- Joined
- Dec 17, 2009
- Messages
- 13,811
- Likes
- 6,734
This isn't some isolated incident, more of these will be the rule than the exception. It is rampant throughout most of the system, not to mention they are broke.
Chinese bullet train a bust
- Thread starter Armand2REP
- Start date
- Status
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2009
- Messages
- 43,132
- Likes
- 23,835
I believe a couple of Chinese Ministers have been sacked.
Sacking is not the answer.
Getting down to the causes and the reason as to why those causes happened is the answer.
China pays too much on attention on 'firsts' and on cosmetic frills. One has to do things deliberately and carefully and not just meet deadlines and to be 'firsts'.
The Highway collapse in two days of construction has been caused because it had to be done before the CCP celebration and so it was a hurried project.
Yet, on the other hand, the Tibetan Railway, an engineering marvel, was done in a deliberate and not in a hurried manner. The reason was simple, they could not afford to have a disaster in front of the Tibetans and lose face as also it was to be used basically for the police and the army mobilisation in case there is any serious internal or external threat.
Sacking is not the answer.
Getting down to the causes and the reason as to why those causes happened is the answer.
China pays too much on attention on 'firsts' and on cosmetic frills. One has to do things deliberately and carefully and not just meet deadlines and to be 'firsts'.
The Highway collapse in two days of construction has been caused because it had to be done before the CCP celebration and so it was a hurried project.
Yet, on the other hand, the Tibetan Railway, an engineering marvel, was done in a deliberate and not in a hurried manner. The reason was simple, they could not afford to have a disaster in front of the Tibetans and lose face as also it was to be used basically for the police and the army mobilisation in case there is any serious internal or external threat.
Last edited:
nrj
Ambassador
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2009
- Messages
- 9,658
- Likes
- 3,911
Blood on China's bullet train rush
China sacked three senior railway officials today and called for an urgent review of its burgeoning high-speed train network after a collision left at least 35 people dead and over 200 injured.
The accident — the worst in the four-year history of China's bullet train network — occurred when a train hurtling through the countryside near the eastern city of Wenzhou careening into a second train from Hangzhou that had stalled on the tracks in a thunderstorm. Two carriages were derailed and four were hurled off a bridge.
Two foreigners of undisclosed nationality were among the dead. The Chinese state news agency reported that a four-year-old child and a boy toddler were rescued 21 hours after the crash.
The tragedy is a low to China's high-speed rail ambitions — a frenzied schedule of new track construction precariously balanced on allegations of massive corruption.
The first reaction of the state-run Chinese media appeared to be to play down the accident even as blood-spattered survivors described their ordeal, causing outrage among China's millions of microbloggers.
None of the country's four largest newspapers covered Saturday's train crash on their front pages on Sunday morning, prompting many bloggers to openly question whether the government cared about life and death in its pursuit of prestige projects.
For Beijing, the timing of the accident could scarcely have been worse as it gears up efforts to sell its high-speed trains around the world.
The fatal collision occurred just a few hours after He Huawu, the chief engineer at the railway ministry, boasted to a media conference about the reliability of Chinese high-speed rail, and its superior quality over equivalent networks in Japan and Europe.
Blood on China’s bullet train rush
China sacked three senior railway officials today and called for an urgent review of its burgeoning high-speed train network after a collision left at least 35 people dead and over 200 injured.
The accident — the worst in the four-year history of China's bullet train network — occurred when a train hurtling through the countryside near the eastern city of Wenzhou careening into a second train from Hangzhou that had stalled on the tracks in a thunderstorm. Two carriages were derailed and four were hurled off a bridge.
Two foreigners of undisclosed nationality were among the dead. The Chinese state news agency reported that a four-year-old child and a boy toddler were rescued 21 hours after the crash.
The tragedy is a low to China's high-speed rail ambitions — a frenzied schedule of new track construction precariously balanced on allegations of massive corruption.
The first reaction of the state-run Chinese media appeared to be to play down the accident even as blood-spattered survivors described their ordeal, causing outrage among China's millions of microbloggers.
None of the country's four largest newspapers covered Saturday's train crash on their front pages on Sunday morning, prompting many bloggers to openly question whether the government cared about life and death in its pursuit of prestige projects.
For Beijing, the timing of the accident could scarcely have been worse as it gears up efforts to sell its high-speed trains around the world.
The fatal collision occurred just a few hours after He Huawu, the chief engineer at the railway ministry, boasted to a media conference about the reliability of Chinese high-speed rail, and its superior quality over equivalent networks in Japan and Europe.
Blood on China’s bullet train rush
sayareakd
Mod
- Joined
- Feb 17, 2009
- Messages
- 17,734
- Likes
- 18,952
For trains they should not go for speed, instead reaching their destination should be priority, we have so many rail accidents, that is why our rail is not travelling at more then 130km Per hour, Indian railways plans to introduce fast trains, i dont want too same thing happing there. BTW if you want to go fast take a plane.
amoy
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jan 17, 2010
- Messages
- 5,982
- Likes
- 1,849
Even slow trains kill people (more) - that accident in Uttar Pradesh this month
I travelled a lot by rail - and that collided train was from Hangzhou to Fuzhou my hometown. Frankly feeling bad, I'm hoping the root cause can be identified soon and rectified, but not at the cost of 'speed'
I travelled a lot by rail - and that collided train was from Hangzhou to Fuzhou my hometown. Frankly feeling bad, I'm hoping the root cause can be identified soon and rectified, but not at the cost of 'speed'
nrj
Ambassador
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2009
- Messages
- 9,658
- Likes
- 3,911
Chinese netizens outraged over response to fatal bullet train crash
Beijing (CNN) -- Nationwide outrage continued Monday in China over the government's response to a deadly bullet train collision last weekend, even as operations resumed on the affected high-speed rail lines.
A bullet train was struck from behind Saturday night by another train near Wenzhou in eastern Zhejiang province, killing at least 38 people -- including two American citizens -- and injuring almost 200. The first train was forced to stop on the tracks due to a power outage and the impact caused six cars to derail, including four that fell from an elevated bridge.
Although Chinese reporters raced to the scene, none of the major state-run newspapers even mentioned the story on their Sunday front pages. A user of Sina Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, first broke the story and increasingly popular social media outlets then provided millions of Chinese with the fastest information and pictures as well as the most poignant and scathing commentaries.
By the time the railway ministry held its first press conference more than 24 hours after the collision, the public had seen not just reports of passengers trapped inside dark trains or images of a mangled car dangling off the bridge -- but also bulldozers crushing mangled cars that had fallen to the ground and burying the wreckage on site.
"How can we cover up an accident that the whole world already knew about?" said a defiant railway ministry spokesman Wang Yongping. "They told me they buried the car to facilitate the rescue effort -- and I believe this explanation."
Wang was terse when reporters asked him to explain the fact that a toddler girl was being pulled out of the wreckage alive 20 hours after the accident -- and long after authorities declared no more signs of life in the trains.
"That was a miracle," he said.
Blaming lightning strike-triggered equipment failure as the cause of the accident based on preliminary investigation, Wang put on a brave face on the safety of China's controversial high-speed rail.
"Chinese technologies are advanced and we are still confident about that," he said.
While some state media echoed Wang's sentiment, many netizens questioned his every statement from the death toll to the cause and called him the face of a ministry mired in allegations of corruption and ineptitude.
"This land is a hotbed for the world's most sprawling bureaucracy and most cold-blooded officials," user "chenjie" wrote on Sina Weibo.
