Yesterday, a fire at the Huiteng Shoe Factory in Jinjiang caused 28 deaths
Social media videos at the time showed thick black smoke billowing from the fire scene, flames shooting into the sky, and many people trapped on the rooftop. Some had taken off their clothes and were standing at the edge of the roof, while firefighters appeared to be spraying them with water from hoses to cool them down. In addition, some people also fell from the building.
Zhang Erlong told Southern Window that after the factory building’s glass was burned through, he saw that there was a layer of something like iron bars inside the window glass, sealing off the “escape route,” making it impossible to escape from the back of the building. Zhang Erlong observed the scene for an hour and did not see a single person escape from the back of the building.
“There was a lot of stuff piled up on the floors. Otherwise, they could have come down the stairs and wouldn’t have had to run up to the roof.” Zhang Erlong said he noticed that the people inside reacted very slowly. There was already a lot of smoke at the time, but there were still many people in the building.
Li Long’an also remembered that when the fire first broke out, he saw many videos people had posted showing a number of people trapped on the factory roof, but when he went to the scene a little after 2 p.m., there was no one left on the roof. Onlookers told him that as the fire grew more intense, many people hid in the rooftop water tank.
At the time, Li Long’an was standing on the rooftop of a tall building not far from the shoe factory to observe the scene. He remembered that many ambulances arrived, “I counted 6 outside the shoe factory, and there were also a few inside, but I couldn’t see the exact number.” However, from afternoon until evening, Li Long’an said he did not see any ambulances leave, “they were standing by the whole time.”
Around 4 p.m., the fire was brought under control, and firefighters then went upstairs one after another to carry out rescues. Li Long’an said that at the scene he saw about 20 firefighters gathered around the rooftop water tank, repeatedly recovering bodies from inside, wrapping them up, and carrying them downstairs.
By his estimate, the water tank was about a dozen square meters in size. He said that during the time he was observing, firefighters recovered 6 bodies from the rooftop water tank. After that, the authorities no longer allowed them to keep watching from nearby rooftops. “When we went downstairs, the firefighters were still recovering bodies.”
https://www.myzaker.com/article/6a50ad258e9f096a186e0868
At the time, I couldn’t help but think of the extremely similar disaster at Shenzhen’s Zhili Toy Factory in the last century
On the afternoon of November 19, 1993, 5 months and 22 days after receiving its fire safety certificate, three power lines in the factory area short-circuited and sparked. Because the fuse wire made of copper could not melt, the power could not be cut off in time, and the short-circuited wires kept spraying sparks, igniting the fabric and foam piled up in the warehouse, and disaster struck.
When the fire broke out, more than 300 workers were working overtime to produce toys for the Italian brand CHICOO for the upcoming Christmas season. The factory manager, Huang Guoguang, who was on the second floor, opened the window himself and climbed out on a rope to escape.
Employees on the second and third floors fled in panic without anyone directing them, but the windows had iron bars nailed over them, and three of the four exits were either locked shut or welded shut. The passages were narrow and crowded, people were pushing into one another, thick smoke and flames made visibility poor, and the burning synthetic materials gave off large amounts of toxic gas. Many workers were overcome by the fumes near the stairwell.
When firefighters used axes to split open the welded-shut rolling door at the west stairwell of the factory building, people were stunned: from the corner on the first floor all the way to the third floor, there were bodies of young female migrant workers everywhere, piled up several layers deep. Some had been burned until only bones remained; some were clustered together in groups of four or five and could not be pulled apart.
The fire ultimately killed 87 people and injured 51. Among the dead, apart from two male workers, all the others were female migrant workers, the youngest only 15 years old.
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/600027.html
Back then, Zhili Toy Factory bribed the head of the fire safety rectification working group with HK$3,000 to obtain a fire safety certificate, only to end up causing the tragedy of 87 workers’ deaths. The fire at Huiteng Shoe Factory was also entirely man-made — a disaster brought about by capitalism, although
Every summer, the relevant departments would go to each factory to do an inspection.
After the incident, the company’s负责人 and relevant responsible persons have been taken into custody, and the company’s accounts have been frozen.
It seems that the local government has already fulfilled its responsibility, and the accident was caused by the shoe factory itself. But if the government truly cared about workers’ lives and was really a people’s government, it would never have allowed so many safety hazards in the shoe factory to persist, to the point where workers, when faced with fire, could only run to the roof, and in the end were forced by thick smoke and flames to jump from the building or enter the water tank. And according to witnesses, no ambulance was seen leaving, which means none of the workers survived. The true death toll is still unknown.
After the Zhili fire and the fire at Gaofu Textile, a bureaucrat under the one-China revisionist system said:
“These two major fires did indeed speed up the introduction of the Labor Law. It made everyone feel that if we did not enact legislation to protect workers’ rights and interests, it would lead to serious social problems.”
This shows that the revisionist government’s introduction of the Labor Law was merely a reactionary measure intended to prevent workers from engaging in more intense struggles and shaking its rule. And as class contradictions in China intensify, workers’ situation is becoming increasingly dire, various deaths and injuries are happening more and more often, and the revisionist government’s repression of workers’ struggles is becoming increasingly severe. Today, without overthrowing this revisionist government, the guardian of a reactionary capitalist order, the working class can only suffer even more brutal oppression.
