By Jianjun Tu and David Livingston
A high-speed train crash near Wenzhou in the coastal Chinese province of Zhejiang took the lives of at least 39 people on July 23 and has raised equal measures of fear, anger and astonishment across the country. Preliminary reports indicate that a bullet train running from Hangzhou to Fuzhou had been struck by lightning, causing it to break down on the tracks. Shortly afterwards another locomotive heading from Beijing to Fuzhou careened into the stalled train, derailing six cars and pushing four of them entirely off the viaduct (New York Times, July 24; 21st Century Herald, July 27). In addition to the fatalities, at least 210 were injured in what is now the highest-profile setback for China’s ambitious rail program. While Beijing has moved quickly to control the flow of information (albeit not successfully) surrounding the disaster and disclosed the foreign origin of its bullet train technologies, the Chinese public and the broader international community are unlikely to be satisfied by such dismissals (Caijing, July 24). The accident is a “canary in the coal mine”, as it were, for a much larger structural challenge facing China. The breadth of Chinese ambitions to indigenize foreign technologies and scale them for mass deployment has simply outpaced its ability to plan, operate and staff these complex undertakings in a safe and sustainable manner. This is true in the case of high-speed rail, and it threatens to become the overarching storyline for the country’s nuclear energy program. The tragedy on the tracks in Wenzhou delivers lessons that Beijing would be wise to heed, not only for the management of its rail networks but also for the more critical issue of its 2020 nuclear energy goals.
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