Netizens also dug up an old video clip showing the railway ministry's chief engineer proudly telling state television in 2007 that China had developed modern technologies to ensure bullet trains never rear-end each other.
The quick sacking of three top local railway officials in Shanghai -- who were in charge of the affected rail lines -- failed to placate the public, either. The announced new Shanghai railway chief prompted more scorn than applaud, as the replacement -- the railway ministry's chief dispatcher -- was once demoted for his role in another fatal train accident in 2008 that killed 72 people.
In a user-generated opinion poll on Sina Weibo on the government's handling of the accident, more than 90 percent of the 30,000 respondents chose the option "terrible -- it doesn't treat us as humans."
Now the world's second-largest economy, and flush with cash, China has built the world's longest high-speed rail network -- boasting more than 8,300 kilometers (5,100 miles) of routes -- in a few short years. The government plans to pour over $400 billion into rail projects in the next five years.
The massive investment and rapid construction have long raised public doubts on the new lines' safety and commercial viability. The skeptics' voices became louder after the former railway minister -- a champion of high-speed rail -- was sacked for corruption early this year.
Even the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail -- the ministry's newest and proudest project -- has broken down several times since its much-touted launch less than a month ago.
"It's not the faster, the better," Sun Zhang, a railway professor at Tongji University in Shanghai and a long-time railway ministry consultant, told CNN last month. "We have to take safety, economics and environmental impact into consideration."
"Strategically we can talk about a great leap forward in the industry, but tactically we have to do things step by step," he added.
Back online, many users -- already jittery about safety in their daily life -- now view China's high-speed rail, long considered a symbol of the country's fast rise, as a metaphor of its troublesome approach to development.
"This is a country where a thunderstorm can cause a train to crash, a car can make a bridge collapse and drinking milk can lead to kidney stones," user "xiaoyaoyouliu" posted on Sina Weibo. "Today's China is a bullet train racing through a thunderstorm -- and we are all passengers onboard."
Chinese netizens outraged over response to fatal bullet train crash - CNN.com
Visit the source for video.
Beijing (CNN) -- Nationwide outrage continued Monday in China over the government's response to a deadly bullet train collision last weekend, even as operations resumed on the affected high-speed rail lines.
A bullet train was struck from behind Saturday night by another train near Wenzhou in eastern Zhejiang province, killing at least 38 people -- including two American citizens -- and injuring almost 200. The first train was forced to stop on the tracks due to a power outage and the impact caused six cars to derail, including four that fell from an elevated bridge.
Although Chinese reporters raced to the scene, none of the major state-run newspapers even mentioned the story on their Sunday front pages. A user of Sina Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, first broke the story and increasingly popular social media outlets then provided millions of Chinese with the fastest information and pictures as well as the most poignant and scathing commentaries.
By the time the railway ministry held its first press conference more than 24 hours after the collision, the public had seen not just reports of passengers trapped inside dark trains or images of a mangled car dangling off the bridge -- but also bulldozers crushing mangled cars that had fallen to the ground and burying the wreckage on site.
"How can we cover up an accident that the whole world already knew about?" said a defiant railway ministry spokesman Wang Yongping. "They told me they buried the car to facilitate the rescue effort -- and I believe this explanation."
Wang was terse when reporters asked him to explain the fact that a toddler girl was being pulled out of the wreckage alive 20 hours after the accident -- and long after authorities declared no more signs of life in the trains.
"That was a miracle," he said.
Blaming lightning strike-triggered equipment failure as the cause of the accident based on preliminary investigation, Wang put on a brave face on the safety of China's controversial high-speed rail.
"Chinese technologies are advanced and we are still confident about that," he said.
While some state media echoed Wang's sentiment, many netizens questioned his every statement from the death toll to the cause and called him the face of a ministry mired in allegations of corruption and ineptitude.
"This land is a hotbed for the world's most sprawling bureaucracy and most cold-blooded officials," user "chenjie" wrote on Sina Weibo.
Netizens also dug up an old video clip showing the railway ministry's chief engineer proudly telling state television in 2007 that China had developed modern technologies to ensure bullet trains never rear-end each other.
The quick sacking of three top local railway officials in Shanghai -- who were in charge of the affected rail lines -- failed to placate the public, either. The announced new Shanghai railway chief prompted more scorn than applaud, as the replacement -- the railway ministry's chief dispatcher -- was once demoted for his role in another fatal train accident in 2008 that killed 72 people.
In a user-generated opinion poll on Sina Weibo on the government's handling of the accident, more than 90 percent of the 30,000 respondents chose the option "terrible -- it doesn't treat us as humans."
Now the world's second-largest economy, and flush with cash, China has built the world's longest high-speed rail network -- boasting more than 8,300 kilometers (5,100 miles) of routes -- in a few short years. The government plans to pour over $400 billion into rail projects in the next five years.
The massive investment and rapid construction have long raised public doubts on the new lines' safety and commercial viability. The skeptics' voices became louder after the former railway minister -- a champion of high-speed rail -- was sacked for corruption early this year.
Even the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail -- the ministry's newest and proudest project -- has broken down several times since its much-touted launch less than a month ago.
"It's not the faster, the better," Sun Zhang, a railway professor at Tongji University in Shanghai and a long-time railway ministry consultant, told CNN last month. "We have to take safety, economics and environmental impact into consideration."
"Strategically we can talk about a great leap forward in the industry, but tactically we have to do things step by step," he added.
Back online, many users -- already jittery about safety in their daily life -- now view China's high-speed rail, long considered a symbol of the country's fast rise, as a metaphor of its troublesome approach to development.
"This is a country where a thunderstorm can cause a train to crash, a car can make a bridge collapse and drinking milk can lead to kidney stones," user "xiaoyaoyouliu" posted on Sina Weibo. "Today's China is a bullet train racing through a thunderstorm -- and we are all passengers onboard."
Chinese netizens outraged over response to fatal bullet train crash - CNN.com
Visit the source for video.
- Joined
- Feb 12, 2009
- Messages
- 7,550
- Likes
- 1,307
pakistanis and Chinese deserve each other, at one end pakistanis hose down the site of Benzir's killing, other side Chinese just take away the wreckage, this is taking H&D to absurd level:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/world/asia/25train.html?_r=1
BEIJING — A deadly train accident in eastern China has added to a national sense of unease that safety may have been sacrificed in the country's rush to modernize. By Sunday evening, 43 bodies had been recovered from the wreckage near Wenzhou, where a high-speed train that had lost power was struck from behind by another train on Saturday night, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Six cars derailed and four fell off a viaduct in the accident, which also injured 210 people.
In official, government-approved accounts of the accident, officials moved quickly to take charge of the situation. On Sunday morning, President Hu Jintao declared that rescue efforts were a top priority. The government also announced that three senior officials in the Railway Ministry had been fired. The railway minister was said to have taken charge of the rescue operation.
But competing narratives already began emerging Sunday. On the feisty microblogging site Sina Weibo, postings said that the minister, Sheng Guangzu, who took over this year when his predecessor was fired for corruption, had been cornered by angry journalists after he dodged interview requests.
Other reports on the site said the ministry was burying parts of the wrecked trains near the site, prompting critics to say that the wreckage needed to be carefully examined for causes of the malfunction. The Railway Ministry said the trains contained valuable "national level" technology that could be stolen and thus must be buried — even though foreign companies have long complained that the technology was actually stolen from their trains.
