Epidemic of incidents is gathering steam in China

Here are the facts, which were picked out from various Chinese media outlets over the latest eight days.

July 2nd: 15 people died because of the flood on Hangcheng (Shaanxi province) private mine.

July 3rd: three workers were killed with the fall, which happened when dismantling a building of the four-storied business building. Nine workers were hospitalized.

July 4th: an explosion took place on a private mine in Suishu (Jilin province) – 39 people remained under the ground.

July 6th: A wall of a building fell down in the town of Changsha, killing 13 people, injuring 15. Six female workers of a shoe factory in Guangdong province (the factory belonged to a Taiwanese businessman) over chemical poisoning. Ten miners died in a mine of the same Guangdong province; seven miners died in one of the private mines in the settlement of Suishu (the owner of the mine escaped).

July 8th: an explosion took place in the mine in Hegang, killing 44 people. Thirteen workers were poisoned with ammonia leakage at the chemical fertilizers factory in the province of Shandong. An accident happened with a bus that was going along the Shenzhen- Shantou road, nine people died, 26 were hospitalized.

July 9th: the fire broke out at the Taiwanese fish boat (the crew of the ship were the people from the continental part of China). One hundred and twenty-eight people managed to save their lives out of the total number of 138.

These facts are horrific, aren’t they? However, they do not exhaust the tragic statistics of the latest eight days: we would have to consider this period as relatively favorable otherwise (only 20 deaths a day). Pursuant to the recently published information, about one million incidents happened in China in 2001, about 130 thousand people were killed as a result of those incidents (including 12554 people that died at industrial and mining enterprises). This was 50 deaths every working day. Workers’ deaths basically come from market rules, which push businessmen to profit.

Andrey Krushinsky PRAVDA.Ru Beijing

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov

AP photo: Rescuers sit beside the entrance of Fuqiang Coal Mine in the town of Songshu in northeast China's Jilin Province