New Year's Tragedy on the Bund

[mirgcire]

There are many reports of crowd stampede on the Bund.  35 killed and 48 injured.  My Chinese friends have been chatting about this on 微新 and claim these numbers are too small.  The reports also claim that Xi Jin Ping is demanding an investigation in to the cause.  It seems like misplaced priorities to me, but what do I know.

[Angelina]

RIP!

 

There is no need for investigation. I was supposed to go there and was looking at train tickets (Hangzhou-Shanghai). Apparently, everyone wanted to go to Shanghai and demand for tickets was ridiculously high. I kinda stood out on my best friend. 

[淨土極樂]

Apparently somebody's been throwing fake 100 dollar bills from a nearby balcony.

 

Quoting one of the comments from here:

Was there.. terrible terrible situation. The violence quickly escalated almost as soon as the fake money started falling, the crowds began hair pulling, punching, pushing, kicking, stomping and gouging other peoples eyes to get closer. Eventually we seen a growing pyramid of people being crushed and trampled in a bloody boot and high heel stomp. Despite this, the guys throwing the fake cash off the balcony kept going and even seemed to be encouraging it. We also seen lots of opportunists... * Some Chinese guys stomping on the head of what looked like a foreign guy * Three guys assaulting and trying to rip the clothing of a woman.

The police and security then attempted to regain control by indiscriminately whacking people with their batons; causing the final stampede. I dont think the photos show here really show the horror; the large areas of the pavement were literally red with blood

[gerri]

claim these numbers are too small

Heard  that an incident with more than 36 dead would require official investigation and/or require the party secretary responsible (for that area? area of concern?) to step down. Can't say if true, but would (also) be reason for such thinking.

 

Terrible beginning to a new year, and if it really happened like that, even more so.

[skylee]

A similar stampede happened in HK on new year's day 1993. 20 were killed.

The Chinese chengyu for the day - 樂極生悲.

[889]

Hong Kong was very lucky a similar tragedy didn't unfold at Admiralty over National Day during the Umbrella Protests. Admiralty at Harcourt Road is a confined area, it was packed as could be, all sorts of obstacles were everywhere, and there wasn't the slightest attempt at crowd-safety measures. I couldn't believe that after what happened in 1993, HK people were not taking crowd control seriously.

[skylee]

HK people take crowd control very seriously. How could we not after the 1993 accident? (The National Day fireworks display was cancelled, and the Times Square new year countdown was also cancelled for fear that the crowd would be out of control.) But the Occupy protests at Admiralty were a situation that was overall out of control. The occupation has now ended, and there was not one accident caused by overcrowding.

[ChTTay]

This story is on the BBC.

 

Security is tighter in BJ today with a lot of volunteers [red armbands] on the streets as well as security guards and police.

[roddy]

I'm highly sceptical* of that quoted comment from the Shanghaiist. Anonymous poster, doesn't tally with any other reports I've seen, and conveniently tailored for the audience. There's a video on Youku (and another, note these are graphic) and all you're seeing is a crush and then people trying to help. There's one heartrending bit of a guy just calling out for a doctor. There's no intentional violence, and if there is - well, go somewhere you're in fear of your life and see how you react. I don't know what I'd do. 

 

*actually I think it's lies. I'll stand corrected if necessary. 

[889]

Only by the Grace of God did a deadly stampede not occur at Harcourt Road. It's blindness to pretend otherwise. One loud firecracker tossed into the crowd at 3pm on October 1 would have done it.

The students, the visitors, and most importantly, the organisers, were all wilfully blind to the risk of packing so many people into such a straitened area, with obstacles all over that would block any crowd surge. It was a risk the organisers didn't see because they didn't want to see it. They wanted to be at Harcourt Road, not the safer Victoria or Hong Kong Park, damn the risk to all. Their shame is no less because by luck alone the tragic potential they created did not become manifest.

Point is, if you find yourself in an unmanaged and unmanageable crowd, then get out ASAP, whether you're in Hong Kong, the Mainland or elsewhere. A Hillsborough Disaster can occur anytime, anywhere. No place is immune.

