China Chronicles August 28, 2012
- China's first aircraft carrier starts another trial
China's aircraft carrier starts 10th sea trial yesterday after one-month cease. The nation's first carrier, refitted from former Ukraine vessel Varyag, left port on August 10 last year for its first sea trials and since then has regularly been tested in both the Yellow and Bohai seas.
- 28 Chinese fishermen missing in S. Korea due to typhoon
TWO Chinese fishing boats with 34 crew members aboard capsized today in waters about 1.8 kilometers from South Korea's port of Hwasun in Jeju's Seogwipo, an official from the Chinese Consulate stationed on Jeju has confirmed.
Six crew members have been rescued and 28 others went missing, the official said.
The two fishing boats, "Yuejiangchengyu" No. 91104 and No. 91105, both from Weihai city of East China's Shandong province, capsized around 2:40 am local time due to gale-force winds and high waves caused by Typhoon Bolaven, the official said.
According to report of Yonhap, South Korea's official news agency, two crew members reported the accident to South Korean authorities after coming ashore. They were taken to a hospital for treatment as one of them sustained serious injuries and the other complained of difficulty breathing.
A third crew member was rescued later.
Currently, the Chinese Consulate is maintaining close contact with local police in regards of search and rescue effort.
- China investigating reported incident involving Japanese ambassador's car
Relevant authorities are seriously investigating the report that the flag of the Japanese ambassador's vehicle was ripped off in Beijing, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson's office told Xinhua yesterday evening.
The Chinese government always conscientiously fulfills the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to protect the safety of foreign embassies and personnel, the office said.
It was reported that the Japanese flag of a car carrying the Japanese ambassador Uichiro Niwa was pulled off by an unidentified person in Beijing yesterday afternoon.
- China investigating reported incident involving Japanese ambassador's car
Relevant authorities are seriously investigating the report that the flag of the Japanese ambassador's vehicle was ripped off in Beijing, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson's office told Xinhua yesterday evening.
The Chinese government always conscientiously fulfills the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations to protect the safety of foreign embassies and personnel, the office said.
It was reported that the Japanese flag of a car carrying the Japanese ambassador Uichiro Niwa was pulled off by an unidentified person in Beijing yesterday afternoon.
- 31 Chinese fishermen missing in S. Korea due to typhoon
TWO Chinese fishing boats with 34 crew members aboard capsized today in waters about 1.8 kilometers from South Korea's port of Hwasun in Jeju's Seogwipo, an official from the Chinese Consulate stationed on Jeju has confirmed.
Three crew members have been rescued and 31 others went missing, the official said.
The two fishing boats, "Yuejiangchengyu" No. 91104 and No. 91105, both from Weihai city of East China's Shandong province, capsized around 2:40 am local time due to gale-force winds and high waves caused by Typhoon Bolaven, the official said.
According to report of Yonhap, South Korea's official news agency, two crew members reported the accident to South Korean authorities after coming ashore. They were taken to a hospital for treatment as one of them sustained serious injuries and the other complained of difficulty breathing.
A third crew member was rescued later.
Currently, the Chinese Consulate is maintaining close contact with local police in regards of search and rescue effort.
- nailed up for nothing
- Shanghai
- Expert angered by bridge collapse reports
BAD weather, overloading and human error have been blamed for a series of bridge accidents that left more than 140 people dead over the past five years, but not shoddy construction.
The findings have angered an expert who said the bridges were "doomed" to fail due to quality problems.
Fifteen bridges, including three under construction, collapsed between 2007 and this month, killing 141 people and injuring another 111. But official reports made public say that no case was triggered by poor quality.
According to the investigation reports, torrential rainfall and overloaded trucks caused the most accidents, yesterday's Shandong Business Daily reported.
Of the 15 bridges, three - in Henan and Hunan provinces and Chongqing City - were said to have been damaged by heavy rain while overloaded trucks were blamed for problems at four bridges in Chongqing and Hangzhou cities and Fujian and Jilin provinces.
However, when pictures of the wreckage of the Yihe Bridge in Luanchuan County in Henan were published, they showed that no steel bars had been used in the construction of the ramps that had broken. The collapse of the bridge killed 53 people in July 2010.
In July last year, gaps appeared in the middle section of the No. 3 Qianjiang Bridge in Hangzhou, capital city of Zhejiang Province, injuring a truck driver.
The bridge was said to have been weakened by overloaded trucks, but experts from the city's traffic authority said the bridge had been plagued by severe quality problems. The government announcement, however, insisted the collapse had nothing to do with shoddy construction, the newspaper reported.
Besides torrential rainfall and overloading, authorities also pointed the finger at unlicensed contractors.
Chen Zhaoyuan, an academician with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said tight schedules and lack of routine maintenance had caused the collapse of the 15 bridges. Only three of them had been in use for more than 15 years.
Some officials! had urged contractors to build the bridges as quickly as possible without taking actual conditions into consideration, which resulted in safety hazards, Chen said.
