On Wednesday night, twin explosions convulsed the northeastern Chinese metropolis of Tianjin, taking more than a hundred lives, injuring some seven hundred people, and leaving still more missing. The most unsettling detail that emerged about the origin of the blasts was perhaps not so much what had sparked them—hazardous chemicals—as the fact that they had taken place at a logistics facility specifically licensed to handle such goods. The warehouse, operated by Ruihai International Logistics, is set inside an eight-hundred-square-mile district, Binhai New Area, that was built, in part, to bolster the city’s reputation as an industrial powerhouse and petrochemical-processing hub.
Mere minutes after the explosion, viewers in China and around the world were confronted with graphic visuals of the chaos, shot by the unsteady hands of smartphone wielders close enough to capture the surreal scene. Fireballs taller than skyscrapers lit up the night, dyeing the sky red; the flame mushroomed and tumbled across the horizon. The impact mangled tower blocks more than a mile away. According to the China Earthquake Networks Center, the magnitude of the first explosion was equivalent to the detonation of three tons of TNT; the second to twenty-one tons. Almost six thousand Tianjin residents now have nowhere to call home, and city hospitals are struggling to accommodate the injured. Charred shells of cars lie strewn across lots near the blast center, and the scorched skeletons of buildings that housed families and office workers remain sheathed in thick plumes of grey smoke.
For many Chinese, answers about the hows and whys of the explosions seem similarly shrouded. “Do you not see the pictures of the wreckage? How can something of this scale be an accident?” an indignant student from Shanghai asked on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. “Can’t decide what’s scarier, that no one knows what’s going on or that no one is telling the whole truth about what’s going on,” another user wrote.
So far, Ruihai International Logistics, a four-year-old company that employs about seventy workers, has yet to offer a statement, though some of its top executives have been detained for questioning. According to its Web site (which went offline at some point after Wednesday), Ruihai specializes in the transportation of hazardous materials, including flammable liquids, combustible agents, and corrosives. Among the chemicals known to have been stored at Ruihai, according to state news reports, is sodium cyanide, a compound that produces a toxic gas. Sodium cyanide was also found in nearby drains after the blasts, stoking fears that it might have contaminated nearby water sources.
These disclosures are particularly troubling in light of the revelation, following the explosions, that the closest high-rise apartment complex to the Ruihai warehouse was a mere two thousand feet away. “They keep saying they will investigate, they don’t know this, they don’t know that, but some official must have known,” a Tianjin resident posted on Weibo. Indeed, it has become increasingly apparent that officials were aware of the risks. According to local maritime administrators, in March, 2014, the municipal government held an emergency drill at the company; earlier this month, local safety personnel had convened companies from various industries to discuss the handling of dangerous chemicals.
It’s unclear how highly authorities and companies are prioritizing such measures amid breakneck economic growth in the metropolitan area of thirteen million, which is one of China’s busiest ports. Last December, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang designated Tianjin a free-trade zone, feeding an existing fervor to expand the scope of business in the city (more than half the world’s Fortune 500 companies operate in the Binhai New Area). But a string of large-scale industrial accidents across the country in recent years, including five chemical explosions since April, have raised questions about whether companies, prioritizing the danger of lost profits over the risk of accidents, are bothering to implement often costly safety precautions or to comply with regulations.
“Whether the fire arose from criminal greed or negligence, our mouths shouldn’t be stuffed just because they are mute,” a Weibo blogger wrote, alluding darkly to the evasions of central-government officials during a press conference on Friday. As China grows increasingly wired, crisis management has evolved into a precarious science, in which the government treats information itself like a virus on the verge of infecting the masses. Reporters have been banned from sharing news about the blast on Weibo; as is the case with all news stories in China, opinions unfavorable to Communist Party leaders remain criminalized as rumor-mongering, and online reactions from citizens are edited by teams of censors to reflect the only acceptable response to a crisis: unity and control.
These measures only serve to exacerbate the anxieties of citizens near and far, despite vows from President Xi Jinping that “all-out efforts” would be made to save the lives of anyone still at risk and to investigate the causes of the explosions. Citizens are asking whether facility workers were properly trained, if firefighters were properly informed about the nature of the fire, and whether the city’s air is now breathable and its water drinkable. In the coming days, the questions are likely to proliferate. How China conducts its investigation into the explosions—the amount of transparency it permits into the process, the expediency with which findings are conveyed, and its willingness to expose powerful people, if necessary—will serve as a barometer of the leadership’s control. “The Premier and President Xi have promised an all-out effort to ‘save lives and contain the fire and demand the severe punishment of everyone responsible,’ ” a blogger surnamed Zhang wrote on Weibo. “But will the definition of punishment depend on the identity of the culprit?”