More confusion emerged over efforts to portray nature as the culprit in the accident. Xinhua reported Saturday that the first train lost power when it was hit by lightning, and national television broadcasts emphasized pictures of lightning storms in the area. But later reports by Xinhua said the supposedly stalled train was under way when it was struck by the other train. Also left unexplained was why railway signals did not stop the second train before it hit the first one.
An editorial with the headline "No Development Without Safety" on People's Net, the government-run Web site affiliated with the party's leading newspaper, People's Daily, said the Railway Ministry had warned of the risks of lightning in a notice four days before the crash. It said new procedures were needed to prevent accidents. But it noted that these measures had not been put into effect, implying that the railway had no emergency plans for trains struck by lightning.
The editorial also made a broader point that spoke to widespread public dissatisfaction over safety.
"From public transport safety to coal mine safety to food safety, these accidents show that theoretically there is no problem with the conception of safety plans," the influential site said. "But they are not executed properly."
The train collision was one of several high-profile public transportation accidents in China recently. Early Friday morning, 41 people were killed when an overloaded bus caught fire in central Henan Province. Earlier this month, an escalator at a new subway station in Beijing collapsed, killing one person and injuring 28. Last week alone, four bridges collapsed in various Chinese cities.
Signaling the official concern over growing public unease, the government issued a directive on Saturday calling for "intensified efforts in preventing major deadly accidents."
The discussion of accidents in China, however, is haphazard. In an unusually frank editorial in People's Daily this month, a commentator said that many disasters were covered up but that the country needed "zero tolerance for concealing major accidents," like a large oil spill that was hidden from the public for more than a month.
Fears that transparency and safety have become secondary to other concerns was present in many Weibo postings on Sunday. One blogger in particular posted an eloquent appeal for more care and caution in China's rapid development: "China, please stop your flying pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience! Don't let the train run out off track, don't let the bridges collapse, don't let the roads become traps, don't let houses become ruins. Walk slowly, allowing every life to have freedom and dignity. No one should be left behind by our era."
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/25/world/asia/25train.html?_r=1
BEIJING — A deadly train accident in eastern China has added to a national sense of unease that safety may have been sacrificed in the country's rush to modernize. By Sunday evening, 43 bodies had been recovered from the wreckage near Wenzhou, where a high-speed train that had lost power was struck from behind by another train on Saturday night, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Six cars derailed and four fell off a viaduct in the accident, which also injured 210 people.
In official, government-approved accounts of the accident, officials moved quickly to take charge of the situation. On Sunday morning, President Hu Jintao declared that rescue efforts were a top priority. The government also announced that three senior officials in the Railway Ministry had been fired. The railway minister was said to have taken charge of the rescue operation.
But competing narratives already began emerging Sunday. On the feisty microblogging site Sina Weibo, postings said that the minister, Sheng Guangzu, who took over this year when his predecessor was fired for corruption, had been cornered by angry journalists after he dodged interview requests.
Other reports on the site said the ministry was burying parts of the wrecked trains near the site, prompting critics to say that the wreckage needed to be carefully examined for causes of the malfunction. The Railway Ministry said the trains contained valuable "national level" technology that could be stolen and thus must be buried — even though foreign companies have long complained that the technology was actually stolen from their trains.
More confusion emerged over efforts to portray nature as the culprit in the accident. Xinhua reported Saturday that the first train lost power when it was hit by lightning, and national television broadcasts emphasized pictures of lightning storms in the area. But later reports by Xinhua said the supposedly stalled train was under way when it was struck by the other train. Also left unexplained was why railway signals did not stop the second train before it hit the first one.
An editorial with the headline "No Development Without Safety" on People's Net, the government-run Web site affiliated with the party's leading newspaper, People's Daily, said the Railway Ministry had warned of the risks of lightning in a notice four days before the crash. It said new procedures were needed to prevent accidents. But it noted that these measures had not been put into effect, implying that the railway had no emergency plans for trains struck by lightning.
The editorial also made a broader point that spoke to widespread public dissatisfaction over safety.
"From public transport safety to coal mine safety to food safety, these accidents show that theoretically there is no problem with the conception of safety plans," the influential site said. "But they are not executed properly."
The train collision was one of several high-profile public transportation accidents in China recently. Early Friday morning, 41 people were killed when an overloaded bus caught fire in central Henan Province. Earlier this month, an escalator at a new subway station in Beijing collapsed, killing one person and injuring 28. Last week alone, four bridges collapsed in various Chinese cities.
Signaling the official concern over growing public unease, the government issued a directive on Saturday calling for "intensified efforts in preventing major deadly accidents."
The discussion of accidents in China, however, is haphazard. In an unusually frank editorial in People's Daily this month, a commentator said that many disasters were covered up but that the country needed "zero tolerance for concealing major accidents," like a large oil spill that was hidden from the public for more than a month.
Fears that transparency and safety have become secondary to other concerns was present in many Weibo postings on Sunday. One blogger in particular posted an eloquent appeal for more care and caution in China's rapid development: "China, please stop your flying pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your morality, wait for your conscience! Don't let the train run out off track, don't let the bridges collapse, don't let the roads become traps, don't let houses become ruins. Walk slowly, allowing every life to have freedom and dignity. No one should be left behind by our era."
nrj
Ambassador
- Joined
- Nov 16, 2009
- Messages
- 9,658
- Likes
- 3,911
China to censor outspoken crash coverage
Chinese journalists and web users have defied censors with scathing criticism of the state after a deadly high-speed rail crash, but analysts predict the government will soon clamp down. Internet users have unleashed unusually high levels of vitriol towards the government in the wake of the crash, and even state newspapers have severely criticised the way authorities handled Saturday's collision in eastern China.
Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based independent analyst, said the "remarkably uncensored" coverage was a marker of the intensity of public feeling about official corruption in China.
"It's quite amazing to see what is going on, because there's a lot of venom and animosity directed towards the government," he said.
"People with huge amounts of followers (on Sina's popular Twitter-like Weibo service) have been extremely aggressive because they're sick of the corruption and the dynamic that allows this kind of mess to happen with the railways."
Already before the crash, which left at least 39 people dead and nearly 200 others injured, criticism of rail authorities online and in the press was rife, following problems with a Beijing to Shanghai high-speed line and graft cases.
In February, Beijing sacked then railways minister Liu Zhijun for allegedly taking more than 800 million yuan ($124 million) in kickbacks, and auditors later uncovered corruption linked to the Beijing-Shanghai project.
The public anger found its focus when a high-speed train careered into a second train on Saturday on the outskirts of Wenzhou city, in an apparent failure of the Chinese-made signalling system.
In the past few days, bloggers have questioned whether the true death toll might be higher than that officially released, and whether the high-speed rail system is being developed too fast.
Premier Wen Jiabao on Thursday travelled to Wenzhou to visit the scene of the crash -- a move Internet commentators interpreted as a victory.
"The central government would never in a million years have thought Weibo could bring so much trouble," one posted on Sina's Weibo.
But Qiao Mu, professor of international political communications at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the government would not tolerate such challenges indefinitely.
"I'm worried that after this accident is over, officials will tighten control over Weibo, because Weibo challenged rulers' authority," he said.
China's state-controlled media has also been unusually outspoken in its coverage of the accident, defying directives not to question the official line.
A comment piece on the front page of the People's Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, said Thursday that China "needs development, but does not need blood-smeared GDP".
"Development is of overriding importance. But development should not be pursued at all cost," said the article, which was attributed to "the newspaper's commentator".
That followed an editorial in both the English and Chinese versions of the state-run Global Times that contrasted the "bureaucratic" attitude of officials with a booming "public democracy" online.
