Tianjin disaster crews fight to neutralize site amid anger in China
Tianjin disaster crews fight to neutralize site amid anger in China
Specially trained disaster crews are
racing to neutralize a toxic cocktail of chemicals at a Chinese disaster
site before rain falls and potentially causes more devastation, as
scores of people – mostly first responders who charged unawares into the
nightmarish scene – remain missing in Tianjin.
The
desperate work was set against seething anger in China against what
people are calling the “Pinocchio” version of events put forward by
officials, and widespread questions about the bent rules and systemic
failures behind one of the worst man-made disasters in the country’s
modern history.
The death toll now stands at 112, after
massive explosions from a warehouse filled with deadly chemicals
scorched the port area of the sprawling city on the shores of Bohai Bay
not far from Beijing last week. At least 95 are unaccounted for missing,
85 of them firefighters.
Chinese
Premier Li Keqiang came to the site Sunday, leading a moment of silence
and standing for photos as the country’s leadership seeks to demonstrate
competence and compassion. But his visit was met with bitter jokes
that, until Sunday, the air in Tianjin was too toxic for the top
leadership to breathe.
Mr. Li visited a Tianjin fire station and called the firefighters “all heroes” who “deserve the respect of the whole society.”
At
the explosion site, meanwhile soldiers dressed in heavy breathing masks
and trained in “nuclear biochemical detection” were dispatched to the
toxic remnants of a warehouse that once contained at least 100 tonnes of
sodium cyanide – far in excess of what was allowed at the site, Chinese
media reported – and calcium carbide. The latter can create noxious
gases when it mixes with water, and crews were racing to clean up
stockpiles before the next rain.
Online,
meanwhile, authorities struggled to cleanse a raging conversation that
attacked the official response and the system that had allowed such a
disaster to happen. Social-media users shared photos of families
rallying behind a giant handwritten banner demanding an details about
the missing: “Either we see them alive or see their bodies,” read one.
Anger
emerged in hashtags calling the situation “A real life Pinocchio” and
demanding “Tanggu explosion truth,” a reference to the Tianjin
neighbourhood where the blasts left a gaping crater.
“We demand the truth, and strict punishment to comfort the victims!” wrote one person on China’s Facebook-like Weibo site.
“People
are casting doubt on the credibility of official information,” said
Lynette Ong, an associate professor at the University of Toronto who
studies the political economy of development in China. “While [Chinese
President Xi Jinping’s] government can get tough on information control,
its credibility isn’t improving. The consequence seems to be the
opposite.”
Local media, too, have
pushed the boundaries of government criticism, with the Beijing Times
asking why state television has continued to cut away from press
conferences once questions begin.
Journalists
at those press conferences gave some insight into why: Facing a barrage
of inquiries, propaganda officials often gave no response, saying only,
“Let me check.” Local security personnel have also sought to physically
obstruct foreign media from speaking to family members of the missing.
Access
to public registry websites has also been blocked, although on Sunday
the National Enterprises Credit and Information System revealed
information on Ruihai International, the company that owns the exploded
warehouse. It listed the chairman as Li Liang, a man identified by
overseas Chinese media as the nephew of Li Ruihuan, a Tianjin-born
former Politburo member and chairman of the Chinese People’s Political
Consultative Conference.
The disaster’s
aftermath has raised numerous questions about how Ruihua was able to
store such large volumes of dangerous chemicals closer to residential
neighbourhoods than Chinese law allows, raising suspicions of high-level
corruption.
On Sunday, the Supreme
People’s Procuratorate, the top prosecution body in China, launched an
investigation into “possible illegal acts, such as abuse of power or
dereliction of duty and deal with those acts which may constitute
crimes,” the Xinhua news agency reported.
The
first blasts in Tianjin came exactly 1,000 days since Mr. Xi became
general secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee, the day he
ascended to the pinnacle of Chinese power. Some seized on the series of
explosions as a symbol of “his imminent downfall, which took the blast
victims as his burial sacrifices,” said Rose Tang, one of the leader of
the student protests at Tiananmen Square in 1989, and now a biting
critic of the Chinese regime.
“Such blasts and accidents are inevitable because of the corruption and absence of rule of law and democracy.”
The
Communist Party of China has long held a grand bargain with its people
that allowed the party to ruthlessly maintain power in exchange for
providing an ever-improving standard of life.
But
waning growth – its effects keenly felt, particularly as house prices
falter – has raised scrutiny, and public criticism, of the ways life has
also degraded.
With “this sort of
man-made enormous tragedy, combined with China’s slowing economy and the
increasing revelations of extreme corruption of Party and military
leaders, people may start to question whether the existing political
institutions are really good enough for China,” said Charles Burton, an
associate professor of political science at Brock University who
specializes in China.
end quote from:Tianjin disaster crews fight to neutralize site amid anger in China
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