Another Accident, An Unexpected Response

Earlier today, a bullet train collided with another in the Eastern Chinese city of Wenzhou, killing 40 and leaving over 200 injured. The spectacular crash catapulted 4 cars into a viaduct and 2 others off the track, leaving many including myself wondering how only 40 lives were lost. The official Communist Party explanation is that a lightning strike caused an outage, which caused track equipment to malfunction, ultimately causing the crash. That's the official story, anyway. But Chinese aren't buying it.

Unfortunately, accidents involving mass transportation vehicles happen dozens of times a year across the globe, and they cost many lives. With 1 in 6 people in the world and beset by aging infrastructure in many lower tier cities, these sorts of incidences are quite common in China. The difference, however, between those events and this is an unprecedented, in Chinese terms, development: the increasingly interconnected Chinese are not buying the nonsensical version of events Beijing is selling, and they're demanding answers unlike ever before.

In a country where few locals know of what happened in 1989 at Tian'anmen Square, and those that witnessed and lived to tell the tale likely seldom did so for fear of repraisal, this sort of rebelliousness is truly remarkable. Ruled by an autocratic government that tightly controls all forms of media, the Internet is increasingly posing a problem for Chinese authorities as they hopelessly try to stem and form the tide of public opinion as they have always done. The ruling party in Beijing would be well served to learn from the lessons of the 'Arab Spring': the Internet has changed the world; and the establishment's media is no longer the authority on what's happening. That role now rests with The People.