Zheng Yongnian, an Internet and politics expert at the National University of Singapore, suggested the extraordinary latitude given to media and online users could be the result of a power play ahead of a leadership change next year.
He said the railway system was consolidated under the leadership of the former president Jiang Zemin, and despite major problems along the way -- such as a deadly train crash in 2008 -- little had been done to reform it.
"There's been major vested interests in the railway system. It's very difficult to deal with... But now with such a major crisis, it's a good opportunity to deal with the issue," he said.
David Bandurski of the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project said mainland press had grabbed this opportunity "aggressively".
"The (Communist) party right now has completely lost the agenda on this story. If you look, you can see signs of how they are asserting control, but so far it's been largely ineffective," he said.
Bandurski, however, warned it would be "foolish" to think this marked a new beginning for China's media and Internet.
He compared the current situation to the 2003 outbreak of the deadly SARS epidemic, which saw authorities giving latitude to the press before gradually reasserting control, handing out penalties to 10 different media.
"They waited in the wings until the crowds dispersed -- metaphorically -- and then they went after them individually. That's pretty typical," he said.
China to censor outspoken crash coverage: analysts - Hindustan Times
Chinese journalists and web users have defied censors with scathing criticism of the state after a deadly high-speed rail crash, but analysts predict the government will soon clamp down. Internet users have unleashed unusually high levels of vitriol towards the government in the wake of the crash, and even state newspapers have severely criticised the way authorities handled Saturday's collision in eastern China.
Bill Bishop, a Beijing-based independent analyst, said the "remarkably uncensored" coverage was a marker of the intensity of public feeling about official corruption in China.
"It's quite amazing to see what is going on, because there's a lot of venom and animosity directed towards the government," he said.
"People with huge amounts of followers (on Sina's popular Twitter-like Weibo service) have been extremely aggressive because they're sick of the corruption and the dynamic that allows this kind of mess to happen with the railways."
Already before the crash, which left at least 39 people dead and nearly 200 others injured, criticism of rail authorities online and in the press was rife, following problems with a Beijing to Shanghai high-speed line and graft cases.
In February, Beijing sacked then railways minister Liu Zhijun for allegedly taking more than 800 million yuan ($124 million) in kickbacks, and auditors later uncovered corruption linked to the Beijing-Shanghai project.
The public anger found its focus when a high-speed train careered into a second train on Saturday on the outskirts of Wenzhou city, in an apparent failure of the Chinese-made signalling system.
In the past few days, bloggers have questioned whether the true death toll might be higher than that officially released, and whether the high-speed rail system is being developed too fast.
Premier Wen Jiabao on Thursday travelled to Wenzhou to visit the scene of the crash -- a move Internet commentators interpreted as a victory.
"The central government would never in a million years have thought Weibo could bring so much trouble," one posted on Sina's Weibo.
But Qiao Mu, professor of international political communications at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, said the government would not tolerate such challenges indefinitely.
"I'm worried that after this accident is over, officials will tighten control over Weibo, because Weibo challenged rulers' authority," he said.
China's state-controlled media has also been unusually outspoken in its coverage of the accident, defying directives not to question the official line.
A comment piece on the front page of the People's Daily, the Communist party mouthpiece, said Thursday that China "needs development, but does not need blood-smeared GDP".
"Development is of overriding importance. But development should not be pursued at all cost," said the article, which was attributed to "the newspaper's commentator".
That followed an editorial in both the English and Chinese versions of the state-run Global Times that contrasted the "bureaucratic" attitude of officials with a booming "public democracy" online.
Zheng Yongnian, an Internet and politics expert at the National University of Singapore, suggested the extraordinary latitude given to media and online users could be the result of a power play ahead of a leadership change next year.
He said the railway system was consolidated under the leadership of the former president Jiang Zemin, and despite major problems along the way -- such as a deadly train crash in 2008 -- little had been done to reform it.
"There's been major vested interests in the railway system. It's very difficult to deal with... But now with such a major crisis, it's a good opportunity to deal with the issue," he said.
David Bandurski of the University of Hong Kong's China Media Project said mainland press had grabbed this opportunity "aggressively".
"The (Communist) party right now has completely lost the agenda on this story. If you look, you can see signs of how they are asserting control, but so far it's been largely ineffective," he said.
Bandurski, however, warned it would be "foolish" to think this marked a new beginning for China's media and Internet.
He compared the current situation to the 2003 outbreak of the deadly SARS epidemic, which saw authorities giving latitude to the press before gradually reasserting control, handing out penalties to 10 different media.
"They waited in the wings until the crowds dispersed -- metaphorically -- and then they went after them individually. That's pretty typical," he said.
China to censor outspoken crash coverage: analysts - Hindustan Times
sandeepdg
Senior Member
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2009
- Messages
- 2,333
- Likes
- 227
Saya, I read the news article in TOI, and its nowhere mentioned that India will be importing advanced high speed trains from abroad like the TGV etc. Northern railway said they are looking at the feasibility of increasing the speed of the current fast trains like the Rajdhani, Shatabdi, Duronto to around 200 kmph which is quite possible with minimum changes in the existing infrastructure as compared to a completely new very high speed train system which will require completely new infrastructure and huge amount of capital. Also, they are thinking about increasing the speed of the super fast trains from the current speed of around 110 kmph to something like 130-150 kmph.
huaxia rox
Senior Member
- Joined
- Apr 4, 2011
- Messages
- 1,401
- Likes
- 103
1 this recent major accident should be investegated throughly. lightenning may be the reason why 1 of the bullet trains didnt run normally but is absolutly not an excuse to tell people why the collision would have to take place. multiple safty equipments onboard and besides the railway and methods should have stopped this from happenning without doubt.
2 corruption is a reality in the current PRC but i think corruption may make a project more expensive but surely not less safe. to sacrfice safty is not tolerated by the CPC, people, and all the constructors and who ever (in current PRC) doesnt understand this is gonna be faced with serious consequences unless he/she is way too lucky.
3 we should also avoid either of the 2 thoughts...1 is to down play the seriousness of the disaster claimming anything can go wrong and some developed nations also got this kind of accidents and flight jets can crash etc.....2 is that we also should not blame anything the gov has done. bullet train has been proved workable for a long time in developed countries. it can clearly bring a range of benefits to one country and its people. PRC may be bigger in size but the techs of the train r indeed very mature and should keep every 1 confortable and at least very safe while running with high speed.
4 anyway we have to avoid a new great leap forward in all the infrastructure constructions but we cant stop us from developing as well.....actually the accident reminds me of the dark period of 1990s when long march rockets kept failling for twice tryhing to send US made settalites into space...after a halt of launching and a lot of painstaking works to remedy the situation today the long march rocket family has become a far more powerful and advanced serial with very high success rate. i hope and believe the same will happen to our high speed train project as well.
RIP to all the passangers we lost.
2 corruption is a reality in the current PRC but i think corruption may make a project more expensive but surely not less safe. to sacrfice safty is not tolerated by the CPC, people, and all the constructors and who ever (in current PRC) doesnt understand this is gonna be faced with serious consequences unless he/she is way too lucky.
3 we should also avoid either of the 2 thoughts...1 is to down play the seriousness of the disaster claimming anything can go wrong and some developed nations also got this kind of accidents and flight jets can crash etc.....2 is that we also should not blame anything the gov has done. bullet train has been proved workable for a long time in developed countries. it can clearly bring a range of benefits to one country and its people. PRC may be bigger in size but the techs of the train r indeed very mature and should keep every 1 confortable and at least very safe while running with high speed.
