NYT
March 16, 2001
Blasts in China Leave at Least 18 Dead
By CRAIG S. SMITH
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The New York Times
S HANGHAI, March 16 A series of apparently coordinated blasts killed
at least 18 people in an industrial city 120 miles south of Beijing
early Friday, sending riot police into the streets and sparking rumors
that laid-off factory workers were wreaking revenge.
The state-run New China News Agency reported that one explosion ripped
through a residential building at the Number Three Cotton Mill in
Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei province. China's news agency said
18 people had died in the pre-dawn explosion.
But the Associated Press and Reuters news agencies separately reported
that at least two other buildings were hit by blasts within an hour of
the first explosion, which witnesses said leveled the five-story
building that housed dozens of families.
The New China News agency published a photograph showing rescue
workers clambering over a pile of rubble at the first blast site.
By this evening, the cause of the blasts had not yet been reported.
The death toll, however, was expected to rise.
Residents reached by telephone described Shijiazhuang as a tense city
with riot police patrolling areas around the blasts. Police turned
back several foreign reporters who tried to reach the city by car from
Beijing.
Reuters and The Associated Press both reported that a second explosion
blew a hole in the side of a dormitory near the city's Number One
Cotton Mill, down the block from the first blast. Another struck the
dormitory of a city-run railroad company about three and a half miles
away.
Reuters reported that a fourth explosion damaged a dormitory near the
Hebei Provincial Television and Broadcasting University, thought it
wasn't clear which organization had the building.
The Associated Press quoted a city fire official named Liu as saying
that the first blast, at around 4 a.m. today, nearly flattened the No.
Three Cotton Mill building, which housed 48 families. Mr. Liu said
that more than 40 people had been rescued from the wreckage.
There were no reported deaths from the other blasts.
The blasts came a day after Prime Minister Zhu Rongji apologized to
the nation for an earlier explosion on March 6 at a school that killed
42 people, most of them schoolchildren, in rural Wanzai county of
Jiangxi province. The government has blamed that blast on a deranged
suicide bomber, though local residents allege that at the time,
children were assembling fireworks in the school.
Guns are tightly controlled in China, but explosives are relatively
easy to come by in a country pocked with construction sites and mines,
fueling the speculation about the blasts today. As a result, bombs
have become the weapon of choice for a broad swath of angry people
seeking revenge or expressing discontent, from spurned lovers to
separatist terrorists in the country's Far West.
Shijiazhuang is in the middle of China's cotton belt and is a center
of the country's beleaguered state-owned textile mills, which the
government has been shaving down in its effort to rid itself of
money-losing enterprises.
Three years ago, Beijing vowed to radically reduce the number of the
textile industry's "spindles," a measure used for yarn spinning
machines, and it has made good on its word. By the end of last year,
9.4 million cotton spindles had been scrapped, according to a recent
government report.
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