China fire sparks scuffle‚ kin clash with police

  • Death toll at least 120‚ with 77 injured in hospital • Worst industrial disaster in recent years

REUTERS

People crying after their relative died in a fire at a poultry slaughterhouse in Dehui, Jilin province, on Tuesday.

REUTERS

DEHUI: Relatives of workers killed as fire engulfed a chicken processing plant in rural northeast China blocked traffic and scuffled with police today, demanding answers to one of

China’s worst industrial disasters in recent years. At least 120 people died, and more than 70 were injured.

A handful of men and woman knelt in the middle of the road in Dehui in Jilin province to stop cars, while a crowd of more than 100 people gathered around them. Police dispersed the protesters after about an hour. Zhao Zhenchun, who lost both his wife and his sister in the fire, said human error was to blame for the death toll. “I don’t think safety was being managed properly. This should never happen again. They paid the price with their blood. So many of these big disasters in China are caused by lax supervision,” he said.

The world’s second-largest economy has a poor record on workplace safety. Fire exits in factories are often locked to prevent workers taking time off or stealing things, or blocked entirely. “The rationale behind the locked doors boils down to efficiency. With the doors locked, workers cannot wander about freely, and therefore concentrate on their work,” the official Xinhua news agency said. Safety regulations are also easily skirted by bribing corrupt officials, and in any case China has relatively few fire safety inspectors.

“Tragically, most of the inspections usually come after a disaster like this,” said Geoffrey Crothall, a China labour expert with Hong Kong-based advocacy group China Labour Bulletin.

“There’s very little proactive or routine inspections of factories to make sure everybody’s up to code and that’s largely because there are too many factories and too few inspectors.” It is a safety record likely to prompt concerns overseas as Chinese companies buy stakes in or take over foreign food producers, such as Shuanghui International Holdings’ $4.7 billion offer last week to buy leading US pork producer Smithfield Foods.

Premier Li Keqiang has ordered a thorough probe into the disaster and promised the authorities will ‘earnestly investigate to find out who was responsible’, the central government said in a statement on its website (www.gov.cn).