China Chronicles August 27, 2012
- 9 killed in van-truck collision in Shaanxi
A commercial vehicle collided with a truck this morning on an expressway in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, leaving at least nine dead, local officials said.
The accident occurred at around 6am in the city of Yulin on the Qingdao-Yinchuan Expressway that spanning northern China, municipal officials said. - Day 4
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- Expressway horror as crashes claim 47 lives
Forty-seven people died and four others were injured in two separate expressway collisions in China yesterday.
The first accident occurred at around 2:18am in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, when a fully-loaded double-decker sleeper coach rammed into the back of a tanker loaded with highly inflammable methanol, triggering a fire that engulfed both vehicles and left 36 people on the bus dead, including the driver.
Only three people survived the accident. Two of them are being treated in hospital for serious burns.
The two drivers of the tanker, who were not injured, were taken into police custody as an investigation began.
In the other accident, a van carrying 12 people crashed into a heavy-duty truck on an expressway in southwest China's Sichuan Province yesterday afternoon, killing 10 people in the van and injuring the two others.
The two injured were sent to a nearby hospital but one died at 3:30pm after rescue efforts failed.
The truck was stopped at the roadside for a tire repair when the van rear-ended it, local work safety authorities said.
In the Shaanxi accident, the bus, full of sleeping passengers, was heading from Inner Mongolia's capital Hohhot to Shaanxi's capital city of Xi'an when it rear-ended the tanker, which had just returned to the expressway after an early morning rest stop in the station close to Yan'an City in Shaanxi.
Both vehicles burst into flames after methanol leaked from the tanker.
A staff member at a nearby gas station said he heard the crash. "It sounded like a tire bursting," the man said.
He and his colleagues rushed to the scene with extinguishers when they saw fire break out.
The fire brigade in Ansai County received an alarm call at about 2:40am and three fire engines and 10 firefighters were sent to the scene, said Wei Chaoyang, director of the fire brigade.
"We found that the fire was very big and the methanol that leaked from the tanker was keeping running to the bus and nearby dra! inage, forming a 'running fire' that hampered our rescue," Wei said.
Wang Xianze, one of the three survivors, told reporters that he was sleeping, like the other passengers, when suddenly he felt a blast like a bomb going off.
He said he felt a huge shockwave crush against his chest, making it extremely hard to breathe and he was knocked out for about 60 seconds. When he regained consciousness, he jumped out of a window, sustaining injuries to his legs.
He had just two minutes to escape before the fire engulfed both vehicles. "After regaining consciousness, I fumbled about feeling my body and head and found I was not injured. So I opened the window by my side and jumped out," he said, adding that the other passengers didn't have enough time to escape.
Another survivor, Zhang Shixiong, 42, from Hohhot, said: "I was sleeping when the huge bang woke me up. I got up fast and pulled the passenger beside me, asking him to run as the bus has caught fire.
"I was so scared that I kept running out without looking back. As soon as I ran out of the bus, it exploded in another bang."
Wei Xuemei, 27, the third survivor, from Sichuan Province, said she was woken up by the sound of people trying to smash open the bus windows.
"I tried hard to smash the windows open but it didn't work. Then I ran and escaped the bus by climbing through the bus' burnt iron frame," she said.
Yue Jiuxiang, an official with Yan'an City Fire Bureau, said the accident caused so many casualties because the liquid methanol had leaked from the tanker to the bus.
The bus was so badly damaged in the crash that passengers were not able to escape from the front door, Yue said.
The fire spread extremely fast as the bus was carrying a lot of flammable goods such as quilts and passengers' luggage.
The tanker, owned by Mengzhou No. 1 Transport Co Ltd in central Henan Province, was transporting methanol from Shaanxi-based Yulin Energy and Chemical Co Ltd to the eastern province of Sh! andong, X! inhua news agency reported. The bus belonged to Hohhot Municipal Transport Group.
A top-level team has been sent to Yan'an to investigate the accident, the State Administration of Work Safety said.
- Yanyu takes the pain out of homework
ATTENDING classes is not usually a way to make money, but using what you have learned to do someone else's homework can be quite lucrative.
As the end of the summer holiday approaches, Chinese pupils increasingly find themselves bogged down in too many school assignments.
But "Yanyu," a college graduate in north China's Hebei Province, is enjoying a business boom. Yanyu, a screen name meaning "misty rain," is a staunch defender of students' freedom during the holiday season. Freedom, however, that comes at a price.
"Seventy yuan (US$11) for an exercise book for a senior-high student, 10 yuan for an exam paper and 5 yuan for a short essay," says Yanyu in an advertisement posted online.
With a team of three, Yanyu says his ghostwriting services can rake in several thousand yuan for each of them during the summer holidays, as many students come to them for help with their holiday homework.
