Chinese Studies - Tibet railway's safety record offers food for thought

/ Opinion








Tibet railway's safety record offers food for thought
By You Nuo(China Daily)
Updated: 2006-07-03 05:41





Much media coverage of the newly completed engineering feat of the
Qinghai-Tibet Railway has focused on its safety record. Indeed, when the
building of subways in Beijing can still result in fatalities, as it did
last week, it sounds almost futuristic for the builders of this railway
of the roof of the world to claim not a single fatality after finishing a
1,100-kilometre project at an altitude in excess of 3,000 metres.

It is like comparing some 21st century technology with simple industry.
And when it comes to mining, where the lax enforcement of safety rules
can cause the loss of hundreds of lives, it is like comparing rocket
science with the 19th century coolie economy.

But when both can happen in the same country, it means that greater use
should have been made of what looks like rocket science, while the 19th
century way of working ought to have been done away with.

The central government should use the completion of the new railway to
start a campaign to educate all industry officials and business leaders
in safety management. The successful experience should be included in
textbooks and manuals, and be made required courses.

In particular, Sun Yongfu, the railway's leading executive, should be
made chairman of the board of directors of a new national work safety
academy funded by the central government, the All-China Federation of
Trade Unions and large corporations.

To start with, the State Administration of Work Safety should perhaps
establish some crash courses, based on the experiences of building the
Qinghai-Tibet Railway, for the nation's coal mine executives.

It has been reported that when the project was due to start, its managers
made clear their goal that the project should have no fatalities despite
the fact that fatalities had occurred during all previous civil
engineering endeavours on the Tibetan plateau.

They achieved their goal. In the subsequent five years, all standards and
procedures were strictly adhered to in order to ensure lives were
safeguarded.

Unfortunately, from reading the Chinese-language press coverage of the
Qinghai-Tibet Railway, one gets the impression that this success is not
getting the attention it deserves.

When the railway's record of no fatalities is reported, more is written
about the scientific aspect, such as Doctor Wu Tianyi's medical research
into high-altitude human activities.

But the railway's success is not just one of pure science. It was a
five-year project involving thousands of workers undertaking various
tasks, most of which were presumably not of a very high-tech type and not
that different from those performed by coal miners. It is even more of a
feat that, through this complex process, the advice of medical
professionals could be followed to the letter.

The success in safeguarding lives during the construction of the
Qinghai-Tibet Railway is therefore one of successful management. The
whole nation owes special thanks to the project's managers.

It might not be a market-economy success in terms of financial
management, or a sales and marketing success. But that doesn't matter,
because it is a government-funded project. So long as it can, by an
objective standard, outperform most other companies, its example should
be recognized to contain a greater value, and be followed by all other
companies.

Even the government itself will have to learn from the builders of the
Qinghai-Tibet Railway. As we can see from the frequent tragedies in the
nation's coal mines, safety rules are often ignored in the interests of
making a short-term profit. Criminal investigations of negligent
executives are unable to deter other executives from acting the same way.

To really ensure humanist values prevail in key industries, a certain
degree of government interference does seem necessary. But in many cases,
officials have yet to learn how much interference is reasonable to just
get the rules followed without upsetting the work plans.

Email: younuo@chinadaily.com.cn


(China Daily 07/03/2006 page4)
















China Daily PDF Edition











Learn Chinese, Learn mandarin, Learning Materials, Mandarin audio lessons, Chinese writing lessons, Chinese vocabulary lists, About chinese characters, News in Chinese, Go to China, Travel to China, Study in China, Teach in China, Dictionaries, Learn Chinese Painting, Your name in Chinese, Chinese calligraphy, Chinese songs, Chinese proverbs, Chinese poetry, Chinese tattoo, Beijing 2008 Olympics, Mandarin Phrasebook, Chinese editor, Pinyin editor, China Travel, Travel to Beijing,