However, the major contributor to the accidents was still poor quality, he said. "Our national standards toward load-bearing capacity are half as strict as international standards. So frequent accidents are doomed to happen due to quality issues," he said.
Last Friday, three people were killed and five injured when a bridge ramp in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, collapsed.
A 120-meter ramp on the multimillion-dollar Yangmingtan Bridge, less than a year after construction finished, tilted and crashed to the ground, sending four trucks plunging 30 meters. Three of the four trucks were heavy-duty vehicles carrying lime. Together they weighed more than 400 tons, the local authority said.
The local government blamed the overloaded vehicles, while China's work safety watchdog said the build quality of the bridge was in question.
"The bridge must have some problems as it collapsed a year after being constructed," Huang Yi, spokesman for the State Administration of Work Safety, told reporters.
Authorities in Harbin yesterday released details about the designer, builder and supervisor of the bridge, Xinhua news agency reported.
The Harbin government also disclosed details of the trucks at a press briefing.
The ramp was designed by Harbin Municipal Engineering Design Institute, built by Fujian Jiaojian Group Engineer Co Ltd and supervised by Heilongjiang Baixin Construction Engineering Supervision Co Ltd, said Huang Yusheng, secretary-general of the Harbin government.
Huang said the ramp had no direct relationship with the main body of the Yangmingtan Bridge. He said the collapse of the ramp had little effect on the bridge, and traffic flow had resumed.
Huang also disclosed that all four trucks were heavy-duty, but he did not clarify if they were overloaded at the time of the accident.
On Fr! iday, Huang suggested that overloading could be one of the possible causes for the accident.
His words triggered a flurry of Internet comment, complaining about shoddy construction and accusing the government of inadequate supervision.
The ramp was built in 90 days at a cost of 7.09 million yuan (US$1.13 million), Huang said.
Of the five injured, Huang said one was still in critical condition while the other four were stable.
- Mother's anger ends in fatal petrol bomb attack
A WOMAN angry at her former company that hadn't given her son a job threw a petrol bomb into a meeting room, killing three people and injuring four others.
Shi Yanfei, who had retired from the Shaoyang Water Company in Shaoyang, Hunan Province, broke into its meeting room at 10am yesterday and threw a bottle filled with petrol at officials.
The subsequent explosion and fire killed Long Xinmin, the company manager and Party chief, deputy manager Rao Xiaoyang, and the company's deputy Party chief Shao Jiaping.
Shi, who was also injured in the fire, jumped from the sixth floor in a suicide attempt, China News Service reported. She was taken to the hospital and later died from her injuries.
An initial investigation suggested that Shi had been angered at the water supply company's decision not to recruit her second son although his older brother had gained a position in the company.
Shi was said to have taken early retirement - a policy in place in state-owned enterprises in order to make room for younger people - and there was speculation the company might have made an offer to give both her sons a job in lieu of paying a sum of money in compensation.
The investigation found that she had become extremely angry when she had heard that someone with close connections to the company's managers had been given the job that she believed should have gone to her younger son. However, police have not yet confirmed these details and their investigation is ongoing.
- Taiwan residents facing typhoon's return
TYPHOON Tembin, which drenched southern Taiwan last week before heading out to sea, appeared to be looping back yesterday for another run at the island and the nearby Philippines, forecasters said.
The revisit comes after another storm about 1,200 kilometers to the northeast, Typhoon Bolaven, lashed the Japanese island of Okinawa. It injured five people and left 66,500 households without power as of yesterday afternoon, but did less damage than feared before moving north into the East China Sea.
Bolaven could affect coastal areas of South Korea today, weather officials said.
Taiwan weather officials predicted Tembin would make landfall early this morning in the same part of southern Taiwan where it dumped more than 500 millimeters of rain three days ago.
Tembin, packing winds of 119 kilometers per hour, will likely skirt the eastern Taiwanese coast before moving north toward the Chinese mainland, the bureau said.
In Manila, typhoon warnings were reissued.
- Lawyers in plea over transport card fund
PUBLIC transport card deposits have become a huge topic on China's social media sites after three lawyers called for more transparent regulations regarding the deposits.
The lawyers, from Jiangsu and Henan provinces and Beijing, sent a letter to the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council last week, urging the government to better regulate deposited money and disclose the whereabouts of the funds.
"The details of this fund have not been publicized despite repeated requests from citizens and members of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, which infringed on the public's right to know and undermined the credibility of urban transport sector," the lawyers wrote.
The transportation card was introduced on a large scale in 2006 in major cities including Shanghai and Beijing.
Data showed that the country had issued more than 180 million transport cards and the total deposits were estimated at between 1.8 billion yuan (US$285.71 million) and 5.4 billion yuan.
"The public has the right to know who is managing the deposit fund, how the money has been invested and how about the returns?" read one post on Sina Weibo.
"I strongly support the lawyers' move. As the deposit fund earns hefty interest each year, local governments should release the details of the fund in a timely manner," was another Weibo post.