[roddy]

Shanghai police have issued a statement saying that the fake money wasn't a factor - not the same site, and after the incident. Sounds like a crush, not a stampede.

 

This reminded me of a lengthy piece in the New Yorker on the science of events like this. It's scary stuff:

“At occupancies of about 7 persons per square meter the crowd becomes almost a fluid mass. Shock waves can be propagated through the mass sufficient to lift people off of their feet and propel them distances of 3 m (10 ft) or more. People may be literally lifted out of their shoes, and have clothing torn off. Intense crowd pressures, exacerbated by anxiety, make it difficult to breathe.” Some people die standing up; others die in the pileup that follows a “crowd collapse,” when someone goes down, and more people fall over him. “Compressional asphyxia” is usually given as the cause of death in these circumstances.

 

[Angelina]

Unlike ants and fish and birds, humans haven’t evolved the capability to transmit information about the physical dynamics of the crowd across the entire swarm. Ants, for example, are able to communicate within a swarm using pheromones. Iain Couzin, a behavioral biologist at Princeton University, told me, “With ants, as with human crowds, you see emergent behavior. By using a simple set of local interactions, ants form complex patterns. The difference is that we are selfish individuals, whereas ants are profoundly social creatures. We want to reduce our travel time, even when it is at the expense of others, whereas ants work for the whole colony. In this respect, we are at our most primitive in crowds. We have never evolved a collective intelligence to function in large crowds—we have no way of getting beyond the purely local rules of interaction, as ants can.”

 

Good to know. 

[maomao2014]

@mirgcire

 

It is not 微新 it is 微信(wei 1  xin4)

 

Once something bad happen, the departments concerned(相关部门) are always looking for scapegoats.

[hedwards]

@Roddy, it seems like this sort of thing happens from time to time, I think you're right that a crush is probably more likely than a stampeded if the density was that great. I remember last year being to the Seahawks Superbowl victory parade and the crowd was probably about a third that density. That would even have been tough to get into a stampede as it was dense enough that people not already moving in the direction of the stampede would have a hard time moving in the right direction to do so.

[gato]

Video showing the location of the stampede. It happened on the staircase across the road and probably had nothing to do with the tossed fake money.

http://www.bjnews.com.cn/video/2015/01/01/348360.html?from=singlemessage&isappinstalled=1

[roddy]

Handy transcript below as well. 

 

It's interesting how easily that original narrative - fake money, stampede - fitted in to a certain view of Chinese people as immoral and greedy. Just read the comments at the Shanghaist article linked above. When you look at what actually happened it seems to have been failings that could have happened if not anywhere, then plenty of places, and then people did their best to help. "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

[roddy]

Gerri, you may be thinking of this:

“Thirty-five, what a magical number,” a writer noted, referring to a Chinese urban legend that claims any death toll above this refers a Party Secretary to the central disciplinary authorities. “Thirty-five dead in the Shanghai stampede, 35 killed in the Wenzhou high-speed train accident, 35 dead in the Henan coal mine accident and in the storm in Yunnan.”
The figure was subsequently updated to 36.

 

From the end of this article. Reminds me of the old 'Chinese workers are allowed to go home if the temperatures reaches 40C, so the forecasters aren't allowed to report temperatures higher than 39C." See comment maybe one third of the way down here.

 

It's a nice story, but I'd be amazed if folk from central government weren't all over this as soon as the alarm was raised. They can count the bodies. 

[Angelina]

One of them was an international student at Zheda from Malaysia  

[hedwards]

@Roddy, I'd be skeptical of that magic number as well. Any incident like this happening in a major city on such a widely observed day is going to result in some sort of an investigation of the people responsible. Whether anything is, or should be, done about it is really the important question. It would be a bit like something like this happening at the World Cup or the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, there's just way too much attention for it to be ignored the way that it might be if it's a smaller number of people that aren't surrounded by people with cameras.

 

I'm not really sure the fake money thing is really terribly specific, it's something that happens in most countries when there's money being dispersed like that, even if it does turn out to be fake. If it looks relatively real, then people are likely to go for it. Probably one of the reasons why the US has restrictions on reproductions of currency. I'd assume that most other countries do as well.