"Schooldays are a vital period in one's life and should not be buried in homework," he says.
Yanyu is one of many ghostwriters, mostly college students, profiting from a widespread problem of too much homework and too little time to play.
"Half of my summer holiday has been in remedial classes, with piano courses and loads of homework. I find the holiday more tiring than semesters," said Wang Qi, a senior high student in Hebei.
Even life in primary school is not easy. Holiday homework for a 11-year-old can include four essays and more than 60 pages of exam papers.
However, experts say the real danger suggested by the emergence of homework ghostwriting was that the "fake culture" of the adult world seemed to be filtering down to infect adolescents.
"When adults hire ghostwriters to write a thesis or reports, they may not realize that they're setting a very bad example for the children," said Han Xiaoyu, a teacher at Shijiazhuang No. 40 Middle School.
Wang Zhongwu, a sociologist at Shandong University, said the phenomenon is due to China's high tol! erance for fakery.
"The lenient penalties have prompted fakery to spread like cancer cells, severely compromising social credentials," Wang said. "But the impact of homework fakery is worse than counterfeit products or false accounts, as it dirties the soul of our children."
- Taiwan warning that typhoon will return
TAIWAN residents were warned yesterday that Typhoon Tembin was likely to return as people struggled to clear mud-filled homes after the storm pounded the south of the island with the heaviest rains in more than a century.
The typhoon appeared to be heading back towards Pingtung County where people were still reeling from the flooding sparked by Tembin when it swept across the southern tip of the island on Friday.
Tembin weakened to a tropical storm after moving out to sea but it intensified into a typhoon again.
"Tembin regained strength and became a typhoon again early this morning. It was moving east-southeasterly," the weather bureau said yesterday.
Although the typhoon was still hundreds of kilometers from the island, the bureau predicted downpours in the south and southeast and called on people there to take precautions.
On its current track, Tembin was forecast to make landfall again in Pingtung tomorrow morning and move northward off the east coast.
"The clean-up has yet been finished even though we've kept working the past three days. And now I heard the typhoon is coming back," the owner of a shop in Hengchun township told the Sanli cable news network.
"This typhoon has destroyed much of my hard work over the past 20 years," he said, visibly upset, while other members of the family used mops to remove thick mud from the floor.
The storm's unusual movement was affected by Typhoon Bolaven which struck Japan's Okinawa yesterday, about 800 kilometers east of Taiwan.
Tembin forced more than 8,000 people to evacuate their homes when the torrential rain struck Pingtung. Weather bureau data indicated the county had received 724 millimeters of rain since last Wednesday, while Hengchun saw more than 600 millimeters of rainfall on Friday alone.
Damage to the agriculture sector totalled TW$168 million (US$5.6 million), according to the Council of Agriculture Affairs.
Last night, Tembin was around 400 kilometers southwest of the south! ern Kaohsiung City. With a radius of 180 kilometers, it was packing gusts of up to 126kph and moving east-southeast at 5kph.
- Tycoon under investigation in loans case
A HIGH-PROFILE entrepreneur in Erdos in the Inner Monglia Autonomous Region is under investigation after collecting a total of 2.6 billion yuan (US$410 million) from private lenders, according to the China Business Journal.
Li Pengfei, chairman of Inner Mongolia Xinyuantai Investment (Group) Co Ltd, an industrial conglomerate in the city whose businesses cover thermoelectric power plants, waste-water treatment, toll operations and real estate development, is currently under surveillance at home as the local public security bureau investigate claims of illegal fundraising.
The case is said to involve some 1,600 creditors, according to the newspaper.
It said Li had been having difficulty in paying interest on loans since April last year, but because of the company's large business portfolio, no action appeared to have been taken until earlier this month.
On August 9, more than a hundred investors approached local government officials demanding an investigation into the state of Li's company and its assets.
Li's group has 14 subsidiaries, and most of the money raised from private lenders was used to fund the daily operation of those subsidiaries, the newspaper said, citing an unidentified source.
- Crackdown on violence at rehabs
STAFF who resort to violence while treating Internet addicts at rehabilitation centers are to be banned from continuing in their jobs.
Zhao Jing, director of a national project responsible for training and appraising psychological instructors for teenage Internet addicts, said the center will fail those who resort to violence.
Licenses will be revoked by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security if violent conduct is found, Zhao was quoted in yesterday's China Youth Daily as saying.
China began to license psychological instructors for teenage Internet addicts in 2010 and now has 1,567.
Concerns over Internet addiction have resulted in increasing numbers of treatment centers in the past few years.
In 2010, two instructors were jailed after a 15-year-old was beaten to death at a facility in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region.
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