On 23 July 2011, two high speed trains traveling across the province of Zhejiang in China collided in an incident now known as the Wenzhou train disaster (Wenzhou refers to the suburb). Forty people were killed and 192 injured in an incident that had major political ramifications in the Chinese state. ...PC General-secretary, President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao called for all-out efforts to rescue passengers.Train operations were suspended on the line while damaged infrastructure was repaired. Fifty-eight trains were canceled the following day.Sheng Guangzu, the Railways Minister, ordered an investigation into the accident, and arrived at the scene of the accident on midday 24 July. He also apologised for the horrific accident. Vice-Premier Zhang Dejiang flew into Wenzhou to lead rescue efforts. The Ministry of Railways announced that three high ranking railway officials were fired immediately after the crash. They were identified as Long Jing, head of the Shanghai Railway Bureau; Li Jia, party secretary and the deputy chief of the bureau, He Shengli.The Chinese government had sacked railways minister Liu Zhijun in February 2011, for allegedly taking over 800 million yuan in kickbacks connected with contracts for high-speed rail expansion. Zhang Shuguang, the deputy chief engineer of Chinas railways, was also arrested in February 2011 and alleged to have amassed $2.8 billion in overseas accounts. The government ordered a two-month nationwide safety campaign on 26 July, as the families of victims demanded more answers. Sheng Guangzu apologised for the collision on behalf of the Railways department and said the campaign would focus on improving Chinas high-speed network. Government officials had not explained by 25 July why the second train was apparently not warned of the disabled one before the crash took place.Lawyers in China were ordered by the Wenzhou Judicial Bureau not to take on cases from the families of the crash victims. According to a statement issued by the Wenzhou Lawyers Association, lawyers were told not to take cases because the accident is a major sensitive issue concerning social stability. The Wenzhou Judicial Bureau later apologised for the statement, saying its wording had been formulated by the Lawyers Association and had not been approved. [Wikipedia] Major disasters like the Wenzhou collision and can open open up a wound in the states and governments, exposing its organisational weaknesses, incompetence and corruption. This is now happening in the case of the disappearance of Malaysian airlines flight MH370. So much of this story is (understandably) preoccupied with the mystery of what happened and where the aircraft is. Speculation has been rife (myself included). The important story -short of the tragic fate of those onboard- lies in the way states were not able to respond because levels of cooperation within and among governments are poor and brittle. Moreover, the matter quickly became politicised as Malaysian government propaganda units started directing blame for the disaster at the opposition as criticism of the current Malaysian governments mismanagement of the search grew louder. The organisational bungling of the search for the plane was largely the product of the failure of government agencies to communicate information to each other. That in turn might have emerged from bureaucratic laziness or -more likely- departmental rivalries and jealousies. One can imagine a public service chief not being too concerned with cooperation since in all likelihood the passengers and crew were all dead anyway, so why not persist with self interested departmental rivalries. The saga of MH370 also exposed nation state rivalries in the sharing of information. Thailand, an ASEAN partner of Malaysia did not publicly reveal until a week later that it had detected MH370s turn to the Indian Ocean in real time, an astonishing admission that has been all but forgotten in the media. There were also some suggestions that military and national security tracking facilities were reluctant to reveal the extent of their surveillance (possibly a reaction to Snowdens revelations about the activities of intelligence gathering agencies). The prevailing narrative about governments in the post communist era is that of increasing economic integration and cooperation. What the MH370 disaster is revealing is that the level of cooperation and convergence among states is more hope and mythology than it is real. But is cooperation and integration ever going to be possible in an era when neoliberal orthodoxy and free market fundamentalism prevails? According to the Hungarian sociologist & Christian socialist Karl Polanyi (author of The Great Transformation, written in 1944 in an effort to explain the reasons for world war 2)the competitiveness that results from the spread of market relations into areas traditionally managed by non-market forms of allocating resources ie tradition, politics, bureaucracies and democratic decision making vastly increases the scope of rivalries, intensifying the possibility of conflict (including war). In other words, the prevailing orthodoxy of neo-liberalism / free market fundamentalism makes cooperation and coordination within and among states difficult or impossible. It is this prevailing and dominant ideology of free market fundamentalism is the problem and the underlying cause of governmental dysfunction.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 08:02:13 +0000
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