[These incidents were heavily
censored on Chinese social media platforms amid calls from President Xi Jinping
to maintain
“political stability” in the lead-up to the Chinese Communist Party’s
100th anniversary celebrations in early July. The Henan fire didn’t make the
front page of the provincial Henan Daily newspaper or break the top 50 topics
discussed on Weibo.]
By Rebecca Tan, Lyric Li and Alicia
Chen
State-run news agencies have
provided wall-to-wall coverage of the collapse halfway across the world, with
daily updates on the death toll and multiple editorials deriding
the U.S. government’s “sluggish” response. A hashtag started by Chinese news
broadcasters saying that American citizens were losing faith in an
“American-style” rescue effort garnered over 21 million views on Weibo. On
Sunday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying fired off a tweet on the condo collapse —
her third in a week — noting that a cat named Binx was rescued from the rubble
in Surfside.
“What about the 100+ lost lives?”
she wrote. “It’s really hard for #Chinese to
understand this kind of #US #humanrights.”
When, on Monday, a hotel in the
Chinese city of Suzhou abruptly collapsed, killing at least 17 people, some
Chinese users were quick to point out the irony online, citing other recent
safety lapses in the country. But pro-government leaders and the party faithful
doubled down, comparing the efficiency of the American and Chinese rescue
efforts.
Ryan Hass, a senior fellow at the
Brookings Institution specializing in China, said he has been taken aback by
how insensitive top Chinese officials have been in their remarks on the
Surfside disaster. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and Hurricane
Katrina in 2005, Chinese leaders were among the first to offer condolences to
the United States, he said. The reaction from Hua and others, he added, appears
to reflect the country’s broader transition to a more aggressive foreign policy.
“There was a certain camaraderie, a
certain humanitarian instinct that used to inform both countries’ diplomacy,”
Hass said. “It’s really striking to think about how far we’ve traveled from
those moments into this one.”
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One Weibo user lamented the
hostilities: “I’m speechless. … In this world, are we only left with power
politics between major countries?”
Within China, coverage of the
Surfside collapse has largely eclipsed news of other local disasters.
In June, a gas pipeline explosion in a Hubei market killed 25
people and injured more than 100. Three days later, a seven-story
building collapsed in Hunan province, leaving five people dead. On June 25,
a day after the Surfside disaster, a
fire tore through a martial arts school in Henan province, killing 18
students — most of them children.
These incidents were heavily
censored on Chinese social media platforms amid calls from President Xi Jinping
to maintain
“political stability” in the lead-up to the Chinese Communist Party’s
100th anniversary celebrations in early July. The Henan fire didn’t make the
front page of the provincial Henan Daily newspaper or break the top 50 topics
discussed on Weibo.
Hu Xijin, editor of the state-run
Global Times, said in an
editorial on the Surfside collapse that “the U.S. rescue capability
with emergency situations is much worse than people think.” Hu, who has sparred with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), acknowledged
the Henan fire but said that unlike the United States, China has a “resolute
attitude to hold those who are responsible to account.” Four municipal leaders
in Henan, he added, had already been removed from their positions.
When part of the Siji Kaiyuan hotel
in Suzhou collapsed, Hu said on Weibo that at least the Chinese rescue
effort was efficient, unlike the “unacceptably sluggish” response in Florida.
As images of Chinese rescuers in orange jumpsuits flooded the nightly news,
others on social media echoed his view.
“Based on China’s rescue
efficiency, the situation will be cleaned up soon, and there will be no
archaeological rescue jokes like in Miami,” wrote one blogger with a million
followers.
[Months
before building collapse, condo board president warned damage to building was
‘accelerating’]
American officials have said that
the response team in Surfside, which includes rescuers from Israel and Mexico,
faced inclement weather and safety hazards when it began, including a
persistent fire among the debris. Claims from Chinese newspapers that survivors waited 16 hours
before response teams arrived are false, said Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett.
He was at the site a half-hour after the collapse, he added, and by that time,
rescue operations were already underway.
“It was a series of impossible
situations on top of an impossible situation,” Burkett said. “And still, every
one of those search-and-rescue teams poured their heart and soul into it.”
There isn’t an official database
tracking building collapses in China, but there have been at least two other
major incidents since 2020. In March last year, 29 people died when the Xinjia
Express Hotel, a covid-19 quarantine facility in the city of Quanzhou, fell
apart. Government investigators later said that hotel owners had added new
stories without notifying authorities, causing the building to exceed its
approved weight. In August, the ceiling of a restaurant in Shanxi caved in,
killing 29 people.
“I don’t think it’s fair to say”
that what happened in Surfside wouldn’t happen in China, said Aidan Chau, a
researcher at the labor rights group China Labor Bulletin, which tracks
workplace accidents in the country, including post-construction building
collapses. According to the Bulletin’s accident map, there have been more than 3,400 workplace
accidents resulting in deaths or injuries since 2015.
In the wake of the devastating 2008
Sichuan earthquake, Chau said, Chinese officials acknowledged that shoddy
construction and corruption contributed to the collapse of about 7,000
classrooms and the deaths of thousands of schoolchildren.
“This kind of practice continues to
happen in new construction sites,” Chau said, especially in inland provinces
where contractors are less familiar with safety codes and often rely on
secondhand or cheap equipment.
Adam Mayer, a California architect
who used to work in China, said both countries will need to invest in more
rigorous safety and maintenance checks as building infrastructure ages.
“There’s more commonalities here than differences,” he said.
Some Chinese citizens agree, though
their voices have been largely drowned out by pro-government actors.
“The discourse on here is getting
more and more disgusting,” one user said Monday on Weibo. “Human life is so
important, why don’t we spend this time praying, trusting the rescuers?
Instead, we have to compare this and that.”
“What’s awkward about it?” another user retorted. “People can pray for the people who are trapped while feeling in awe for how good China is.
”
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