breakneck plans for rapid development and for sacrificing public safety.
“This is one wave after another. Everybody should learn self-rescue methods because that’s what it takes to survive in this country,” a user called Long Maoer 88 said. “What happened in Shanghai tells us that the government has not served its people whole-heartedly and can’t even learn from mistakes.”
Other Internet users demanded to know why the government had not published its report into the high-speed train crash in late July that killed 40 people.
“The Shanghai metro has rear-ended, look at how the lives of the ordinary people are a joke,” said a user called The Miracle of energetic mindfulness. “Why is it that we still don’t have the truth of the high-speed train crash. What else is there to hide?”
Parts of Line 10 on which the accident occurred were closed yesterday, but other lines were operating normally.
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