4 anyway we have to avoid a new great leap forward in all the infrastructure constructions but we cant stop us from developing as well.....actually the accident reminds me of the dark period of 1990s when long march rockets kept failling for twice tryhing to send US made settalites into space...after a halt of launching and a lot of painstaking works to remedy the situation today the long march rocket family has become a far more powerful and advanced serial with very high success rate. i hope and believe the same will happen to our high speed train project as well.
RIP to all the passangers we lost.
Last edited:
agentperry
Senior Member
- Joined
- Oct 24, 2010
- Messages
- 3,022
- Likes
- 690
just like dawn, pak based zaid hamid is encyclopedia for herd of anti india faction
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2009
- Messages
- 11,615
- Likes
- 5,772
China manufacturer China CNR recalls 54 bullet trains
Chinese state-owned train manufacturer, China CNR, will recall 54 bullet trains, as problems continue to plague the industry.
The particular models were used on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line, the firm said in a statement.
The announcement comes a day after officials placed a temporary halt on all new high-speed rail projects.
The government continues to face public fury over a crash that killed 40 people last month.
The incident, which took place on a separate high-speed rail line near Wenzhou, lead to allegation of mishandling on the part of authorities and has called the country's flagship project into question.
This after the rail link between Shanghai and Beijing had already run into delays because of power cuts and technical reasons after it was launched in June.
The State Council said on Thursday that safety checks would be carried out on existing lines, speed limits would be enforced and the safety of all new projects would be re-evaluated before being approved.
"We will suspend for the time being the examination and approval of new railway construction projects," the council said in a statement.
However, the council also said: "China will unswervingly continue its development of high-speed railways."
Chinese state-owned train manufacturer, China CNR, will recall 54 bullet trains, as problems continue to plague the industry.
The particular models were used on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail line, the firm said in a statement.
The announcement comes a day after officials placed a temporary halt on all new high-speed rail projects.
The government continues to face public fury over a crash that killed 40 people last month.
The incident, which took place on a separate high-speed rail line near Wenzhou, lead to allegation of mishandling on the part of authorities and has called the country's flagship project into question.
This after the rail link between Shanghai and Beijing had already run into delays because of power cuts and technical reasons after it was launched in June.
The State Council said on Thursday that safety checks would be carried out on existing lines, speed limits would be enforced and the safety of all new projects would be re-evaluated before being approved.
"We will suspend for the time being the examination and approval of new railway construction projects," the council said in a statement.
However, the council also said: "China will unswervingly continue its development of high-speed railways."
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2009
- Messages
- 11,615
- Likes
- 5,772
China Bullet Trains Trip on Technology
By JAMES T. AREDDY in Shanghai and NORIHIKO SHIROUZU in Beijing
SHANGHAI—China celebrated its bullet trains as the home-grown pride of a nation: a rail system faster and more advanced than any other, showcasing superior Chinese technology.
However, China's high-speed rail network was in fact built with imported components—including signaling-system parts designed to prevent train collisions—that local engineers couldn't fully understand, according to a review of corporate documents and interviews with more than a dozen rail executives inside and outside China.
During a late July lightning storm, two of China's bullet trains collided in the eastern city of Wenzhou, killing 40 people and injuring nearly 200 in one of the world's worst high-speed passenger-rail accidents. China's government initially blamed flawed signaling and human error. It recently postponed public release of its crash findings.
The precise cause of the disaster remains uncertain, so there is no way to know what role, if any, the signaling assembly may have played.
An examination of China's use of foreign technology in its bullet-train signal systems highlights deep international distrust over China's industrial model, including weak intellectual-property protections, which can complicate efforts to acquire state-of-the-art technology.
Key signaling systems were assembled by Beijing-based Hollysys Automation Technologies Ltd., one of the few companies China's Ministry of Railways tapped to handle such work. In some cases of the signal systems it supplied, technology branded as proprietary to Hollysys contained circuitry tailor-made by Hitachi Ltd. of Japan to Hollysys specifications, according to people familiar with the situation.
The problem, these people say, is that Hitachi—fearful that Chinese technicians might reverse-engineer and steal the technology—sold components with the inner workings concealed from Hollysys. Hitachi executives say this "black box" design makes gear harder to copy, and also harder to understand, for instance during testing.
"It's still generally a mystery how a company like Hollysys could integrate our equipment into a broader safety-signaling system without intimate knowledge of our know-how," a senior Hitachi executive said.
A rail signaling system is a complex assemblage of dozens of devices, circuits and software that helps train drivers and dispatchers keep everything running safely. As trains pass beacons along a route, known as "balise modules," information about location and speed are fed into the train-control network. According to Hollysys statements, it supplied key parts of the system including the onboard brain, the Automatic Train Protection, or ATP. Hitachi supplied Hollysys with a primary part of the ATP, according to Hitachi executives.
Hollysys didn't respond to requests for comment. Two days after the crash in July, Hollysys issued a statement confirming its ATP components were installed on both trains. Hollysys said its components "functioned normally and well."
A separate state-owned Chinese signaling company, which also works with foreign firms and supplies most of the gear to bullet-train projects, issued a statement around the same time expressing "sorrow" and pledging to accept its responsibility.
China's high-speed railway, budgeted at close to $300 billion, already challenges the travel time of jetliners between cities like Beijing and Shanghai, which are roughly as far apart as Philadelphia and Atlanta. The trains, with advertised cruising speeds on the fastest lines topping 215 miles per hour, are said to "fly on land," demonstrating a future where China is a recognized peer of the U.S., EU and Japan in big-ticket ingenuity. China is designing airliners to compete with Boeing Co. and nuclear reactors to challenge Toshiba Corp.'s Westinghouse Electric Co. It already exports high-speed rail equipment: This month it reached a deal to supply locomotives to the nation of Georgia.
In less than seven years, China has built a bullet-train network larger than the ones Japan and Germany took decades to construct. China is only about halfway through a 15-year plan to build a total of nearly 10,000 miles of high-speed track connecting 24 major cities.
"We aim at the world's top-notch technologies," then-Railways Minister Liu Zhijun declared four years ago. A few months before the July crash, Mr. Liu was fired after China's Communist Party accused him and other top officials of unspecified corruption. Mr. Liu couldn't be located for comment.
July's rail tragedy—in which two bullet trains collided during a storm, sending some cars plunging 65 feet from elevated tracks—is tarnishing China's effort to portray the project as technologically advanced and safety-minded. Among other things, the Ministry of Railways chose not to install lightning rods and surge protectors on some high-speed rail lines even as an industry association recommended doing so on major infrastructure projects, He Jinliang, director of China's National Lightning Protection Technology Standard Committee, said in July.
The Ministry of Railways didn't respond to requests for comment. Through state media and on its website, the ministry has stressed its attention to safety. A Sept. 5 statement said, "Our cadres should be leading the work, changing their style, going to the grass-roots level and trying to solve problems."
Last week, Chinese authorities reiterated their safety pledge after two subway trains in collided in Shanghai, injuring more than 280 people, in an accident blamed on errors after a power snafu knocked out signals, according to the subway operator.
At 8:37 p.m., Train No. D301 rammed into the back of No. D3115, which was nearly stationary on the tracks, in Wenzhou. The accident killed 40 people and injured at least 190. The impact sent four carriages plunging 65 feet off the elevated rail line.