"We will not give up until the government publicize the management of the card deposits," said Wang Yu, one of the three lawyers.
- Guangzhou starts using car plate lottery, auction
THE southern Chinese megacity of Guangzhou conducted its first ever car license plate lottery yesterday, nearly two months after it introduced the policy to ease traffic jams and cut pollution.
A total of 5,640 applicants were awarded plates at the lottery, attended by the representatives of the applicants, notaries and officials.
Guangzhou said last month it would allocate the city's annual 120,000 new car registration quota through a dual model of auction and lottery.
Among 64,866 people who applied for the lottery and auction, 58,405 passed an assessment to vie for 10,907 plates, which means that one out of six people will be lucky enough to win a plate.
But the odds of winning are likely to shrink as more applicants enter the lottery later.
It is not known how many applicants participated as the city keeps the number of bidders confidential. The auction is set to start today. Among yesterday's 5,640 winners, 4,800 were individuals, 654 were office applicants and the remaining 186 were registered for plates for energy-saving or new-energy vehicles.
Guangzhou becomes the fourth Chinese city to cap small passenger vehicle registrations after Beijing, Shanghai and Guiyang.
- Fishermen say pollution cause of massive fish kill
AUTHORITIES in Anxin County in Hebei Province attributed the death of 1 million kilograms of fish in Baiyangdian Lake to environmental changes, triggering controversy among fishermen who blamed illegal chemical dumping.
Flooding in the upstream Xiaoyi River sent a large amount of mud and wastes into the lake and decreased oxygen in the water, which caused many fish to die, authorities said.
But fishermen said the lake had turned black and red and emitted a smelly odor because of illegal chemical discharges from factories in the upstream counties, poisoning the fish, Beijing Times reported yesterday.
The fish died between August 12 and August 14, causing economic losses up to tens of millions of yuan. The fish were removed and buried on August 18, the paper said.
Wang Xiaocang, a fisherman from Dahenan Village, said fish started to jump out of the water.
"The mixture of mud and water has a lot of floating debris and never emits stinky smells, but this time, the water smells so bad," Wang said.
A local villager surnamed Liu said the upstream water had given off a strong odor since August 5 and "forced villagers to close the windows and doors" to avoid being overwhelmed by the odor.
The fishermen suspected textile mills and fur processors in Gaoyang and Lixian counties caused the contamination. They said they would bring the plants to the court if they got conclusive evidence, the paper said.
Local government officials said the fishermen who suffered big losses could register for compensation.
Villagers said many plants in Gaoyang and Lixian were closed in 2006 after massive fish kills at Baiyangdian Lake. However, the factories reopened soon.
Residents in Nanzong Village denied the plants directly discharged waste to the river, but admitted illegal dumping in some ditches linked to it.
- 9 die as truck hits van
A speeding tractor-trailer rammed into a Toyota van yesterday morning in northwest China's Shaanxi Province, killing nine in the van.
Officials of Suide County in the city of Yulin said the truck hit the van on the Qingdao-Yinchuan Expressway. The crash, blamed on the truck's speeding, led to a pile-up crash involving four other vehicles.
- Province bans overnight buses after crash
ALL the red-eye bus trips in Shaanxi Province will be banned starting next week after a deadly bus accident claimed 36 lives and injured three early Sunday, the provincial governor said yesterday.
At the same time, all buses traveling from nearby provinces to Shaanxi late at night will be forced to pull off the highway for the driver to rest for safety concerns, said the governor, Zhao Zhengyong.
The announcement was made after a crash at 2:18am on Sunday in which a fully-loaded double-decker sleeper coach rammed into the back of a tanker loaded with highly flammable methanol, triggering a fire that engulfed both vehicles and left 36 people on the bus dead, including the driver.
The transport company in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region yesterday published the names of 20 victims. The names, published by Hohhot Municipal Transport Group, the owner of the bus, indicates 12 victims were from the provinces of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Henan, as well as Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.
Three survivors severely burned in the accident are being treated at a hospital.
The bus driver who died, Chen Qiang, a man in his 40s, is now suspected of driving dangerously fatigued. The bus station of the double-decker coach told China Central Television yesterday that they had received warning from a GPS device on the coach.
An official with the bus station showed a video of the drivers taking shifts driving the coach, according to CCTV. About 2am, the station got the warning saying that Chen was driving while overly tired.
One survivor, Wei Xuemei, said the bus driver saved her by pushing her out of the bus window before it was devoured by flames. Wei said someone broke the bus window for her but she wasn't able to climb out until the driver pushed her out.
In the past 17 months, over 140 people have died in double-decker sleeper coaches in six accidents. Companies were ordered to stop manufacturing or selling sleeper bus products starting in March of th! is year.
- Day 5
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Somewhere in China...
炸锅粉 I still find delicious food I have never eaten before - Guiyang, Guizhou - you were happier
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"Be it a weakness, it deserves some praise, We love the play-place of our early days; The scene is touching, and the heart is stone, That feels not at that sight, and feels at none."
- William Cowper
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