After a Horrific Crash, a Stark Depiction of Injustice in China
Days after a nine-seat van crammed with 62 kindergartners slammed into a coal truck in northwest China this week, killing 21 children and two adults, the 21st Century Business Herald — a state-run, reliably nationalistic newspaper — did something extraordinary. The nine-seat van was carrying 62 children; 21 were killed and the rest were injured, setting off angry discussions about safety standards and corruption. It published a chart.
In one column, the paper recounted recent school-bus accidents in which about 60 children had died. In an adjacent column, it listed the sums that selected Chinese government departments had lavished on new cars in 2010. No Chinese citizen needed a pencil to connect the dots. Since the accident on Wednesday in Gansu Province, China’s Twitter-like microblogs and other social media sites have been alight with heartbreak and outrage over the tragedy — and they have been subsequently red-carded by government censors for unpatriotic emotion. But there are few more devastating statements about what gnaws at modern Chinese than the state-run newspaper’s two columns of numbers.
As China sped toward its new status as the world’s second largest economy, the already yawning gap between the rich and poor grew wider. By sociologists’ calculations, income inequality here is not that far from levels that have spurred social unrest in other nations. But some things are not easily reduced to statistics. There is an argument, buttressed by the Gansu tragedy, that what truly eats at people here is not so much the rich-poor gap as the canyon that separates the powerful from the powerless. “Most Chinese aren’t angry about rising inequality,” said Martin K. Whyte, a Harvard sociologist who specializes in research on Chinese social trends. “It’s not rich versus poor. It’s the system of power and procedural injustices that they’re upset about.” And in fact, many episodes in the litany of scandal and misfortune that has consumed Chinese Web surfers in recent years had little to do with money.
According to China’s major social media platform, Sina Weibo, the country’s most influential bloggers, the social scientist Yu Jianrong, wrote that school buses were notoriously overcrowded, while government officials built themselves palatial offices and bought luxury cars. It is a known fact that the roads in China are among the world’s most dangerous and continue to remain unrepaired despite increasing traffic tragedies! Especially shocking is that “The biggest problem of China’s school bus industry is not the lack of a standard, but the rampant use of illegal vehicles,” a prescient vehicle-rental businessman from Beijing, Zhang Jie, told China Daily, a state-run English-language newspaper. Children and young students are frequently killed in large numbers from traffic incidents that slip by without being reported. This is just another blatant example of the Chinese Government’s worship of money over human lives. In these cases, the lives of innocent school children. 🙁 Very scary!
In a Country where a citizen would rather run you over to finish you off rather than have to pay for your medical, I can’t pretend to be surprised by this! I still keep the toddler Yue in my prayers. (The little girl left in the street who was run over twice with onlookers standing by her.) I still can’t get over the shock of that incident!