StormShadow
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In an unprecedented act of defiance, some leading Chinese newspapers have ignored a ban on negative coverage of the Wenzhou bullet train crash and have been critical of the government's handling of the disaster.
Newspapers were told to avoid all mention of the crash "except positive news or information released by the authorities", but some papers risked censure to run stark stories about the 23 July accident in which 40 people were killed and scores were injured.
The Economic Observer, a respected business weekly, ran a hard-hitting eight-page special on the crash, pictured here, featuring a bleak photograph of the wrecked bullet train overlaid with a blood-red logo of the railway ministry.
"No miracles in Wenzhou", it said. On the bottom of the page was an editorial written in the form of a letter to Xiang Weiyi, a two-year-old girl discovered alive in the train wreckage 21 hours after the accident that killed her parents, after the search effort had officially been called off. It began:
"Yiyi, when you've grown up and started to understand this world, how should we explain to you everything that happened... When you're grown, will we and this country we live in be able to honestly tell you about all the love and suffering, anger and doubts around us?
How do we tell you that, even as they'd declared there were no more signs of life in the wreckage and had started cleaning up the site, you were still there struggling in the crushed darkness.
Do we tell you that, with the truth still far off in the distance, they buried the engine; that before any conclusions had been reached, the line that had given birth to this tragedy was declared open..."
It concluded:
"Yiyi, if we're going to promise you and other regular children like you a future, the journey must start from the wreckage of the train collision. That is the best way to remember your parents, and all the others who perished there."
The Beijing News chose to tell the story through code. It ran a front-page article about the breakage at a Beijing museum of a piece of pottery from the Song dynasty.
Hardly earth-shattering stuff, until you start noticing the parallels between this innocuous event and the crash in Wenzhou.
The bowl broke into six pieces six train carriages were derailed in Wenzhou and the accident happened because data was wrongly entered. The museum was "very distressed". The news was announced days late and the museum denies a cover-up.
The report ran above a photograph headlined "China's Speed", which shows Chinese swimmer Sun Yuan breaking the world record at the World Championships in Shanghai, but which can also be read as a comment on the high-speed rail obsession at government level.
Even the Communist Party's official organ, the People's Daily, said China did not need GDP growth smeared with blood.
The ban on negative coverage came after premier Wen Jiabao visited Wenzhou to pledge transparency and openness, promising to punish those responsible.
There were similar outpourings of anger after the poisoning of infant milk formula in 2008, but this time the outrage is being vented on the popular Weibo microblog service, where the rail crash was the top trending story.
"If the media trend is to comment only on the kindness of Wenzhou people, on the bravery of soldiers rescuing people and how hardworking the rail ministry is, then it is a faceless thing, an absolute shame," one comment said.
Chinese newspapers defy ban to report on train tragedy | Media | guardian.co.uk
Newspapers were told to avoid all mention of the crash "except positive news or information released by the authorities", but some papers risked censure to run stark stories about the 23 July accident in which 40 people were killed and scores were injured.
The Economic Observer, a respected business weekly, ran a hard-hitting eight-page special on the crash, pictured here, featuring a bleak photograph of the wrecked bullet train overlaid with a blood-red logo of the railway ministry.
"No miracles in Wenzhou", it said. On the bottom of the page was an editorial written in the form of a letter to Xiang Weiyi, a two-year-old girl discovered alive in the train wreckage 21 hours after the accident that killed her parents, after the search effort had officially been called off. It began:
"Yiyi, when you've grown up and started to understand this world, how should we explain to you everything that happened... When you're grown, will we and this country we live in be able to honestly tell you about all the love and suffering, anger and doubts around us?
How do we tell you that, even as they'd declared there were no more signs of life in the wreckage and had started cleaning up the site, you were still there struggling in the crushed darkness.
Do we tell you that, with the truth still far off in the distance, they buried the engine; that before any conclusions had been reached, the line that had given birth to this tragedy was declared open..."
It concluded:
"Yiyi, if we're going to promise you and other regular children like you a future, the journey must start from the wreckage of the train collision. That is the best way to remember your parents, and all the others who perished there."
The Beijing News chose to tell the story through code. It ran a front-page article about the breakage at a Beijing museum of a piece of pottery from the Song dynasty.
Hardly earth-shattering stuff, until you start noticing the parallels between this innocuous event and the crash in Wenzhou.
The bowl broke into six pieces six train carriages were derailed in Wenzhou and the accident happened because data was wrongly entered. The museum was "very distressed". The news was announced days late and the museum denies a cover-up.
The report ran above a photograph headlined "China's Speed", which shows Chinese swimmer Sun Yuan breaking the world record at the World Championships in Shanghai, but which can also be read as a comment on the high-speed rail obsession at government level.
Even the Communist Party's official organ, the People's Daily, said China did not need GDP growth smeared with blood.
The ban on negative coverage came after premier Wen Jiabao visited Wenzhou to pledge transparency and openness, promising to punish those responsible.
There were similar outpourings of anger after the poisoning of infant milk formula in 2008, but this time the outrage is being vented on the popular Weibo microblog service, where the rail crash was the top trending story.
"If the media trend is to comment only on the kindness of Wenzhou people, on the bravery of soldiers rescuing people and how hardworking the rail ministry is, then it is a faceless thing, an absolute shame," one comment said.
Chinese newspapers defy ban to report on train tragedy | Media | guardian.co.uk