From the initial days of the high-speed railway program, Beijing turned to local firms, including Hollysys, rather than foreign expertise. Hollysys says it is one of just two companies eligible to supply certain signaling technology for China's fastest trains. Ministry of Railways rules effectively forbid foreign companies from bidding.
Though new to high-speed rail, Hollysys became a central supplier of the signaling systems, circuits and software that are supposed to prevent the kind of accident that happened near Wenzhou by automatically stopping trains if trouble is detected.
Integrating signaling components is a challenge, particularly at the pace that China was expanding its rail network, train executives say. "The problem is to put all these pieces of the puzzle into a coherent system," says Marc Antoni, technological innovation director at SNCF, the French national railway operator, which runs the high-speed TGV.
Originally part of China's Ministry of Electronics, Hollysys in the 1990s became a privately owned business focused on "controls"—the technology that keeps factory assembly lines humming smoothly. In a Hollysys timeline of its railway achievements, the company says it won its first noteworthy high-speed-rail signaling contracts in 2005, about when China began construction.
A year later, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Hollysys played down the importance of high-speed-rail signaling by describing it as "adjacent" to core operations in industrial controls. The sector was mentioned just once in a 300-plus page SEC filing in 2006, part of a successful effort by Hollysys to list its shares on Nasdaq through a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a practice that involves adoption of a current listing by another company.
By late 2008 Beijing was speeding construction of its bullet trains in part to help power the Chinese economy through the global economic slump. Hollysys described itself in regulatory filings as one of just two companies that possessed "the capability" to supply the Ministry of Railways with signals on its fastest lines.
Hollysys became a tech darling and in September 2009 its chief financial officer, Peter Li, speaking to analysts, credited the Ministry of Railways' "very clear mandate of localizing the product." When an analyst asked whether he feared competition, Mr. Li said, "Basically, foreign players are not allowed to bid independently for high-speed-rail projects."
The Ministry of Railways awarded Hollysys more than $100 million of high-speed-signaling contracts in 2010 alone, according to company statements. For the fiscal year ended this past June, Hollysys reported total revenue of $262.84 million.
The ministry also played matchmaker for Hollysys. When a leading Italian signaling company, Ansaldo STS, sought a business foothold in China, the Ministry of Railways indicated that it should be in the form of a partnership with Hollysys, according to Ansaldo spokesman Roberto Alatri.
A $97 million contract followed in July 2008 for a Hollysys-Ansaldo consortium to design, build and maintain signal-control systems on China's then-fastest train line, a 459-kilometer section linking the central China cities of Zhengzhou and Xian. The Hollysys portion was $22 million.
Hollysys had a longer relationship with Hitachi, which supplied the Chinese company components for high-speed rail signaling starting in 2005, the year Hollysys says it got its start in the business. The main cooperation was on the onboard ATP system, which Hollysys documents describe as components in the nose and tail of trains that act as its "last line of defense in safety."
The Hitachi-made ATP components came with a catch. Two Hitachi executives familiar with the matter said the company adopts what the industry refers to as "black box" security to conceal design secrets by withholding technical blueprints known in Japanese as zumen.
Black boxes make it tough to reverse-engineer the equipment. They can also make it more difficult to troubleshoot the gear, according to executives of several companies familiar with the practice in China.
"Providing zumen means"¦we completely trust the buyer of our technology," a senior Hitachi executive said, with the understanding that the buyer "would not become a competitive threat in other markets."
Hitachi doesn't always withhold its design secrets. When working with companies elsewhere on a common project, the senior executive said, it will provide the zumen, or blueprints, in some cases.
Hitachi executives say the arrangement with Hollysys wasn't a technology-transfer deal—in which it would be expected to share technical details—but rather a contractual arrangement to manufacture parts to specifications provided by Hollysys. Hitachi says it did provide "limited" technical support that is typical of contracts of this type.
A spokesman at Hitachi's headquarters in Tokyo, Atsushi Konno, said the company "has no comment about Hollysys's products, as we do not have any information as to what kind of end product Hollysys developed using our devices." The official confirmed that Hitachi supplied Hollysys some equipment for the signaling systems used aboard trains and "also provided technical explanation regarding those components, and we believe Hollysys, as a result, fully understands them."
At least one installation of Hollysys components didn't go smoothly, according to one Europe-based engineer who worked on the job. An onboard Hollysys computer, part of the ATP called a driver machine interface, kept freezing, displaying old information.
Technical bugs aren't unusual when fine-tuning a train system, but the temporary fix was, according to the engineer. To avoid the embarrassment of canceling an opening ceremony, operators decided to begin passenger service on the high-speed line and assign one person in the train's cab the exclusive task of watching that the seconds continued to scroll on the computer's clock—thereby ensuring the device was functioning.
"It was a random failure that was not managed very well," the engineer said. The problem was later fixed, he said.
Dominique Pouliquen, head of Alstom SA's China operations, said China and its rail-equipment suppliers remain in the learning stages. "You acquire the technology. Then you need to absorb it; you need to master it," Mr. Pouliquen told a small group of reporters last week. For China, "I think it's all about absorption and fully mastering the whole technology that has been acquired over the last 10 years."
Alstom supplied, through a local joint venture, hardware for train dispatchers on the line where July's collision occurred. Mr. Pouliquen said the JV didn't provide any of the signaling technology that the Chinese government has said was possibly flawed.
In an August letter to shareholders, Hollysys Chief Executive Wang Changli cited the "tragic" Wenzhou accident and reiterated that Hollysys equipment wasn't to blame. China's biggest signaling company, Beijing-based China Railway Signal & Communication Corp., originated within China's railways bureaucracy. Shortly after the crash, a CRSC unit, Beijing National Railway Research & Design Institute of Signal and Communication, issued a statement of "sorrow" and pledged to "shoulder our responsibility."
CRSC hasn't commented about the accident directly, aside from a statement Aug. 23 stating that its top executive, 55-year-old Ma Cheng, collapsed and died during questioning by crash investigators.
By JAMES T. AREDDY in Shanghai and NORIHIKO SHIROUZU in Beijing
SHANGHAI—China celebrated its bullet trains as the home-grown pride of a nation: a rail system faster and more advanced than any other, showcasing superior Chinese technology.
However, China's high-speed rail network was in fact built with imported components—including signaling-system parts designed to prevent train collisions—that local engineers couldn't fully understand, according to a review of corporate documents and interviews with more than a dozen rail executives inside and outside China.
During a late July lightning storm, two of China's bullet trains collided in the eastern city of Wenzhou, killing 40 people and injuring nearly 200 in one of the world's worst high-speed passenger-rail accidents. China's government initially blamed flawed signaling and human error. It recently postponed public release of its crash findings.
The precise cause of the disaster remains uncertain, so there is no way to know what role, if any, the signaling assembly may have played.
An examination of China's use of foreign technology in its bullet-train signal systems highlights deep international distrust over China's industrial model, including weak intellectual-property protections, which can complicate efforts to acquire state-of-the-art technology.
Key signaling systems were assembled by Beijing-based Hollysys Automation Technologies Ltd., one of the few companies China's Ministry of Railways tapped to handle such work. In some cases of the signal systems it supplied, technology branded as proprietary to Hollysys contained circuitry tailor-made by Hitachi Ltd. of Japan to Hollysys specifications, according to people familiar with the situation.
The problem, these people say, is that Hitachi—fearful that Chinese technicians might reverse-engineer and steal the technology—sold components with the inner workings concealed from Hollysys. Hitachi executives say this "black box" design makes gear harder to copy, and also harder to understand, for instance during testing.
