Reply #17: Link to story in Vanity Fair about the corruption and shortcuts that went into China's trains

[sammytko]

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/10/china-201110



The corruption allegations against Liu and Madame Ding and other high-level officials and supply-company bosses prompted some bureaucrats to suspect Liu may have allowed builders (as many as 100,000 were engaged to build our new line alone) to use cheap and substandard materials: hardening agents may have been omitted from concrete poured for the roadbed, meaning that over the years the rails may buckle, and the amount of fly ash used to harden concrete pillars may have been cut, meaning that some pillars could well crumble under the relentless pounding of the expresses

Nor did they, when, a scant three weeks after the inauguration of our train, an express from the very same Rainbow Bridge Station in Shanghai, en route to the southern city of Wenzhou, collided at full speed with another high-speed train that had stalled in a thunderstorm after an electrical failure, and fell a hundred feet off a viaduct. Thirty-nine died—two Americans among them—and more than 200 were injured. It was precisely the kind of prestige-ruining disaster that had been feared, and the reaction to it—when, true to form, the Chinese government began lying about what they soon called “the July 23 incident” (much as they term the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre “the June 4 incident”), and tried to bury the wrecked train cars in giant pits beside the bridge—was predictably hostile.