A high-speed passenger train jumped its tracks and slammed into another train in eastern China yesterday, killing at least 70 people and injuring more than 400 in China’s worst train accident in a decade.
Authorities were quoted as saying that human error was to blame.
The death toll could rise, with 70 people hospitalized in critical condition after the pre-dawn crash in a rural part of Shandong Province, the official Xinhua News Agency said.
It said a total of 420 people had been hurt. Injured survivors included four French nationals, a Chinese national sailing coach and a three-year-old boy.
Xinhua said investigators had ruled out terrorism as a cause of the crash. Its English report said it was human error, while its Chinese-language report attributed the crash to negligence without giving other details.
Xinhua said, however, that two high-ranking railway officials in Shandong had been fired.
The crash just before the May Day long weekend holiday happened when a train traveling from Beijing to Qingdao derailed and hit a second passenger train just before dawn. Nine of the first train’s carriages were knocked into a dirt ditch, Railway Ministry spokesman Wang Yongping said in a statement.
The second train on its way from Yantai in Shandong to Xuzhou in eastern Jiangsu Province was knocked off its tracks although it stayed upright. News photos showed several of its carriages sitting across the train tracks just outside the city of Zibo.
News photos showed rescuers pulling passengers from a carriage sitting on its side. Survivors stood or sat near the wreckage.
Xinhua said bloodstained sheets could be seen on the ground beside the twisted train cars.
It did not say how many people were on both trains.
“Most passengers were still asleep, but some were standing in the aisle waiting to get off at the Zibo railway station,” one passenger surnamed Zhang told Xinhua.
“I suddenly felt the train, like a rollercoaster, topple ... to one side and all the way to the other side. When it finally went off the tracks, many people fell on me,” Zhang said.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
RSS