Blood on China’s bullet train rush

Beijing, July 24: China sacked three senior railway officials today and called for an urgent review of its burgeoning high-speed train network after a collision left at least 35 people dead and over 200 injured.

The accident — the worst in the four-year history of China’s bullet train network — occurred when a train hurtling through the countryside near the eastern city of Wenzhou careening into a second train from Hangzhou that had stalled on the tracks in a thunderstorm. Two carriages were derailed and four were hurled off a bridge.

Two foreigners of undisclosed nationality were among the dead. The Chinese state news agency reported that a four-year-old child and a boy toddler were rescued 21 hours after the crash.

The tragedy is a low to China’s high-speed rail ambitions — a frenzied schedule of new track construction precariously balanced on allegations of massive corruption.

The first reaction of the state-run Chinese media appeared to be to play down the accident even as blood-spattered survivors described their ordeal, causing outrage among China’s millions of microbloggers.

None of the country’s four largest newspapers covered Saturday's train crash on their front pages on Sunday morning, prompting many bloggers to openly question whether the government cared about life and death in its pursuit of prestige projects.

For Beijing, the timing of the accident could scarcely have been worse as it gears up efforts to sell its high-speed trains around the world.

The fatal collision occurred just a few hours after He Huawu, the chief engineer at the railway ministry, boasted to a media conference about the reliability of Chinese high-speed rail, and its superior quality over equivalent networks in Japan and Europe.