MCLC: stark depiction of injustice

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: stark depiction of injustice
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (11/18/11):
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/19/world/asia/a-horrific-crash-sets-off-onli
ne-anger-in-china.html

After a Horrific Crash, a Stark Depiction of Injustice in China
By MICHAEL WINES and IAN JOHNSON

BEIJING ‹ 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.

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, China¹s 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 newspaper¹s two columns of numbers.

As China sped toward its new status as the world¹s second largest economy,
the already yawning gap between the rich and poor grew wider. By
sociologists¹ 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.

³Most Chinese aren¹t angry about rising inequality,² said Martin K. Whyte,
a Harvard sociologist who specializes in research on Chinese social
trends. ³It¹s not rich versus poor. It¹s the system of power and
procedural injustices that they¹re upset about.²

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.

After a young man fled last year from a hit-and-run accident by invoking
his father¹s rank as a deputy police chief, the phrase ³My father is Li
Gang² became a national catchphrase for using connections to escape
responsibility.

After a much-publicized high-speed rail crash in the eastern city of
Wenzhou killed 40 people in July, online critics and journalists contended
that corruption had enriched powerful officials at the expense of safety
or had encouraged cover-ups of officials¹ misbehavior.

The Railway Ministry admitted to high-level corruption and fired several
officials, although a government report is two months overdue, and scores
of victims have yet to be compensated.

By many accounts, the awful van accident in Gansu Province only
underscored the impotence that some Chinese feel in the face of authority.

For years, China¹s roads have been among the world¹s most dangerous.
Statistics for 2009, the most recent available, show that 67,759 people
died on the road in China, a 7.8 percent decline over the previous year.
That capped a decade of steadily declining road fatalities.

But another study, by the World Health Organization, cast serious doubt on
the official Chinese figures. Comparing policy data with hospital records,
the study concluded that the real death rate from traffic accidents was
roughly twice the official figure. That would make China¹s roads the most
dangerous among middle-income countries.

The dangers facing students in substandard school buses were known to
government officials. In July 2010, the national government ordered that
buses carrying primary school students meet strict safety standards that
included emergency exits, seat belts and data recorders to track drivers¹
behavior. Unregistered minibuses were outlawed.

Some were skeptical that the new standards would have much effect. ³The
biggest problem of China¹s school bus industry is not the lack of a
standard, but the rampant use of illegal vehicles,² a prescient
vehicle-rental businessman from Beijing, Zhang Jie, told China Daily, a
state-run English-language newspaper, at the time.

Without enforcement, he said, new standards would represent ³just a piece
of paper² and data recorders expensive decorations.
Five months later, 14 students died when a three-wheel farm truck being
used as a school bus tumbled into a river in Hunan Province. And in
September, police officers in Hebei Province stopped an eight-seat van in
Qian¹an with 64 preschoolers stuffed inside.

³The government should not wait for more fatal crashes to occur to take
whatever steps are needed to ensure that the nation¹s children are as safe
as they can be,² China Daily stated then.

On Wednesday, just two months later, the van badly overloaded with the 62
children, along with a teacher and the driver, careened down a foggy
street and crashed head-on with a coal truck. The van was demolished,
killing 23 passengers, and injuring everyone else on board.

The government took swift action, as it often does in cases of public
embarrassment. The Education Ministry ordered a national inspection of
school buses, and four local officials were suspended pending an inquiry.

The news ignited indignant postings on China¹s major social media
platform, Sina Weibo. One of the country¹s 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.

Microbloggers posted photographs of an elaborate new government office
building in Qingyang, the poor town where the accident occurred.

A post on the blog of Caixin, a business magazine known for its
rule-bending investigations, reported that the building¹s garage and
ventilation systems alone cost more than $2.2 million.

By Thursday, the discussion in China¹s blogosphere had turned sharply
against the government. A microblog post by local officials in Gansu
Province that hailed the swift official response to the disaster was
hooted down by critics and was subsequently withdrawn.

Commentators asked why countries like the United States had enormous,
high-riding school buses instead of shoddily built microvans.

The magazine News Weekly posted a rhetorical question on its blog: ³Why
doesn¹t the flower of the nation have a proper flower pot?² and posted
next to it a picture of a big yellow school bus.

Other bloggers were even more blunt.

³Qingyang is nothing but a representative of tens of thousands of places
in China. It¹s no more than the tip of an iceberg,² wrote one poster who
called himself Kuaile de Jingling Laodie.

³No matter how poor we are, or how much hardship there is, we cannot let
the leaders suffer.²

Li Bibo and Shi Da contributed research.