"It's still generally a mystery how a company like Hollysys could integrate our equipment into a broader safety-signaling system without intimate knowledge of our know-how," a senior Hitachi executive said.
A rail signaling system is a complex assemblage of dozens of devices, circuits and software that helps train drivers and dispatchers keep everything running safely. As trains pass beacons along a route, known as "balise modules," information about location and speed are fed into the train-control network. According to Hollysys statements, it supplied key parts of the system including the onboard brain, the Automatic Train Protection, or ATP. Hitachi supplied Hollysys with a primary part of the ATP, according to Hitachi executives.
Hollysys didn't respond to requests for comment. Two days after the crash in July, Hollysys issued a statement confirming its ATP components were installed on both trains. Hollysys said its components "functioned normally and well."
A separate state-owned Chinese signaling company, which also works with foreign firms and supplies most of the gear to bullet-train projects, issued a statement around the same time expressing "sorrow" and pledging to accept its responsibility.
China's high-speed railway, budgeted at close to $300 billion, already challenges the travel time of jetliners between cities like Beijing and Shanghai, which are roughly as far apart as Philadelphia and Atlanta. The trains, with advertised cruising speeds on the fastest lines topping 215 miles per hour, are said to "fly on land," demonstrating a future where China is a recognized peer of the U.S., EU and Japan in big-ticket ingenuity. China is designing airliners to compete with Boeing Co. and nuclear reactors to challenge Toshiba Corp.'s Westinghouse Electric Co. It already exports high-speed rail equipment: This month it reached a deal to supply locomotives to the nation of Georgia.
In less than seven years, China has built a bullet-train network larger than the ones Japan and Germany took decades to construct. China is only about halfway through a 15-year plan to build a total of nearly 10,000 miles of high-speed track connecting 24 major cities.
"We aim at the world's top-notch technologies," then-Railways Minister Liu Zhijun declared four years ago. A few months before the July crash, Mr. Liu was fired after China's Communist Party accused him and other top officials of unspecified corruption. Mr. Liu couldn't be located for comment.
July's rail tragedy—in which two bullet trains collided during a storm, sending some cars plunging 65 feet from elevated tracks—is tarnishing China's effort to portray the project as technologically advanced and safety-minded. Among other things, the Ministry of Railways chose not to install lightning rods and surge protectors on some high-speed rail lines even as an industry association recommended doing so on major infrastructure projects, He Jinliang, director of China's National Lightning Protection Technology Standard Committee, said in July.
The Ministry of Railways didn't respond to requests for comment. Through state media and on its website, the ministry has stressed its attention to safety. A Sept. 5 statement said, "Our cadres should be leading the work, changing their style, going to the grass-roots level and trying to solve problems."
Last week, Chinese authorities reiterated their safety pledge after two subway trains in collided in Shanghai, injuring more than 280 people, in an accident blamed on errors after a power snafu knocked out signals, according to the subway operator.
At 8:37 p.m., Train No. D301 rammed into the back of No. D3115, which was nearly stationary on the tracks, in Wenzhou. The accident killed 40 people and injured at least 190. The impact sent four carriages plunging 65 feet off the elevated rail line.
From the initial days of the high-speed railway program, Beijing turned to local firms, including Hollysys, rather than foreign expertise. Hollysys says it is one of just two companies eligible to supply certain signaling technology for China's fastest trains. Ministry of Railways rules effectively forbid foreign companies from bidding.
Though new to high-speed rail, Hollysys became a central supplier of the signaling systems, circuits and software that are supposed to prevent the kind of accident that happened near Wenzhou by automatically stopping trains if trouble is detected.
Integrating signaling components is a challenge, particularly at the pace that China was expanding its rail network, train executives say. "The problem is to put all these pieces of the puzzle into a coherent system," says Marc Antoni, technological innovation director at SNCF, the French national railway operator, which runs the high-speed TGV.
Originally part of China's Ministry of Electronics, Hollysys in the 1990s became a privately owned business focused on "controls"—the technology that keeps factory assembly lines humming smoothly. In a Hollysys timeline of its railway achievements, the company says it won its first noteworthy high-speed-rail signaling contracts in 2005, about when China began construction.
A year later, in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Hollysys played down the importance of high-speed-rail signaling by describing it as "adjacent" to core operations in industrial controls. The sector was mentioned just once in a 300-plus page SEC filing in 2006, part of a successful effort by Hollysys to list its shares on Nasdaq through a special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, a practice that involves adoption of a current listing by another company.
By late 2008 Beijing was speeding construction of its bullet trains in part to help power the Chinese economy through the global economic slump. Hollysys described itself in regulatory filings as one of just two companies that possessed "the capability" to supply the Ministry of Railways with signals on its fastest lines.
Hollysys became a tech darling and in September 2009 its chief financial officer, Peter Li, speaking to analysts, credited the Ministry of Railways' "very clear mandate of localizing the product." When an analyst asked whether he feared competition, Mr. Li said, "Basically, foreign players are not allowed to bid independently for high-speed-rail projects."
The Ministry of Railways awarded Hollysys more than $100 million of high-speed-signaling contracts in 2010 alone, according to company statements. For the fiscal year ended this past June, Hollysys reported total revenue of $262.84 million.
The ministry also played matchmaker for Hollysys. When a leading Italian signaling company, Ansaldo STS, sought a business foothold in China, the Ministry of Railways indicated that it should be in the form of a partnership with Hollysys, according to Ansaldo spokesman Roberto Alatri.
A $97 million contract followed in July 2008 for a Hollysys-Ansaldo consortium to design, build and maintain signal-control systems on China's then-fastest train line, a 459-kilometer section linking the central China cities of Zhengzhou and Xian. The Hollysys portion was $22 million.
Hollysys had a longer relationship with Hitachi, which supplied the Chinese company components for high-speed rail signaling starting in 2005, the year Hollysys says it got its start in the business. The main cooperation was on the onboard ATP system, which Hollysys documents describe as components in the nose and tail of trains that act as its "last line of defense in safety."
The Hitachi-made ATP components came with a catch. Two Hitachi executives familiar with the matter said the company adopts what the industry refers to as "black box" security to conceal design secrets by withholding technical blueprints known in Japanese as zumen.
Black boxes make it tough to reverse-engineer the equipment. They can also make it more difficult to troubleshoot the gear, according to executives of several companies familiar with the practice in China.
"Providing zumen means"¦we completely trust the buyer of our technology," a senior Hitachi executive said, with the understanding that the buyer "would not become a competitive threat in other markets."
Hitachi doesn't always withhold its design secrets. When working with companies elsewhere on a common project, the senior executive said, it will provide the zumen, or blueprints, in some cases.
Hitachi executives say the arrangement with Hollysys wasn't a technology-transfer deal—in which it would be expected to share technical details—but rather a contractual arrangement to manufacture parts to specifications provided by Hollysys. Hitachi says it did provide "limited" technical support that is typical of contracts of this type.
A spokesman at Hitachi's headquarters in Tokyo, Atsushi Konno, said the company "has no comment about Hollysys's products, as we do not have any information as to what kind of end product Hollysys developed using our devices." The official confirmed that Hitachi supplied Hollysys some equipment for the signaling systems used aboard trains and "also provided technical explanation regarding those components, and we believe Hollysys, as a result, fully understands them."
At least one installation of Hollysys components didn't go smoothly, according to one Europe-based engineer who worked on the job. An onboard Hollysys computer, part of the ATP called a driver machine interface, kept freezing, displaying old information.
