What happened around 8:29 p.m. on July 23, has been put together, piece by piece, but not in any official report. Despite a strict gag order from the Central Propaganda Department, some media outlets and netizens are still digging into the truth about the accident and assigning responsibility to guilty parties.
What Happened
The traffic controller at Wenzhou South Station found that the southbound line toward Wenzhou showed an all red signal zone. That meant there was some dysfunction of the rail or the signal. After making sure that the dysfunction was not caused by the rail but by the signal, the controller turned the control system to abnormal control and ordered the express train D3115, which waited at Yongjia Station, to go. Abnormal control is a manual control status.
The controller also ordered that, once D3115 saw a red signal, it should switch to see and go mode. The train should drive very slowly, guided only by the operator’s naked eye, until it passed the red light zone.
However, the controller didn’t order D301, which was behind D3115 and left Yongjia Station nine minutes later, to switch to the same mode. It is thought the controller must have assumed that the D301 would encounter red signals behind D3115. It didn’t. The driver of the D301 saw all green signals up until the moment he saw D3115 with his own eyes. With D301 traveling at 175 kilometers per hour (108 mph), even though the driver pulled the brake, D301 still hit D3115 at 100 kmph (62 mph).
The driver was killed on impact. So, too, were at least 38 others, according to the official death toll—netizens speculate the actual death toll is in the hundreds.
Insufficient Explanations
If a thunderstorm hadn’t damaged the equipment, things would have been different, or so the Ministry of Railways (MR) would have it. At a July 24, press conference, Wang Yongping, the MR spokesperson, claimed that the crash was caused by equipment damaged by a lightning strike.
This damage could be the reason for the original all red signal zone, but it couldn’t explain the accident. Experts would not accept lightning as an excuse for the crash. In the first place, the railways should have robust measures for preventing damage from lightning. In the second place, even if lightning did damage equipment, operations should still be protected by backup plans and systems.
That the traffic controller apparently made a wrong assumption is also not a sufficient explanation. If the controller did assume the signals behind D3115 would be red, perhaps he did so because he didn’t know the signal equipment used at the Wenzhou Station had serious design problems. The newly appointed head of Shanghai Railways Bureau, An Lushen, admitted this after the crash.
How could a system with serious design problems pass all the approving, testing, and checking for the high-speed trains before it was accepted and put into operation? The same products are widely used on railways all over China, and on many other traffic control systems, including the subways.
Missing Train Protection System
The signal equipment was not the only system with design problems.
Bullet trains around the world are all equipped with an Automatic Train Protection system (ATP). When the MR imported the bullet train technology from Japan, Germany, and France, it didn’t import the ATP system.
In 2007, the MR proudly announced it had a “world class indigenously developed high-speed train protection system.” The current system is called the Chinese Train Control System (CTCS-2). It is said to have track circuits, plus balise (a kind of electronic beacon installed between the tracks), plus ATP, which is functionally equivalent to the European ETCS Level-1.
When the Wenzhou collision happened, most netizens assumed that the system was mistakenly shut down or dysfunctional. In fact, the system was very likely never installed.
According to Wang Mengru, a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, the emergency automatic brake for the bullet train is still only a theory in China. The emergency brake for the bullet train depends mostly on the driver’s manual operation. This claim was made during a media interview after the collision.
If this is so, then what is the function of the “world class” CTCS-2? Is it just a low tech, old fashioned manual or semi-automatic system that has been passed off as an ATP system? Such counterfeiting is not without precedent. A few years ago, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology tried to install Green Dam software in every computer in China, which turned out to be a poor counterfeit of a U.S. company’s software.
Read more: The real significance of the Wenzhou train crash...
Waiting for Disaster
If the controller had not made a wrong assumption, if the signals were not defective, if the railways had a functioning ATP system, if any of these factors had been different, the deadly crash would not have happened.
Those in charge at the MR either pretended not to know the real situation or were cheated by the vendors. Either way, the situation is terrifying. High-speed trains in China are running every day with either insufficient or nonexistent safety systems.
After the MR press conference failed to provide an adequate explanation for the disaster, Wang Xuming, the former spokesperson in the Ministry of Education wrote an open letter to his counterpart Wang Yongping in the MR.
In the letter, he mentioned that several days before the accident, they had a meeting. Wang Xuming asked, “I am mostly worried that if the high-speed railway system collapses, if a bullet train collides or is derailed, what should we do? How do we handle it? You said, ‘This is also what worries me the most.’”
They knew the situation all along. Those in the inner circle are just waiting for disaster to strike.
The Party Accelerating
Speed has always been the most important issue in China’s bullet train development. The train that crashed in Wenzhou used Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. technology. Even though the top speed the train was designed to operate at is 275 kph (171 mph), the Chinese tested it at speeds sometimes exceeding 350 kph (217 mph). Kawasaki formally submitted a memorandum in 2008 to the Chinese side that it would not take any responsibility should something happen. The higher speed was reached not by improvements in the design but by disregarding safety.
A well-circulated People’s Daily article from December 2010, makes the same point. It told the story of how, in order to drive a bullet train back to Beijing, the train’s driver received only 10 days of training, which by the book should require three months. The article praised this as “China accelerating.”
The future passengers obviously did not need China to accelerate by putting an untrained operator behind the controls of a bullet train. Party leaders, though, wanted to put the bullet train in operation just before the Beijing Olympics. The train’s high speed and the haste with which the rail system itself was constructed were simply meant to showcase a regime seeking to prove itself.
Fast Track Ending
The bullet train, the Olympics, the Shanghai Expo, the Three Gorges dam—these projects and many others all serve the same purpose, buttressing the Communist Party’s legitimacy by attesting to the success of the China Model.
The China model, like the bullet train, aims to awe the Chinese people with its speed. It involves trying to keep the nation’s economy on a fast track while suppressing any possible political reform, any different voices and opinions.
The China model is not something any democracy can imitate. No elected government can put the Sichuan earthquake victims’ parents in jail for seeking justice; no elected government can put the melamine-tainted milk victims’ fathers in jail for protecting children; no elected government dares to announce stopping the rescue effort several hours after a deadly collision, then destroying the evidence in broad daylight, as was done at Wenzhou.
At bottom, the significance of the Wenzhou train crash is not in the design of the high-speed rail system, nor in possible corruption or malfeasance in the MR. The significance lies in the hopes the Party has had that it could outdo its opponents.
Railway troubles played a big role in China’s history 100 years ago, give or take a month.
The rulers at the time tried to nationalize railways built partially by private funds in the southwestern regions of China. The Railway Movement that was intended to protect private investment turned out to be the straw that broke the dynasty’s back. A few months later, the Wuchang uprising succeeded, and the Qing Dynasty lost the mandate of heaven and was overthrown.
Today, in the aftermath of the Wenzhou train crash, the Communist Party has faced anger from all parts of Chinese society, including angry voices inside the Party’s very citadel—the Party’s mouthpiece media outlets. The Party leaders now have more reasons to worry about how to avoid the fate of their predecessors.
After the Party had destroyed Chinese culture and tradition, the economic express train, which in recent years has been represented by high-speed railways, was the only replacement available for heaven as the source of the Chinese Communist Party’s “divine right to rule.” Now, the Party is bound to the high-speed rail system it created, which at Wenzhou has seemed to embody the Party’s accelerating troubles.
