"Planning", or lack thereof

I appear to be in a bit of a vitriolic mood today because of the screw up of the Super Bowl coverage by the morons at ZHTV. That being said, I thought that I would pass along this story with some further comments. I don’t know how long this link will stay “alive”, so I suggest that you get to it quickly.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22978449/?GT1=10856

For the better part of four weeks, many of the central and south central provinces have been experiencing severe snow and ice storms accompanied by the predictable disruptions in road, rail, and air travel. This has been no secret. The situation has been reported in both the domestic and international media for all of that time. It is also no secret that the Spring Festival holiday period is upon us along with the accompanying travel “crunch” that happens every year at this time as millions try to arrange transportation to their home towns to be with their families for the holidays.

For the past five or six days the local media has been awash with stories of the hordes of people, many of them migrant workers, cramming into railway, bus and air terminals in a desperate and panicked effort to get home to their families. Most notable of these stories were/are the ones about the huge masses of people, as many as 3000,000 at one time by some estimates, most of whom are migrant workers, flooding the main railway station and the surrounding city streets in Guangzhou. These poor souls had been standing in queues (if you can call them “queues” in China), unprotected from the weather for as long as 4 or 5 days in rain and sub-10 degree temperatures.

For the three weeks prior, most of the stories presented on the national media (CCTV) were ones in which they praised the wonders of the magnificent, Chinese inspired, Olympic Games venues such as the “Water Cube” and the “Bird Cage” which were either opening or nearing completion in Beijing. By the way, don’t let this get around, but both of those structured were designed and engineered by foreign architectural firms

Is it any wonder to anyone who has spent more than 12 hours in China that there was a stampede at the Guangzhou railway station in which someone was trampled to death? It did not come as any surprise to me that there was someone killed in a stampede at the Guangzhou railway station, or that 59 others across the country had lost their lives by weather-related causes, mostly traffic accidents. What is surprising to me, however, given the scope of the weather problem, is that the reported mortality numbers are so low. I strongly suspect that the actual numbers are considerably larger than that, probably by a factor of ten or more. I don’t have a great deal of faith in the objectivity of the reporting in the Chinese news media.

I guess that the real issue is; WHERE THE HELL WAS THE GOVERNMENT IN THE 3 WEEKS LEADING UP TO THIS DISASTER? This is a question being asked not only by me, but by many of the locals I know as well. Couldn’t they predict that such a huge adverse weather event, at the peak travel time of the year, could have such a huge impact on millions of their own citizens? Oh sure; they set up a few canopies and distributed some packages of dried noodles at a few railway stations; and when they finally came to grips with the magnitude of the situation, they advised a million or so migrant workers to abandon their plans for their once-a-year visit with their families. The events of yesterday and today showed how successful that strategy was.

This morning, CCTV9 reported that the railroad was able to get about 100 trains out of Guangzhou, and therefore send 200,000 “happy” travelers on their way. Do the math. Do they expect us to believe that each train carried 2000 passengers? This may be possible, but I think that it is most unlikely.

This was, and is, China’s “perfect storm”. Given what I have seen over the past week or so, it seems that the government, unlike those in other countries, had absolutely zero contingency plans in place to deal with such a situation. If an “uncultured, unenlightened, and inadequately educated” foreigner such as I could predict that something like we are witnessing now was going to happen, why couldn’t our wonderfully competent leaders in Beijing fit this planning into the “harmonious society” of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”?

But, then again, the words “contingency planning” are like the words “workplace safety”; neither of which exist in the contemporary Chinese vernacular.