Technical bugs aren't unusual when fine-tuning a train system, but the temporary fix was, according to the engineer. To avoid the embarrassment of canceling an opening ceremony, operators decided to begin passenger service on the high-speed line and assign one person in the train's cab the exclusive task of watching that the seconds continued to scroll on the computer's clock—thereby ensuring the device was functioning.
"It was a random failure that was not managed very well," the engineer said. The problem was later fixed, he said.
Dominique Pouliquen, head of Alstom SA's China operations, said China and its rail-equipment suppliers remain in the learning stages. "You acquire the technology. Then you need to absorb it; you need to master it," Mr. Pouliquen told a small group of reporters last week. For China, "I think it's all about absorption and fully mastering the whole technology that has been acquired over the last 10 years."
Alstom supplied, through a local joint venture, hardware for train dispatchers on the line where July's collision occurred. Mr. Pouliquen said the JV didn't provide any of the signaling technology that the Chinese government has said was possibly flawed.
In an August letter to shareholders, Hollysys Chief Executive Wang Changli cited the "tragic" Wenzhou accident and reiterated that Hollysys equipment wasn't to blame. China's biggest signaling company, Beijing-based China Railway Signal & Communication Corp., originated within China's railways bureaucracy. Shortly after the crash, a CRSC unit, Beijing National Railway Research & Design Institute of Signal and Communication, issued a statement of "sorrow" and pledged to "shoulder our responsibility."
CRSC hasn't commented about the accident directly, aside from a statement Aug. 23 stating that its top executive, 55-year-old Ma Cheng, collapsed and died during questioning by crash investigators.
agentperry
Senior Member
- Joined
- Oct 24, 2010
- Messages
- 3,022
- Likes
- 690
its good that they atleast recalled them for checks or for replacement.
- Joined
- Apr 5, 2009
- Messages
- 11,615
- Likes
- 5,772
China suspends railways projects
China has suspended construction on 80 per cent of its new high-speed railway projects in the wake of a deadly bullet train crash in July.
Until the crash in the southern city of Wenzhou, which claimed 40 lives and injured almost 200 people, China's high-speed rail network was the envy of the world.
By next year, China was expected to have more miles of high-speed rail tracks than the rest of the world put together.
The most advanced Chinese bullet trains travelled at over 200mph, completing the 820 mile journey from Beijing to Shanghai in less than five hours.
Many observers had voiced safety concerns before the Wenzhou crash, and in its wake, the Chinese government has decided to reassess the safety of the entire network.
Chinese banks have been instructed not to lend money for new railway construction and "there is no decision yet on the next move for China's high-speed railways," the the 21st Century Business Herald newspaper reported.
While China was hoping to recoup some of its investment by selling its high-speed rail technology abroad, including to Britain, those plans have also been suspended.
=============
All the hype about Bullet train got burst like a bubble. I hope they learn from the mistakes and don't rush things to make the party look good in the eyes of the people.
China has suspended construction on 80 per cent of its new high-speed railway projects in the wake of a deadly bullet train crash in July.
Until the crash in the southern city of Wenzhou, which claimed 40 lives and injured almost 200 people, China's high-speed rail network was the envy of the world.
By next year, China was expected to have more miles of high-speed rail tracks than the rest of the world put together.
The most advanced Chinese bullet trains travelled at over 200mph, completing the 820 mile journey from Beijing to Shanghai in less than five hours.
Many observers had voiced safety concerns before the Wenzhou crash, and in its wake, the Chinese government has decided to reassess the safety of the entire network.
Chinese banks have been instructed not to lend money for new railway construction and "there is no decision yet on the next move for China's high-speed railways," the the 21st Century Business Herald newspaper reported.
While China was hoping to recoup some of its investment by selling its high-speed rail technology abroad, including to Britain, those plans have also been suspended.
=============
All the hype about Bullet train got burst like a bubble. I hope they learn from the mistakes and don't rush things to make the party look good in the eyes of the people.
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2009
- Messages
- 43,132
- Likes
- 23,835
Better technology means sacrifice initially, till it pays for itself.
The problem with China is that it is obsessed with showcasing itself, with the bestest, fastest, longest, heaviest, and every other 'est' in the world.
The attitude is the same as the merchant class who have money but have no class and still want to be hobnobbing with high society without shedding their inborn crudity.
While one should not decry the high speed train because of one accident, no matter how catastrophic it may have been, it is poor overall planning in the hurry to be with the Joneses that has caused a mismatch and hence the criticism.
For instance, there is nothing wrong with higher fares. It is compensated with faster service and maybe better amenities on board. Airfares cost a arm and a leg compared to trains, but still airlines operate because it is a necessity for some. Does it mean that airlines should be grounded?
Where the Chinese in my opinion have gone wrong is attempting to convert the Chinese railway lock, stock and barrel into a high speed railway and cutting out the slower trains that were affordable to the 'toiling masses'. They, too, have to travel from place A to B. They cannot afford expensive fares, even if it takes them home early. What good is reaching home fast, when you do not have the money to buy things to give to your people back home or have to save money to travel by such expensive trains (there being none else) and not send money home to feed the family in the village?
Therefore, as I see it, and I maybe wrong, it is the fault of the Chinese Govt that they are not taking a holistic view of modernisation catering not only on the economic factor, but also on the social effects.
Discontent amongst the majority population can have adverse effect on the stability.
India, too, is talking about high speed trains. It is better to first check what went wrong in China, before leaping in like silly, bleating 'lambs' (isn't that one Chinese called the Asian countries less China?)
Let us not fall into the 'Me Too' trap that China has driven itself into!
The problem with China is that it is obsessed with showcasing itself, with the bestest, fastest, longest, heaviest, and every other 'est' in the world.
The attitude is the same as the merchant class who have money but have no class and still want to be hobnobbing with high society without shedding their inborn crudity.
While one should not decry the high speed train because of one accident, no matter how catastrophic it may have been, it is poor overall planning in the hurry to be with the Joneses that has caused a mismatch and hence the criticism.
For instance, there is nothing wrong with higher fares. It is compensated with faster service and maybe better amenities on board. Airfares cost a arm and a leg compared to trains, but still airlines operate because it is a necessity for some. Does it mean that airlines should be grounded?
Where the Chinese in my opinion have gone wrong is attempting to convert the Chinese railway lock, stock and barrel into a high speed railway and cutting out the slower trains that were affordable to the 'toiling masses'. They, too, have to travel from place A to B. They cannot afford expensive fares, even if it takes them home early. What good is reaching home fast, when you do not have the money to buy things to give to your people back home or have to save money to travel by such expensive trains (there being none else) and not send money home to feed the family in the village?
Therefore, as I see it, and I maybe wrong, it is the fault of the Chinese Govt that they are not taking a holistic view of modernisation catering not only on the economic factor, but also on the social effects.
Discontent amongst the majority population can have adverse effect on the stability.
India, too, is talking about high speed trains. It is better to first check what went wrong in China, before leaping in like silly, bleating 'lambs' (isn't that one Chinese called the Asian countries less China?)
Let us not fall into the 'Me Too' trap that China has driven itself into!
Last edited:
- Status
| Thread starter | Similar threads | Forum | Replies | Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E | U.N. report: Chinese bullets killed peacekeepers in Darfur | China | 25 | |
|
Chinese Lunar Exploration Program | China | 0 | |
|
Attacks on Chinese in Pakistan | Pakistan | 10 | |
|
Idiotic musing of Chinese communist party. | China | 2 |
