Boss Rail: The disaster that exposed the underside of the boom

[Chris_]

Boss Rail: The disaster that exposed the underside of the boom

On the morning of July 23, 2011, passengers hurried across Beijing South Station at the final call to board bullet train D301, heading south on the world’s largest, fastest, and newest high-speed railway, the Harmony Express. It was bound for Fuzhou, fourteen hundred miles away.

The driver of D301, Pan Yiheng, was a thirty-eight-year-old railway man with a broad nose and wide-set eyes. In the final seconds, Pan pulled a hand-operated emergency brake. His train was high atop a slender viaduct across a flat valley, and immediately ahead of him was train D3115, moving so slowly that it might as well have been a wall.

The Wenzhou crash killed forty people and injured a hundred and ninety-two. For reasons both practical and symbolic, the government was desperate to get trains running again, and within twenty-four hours it declared the line back in business. The Department of Propaganda ordered editors to give the crash as little attention as possible. “Do not question, do not elaborate,” it warned, on an internal notice. When newspapers came out the next morning, China’s first high-speed train wreck was not on the front page.

New Yorker

Chinese politicians are willing to sell lives and public safety for positive press and international investment.  Why are we doing business with this country?

[JohnnyReb]

Didn't click the link......just want to add that China is discussing building high speed rail here in the U.S..

[obumazombie]

Historically, whenever the Chinese ran into a problem, they had more than enough populace to throw people at it.
As for government owned media, the Chinese took notes from socialists who wrote the book on media and propaganda.