Dozens crushed to death in a tragic stampede at a place where people congregated to enjoy themselves, not to die. Police blamed for failures in crowd control. Emergency services pilloried for a slow and chaotic response which led to needless deaths.
Sound like the New Year’s Eve disaster at the Shanghai Bund, in which 36 people died and dozens more were injured? It’s not: it’s a description of the 1989 Hillsborough stadium tragedy in Sheffield, England, in which 96 people died and hundreds were injured in a similar human pile-up. My point? China has no corner on the market for unruly crowds, incompetent police and unnecessary disasters. But you’d never know that, from the way many mainlanders reacted to the carnage.
When news of the Bund bloodbath surfaced on a frigid bright New Year’s morning in Shanghai, the first reaction of many locals was to blame the Chinese. Only hours after dozens of young people had suffocated to death at the very same spot, Chinese bystanders at the scene of the stampede repeatedly told me versions of the same thing: “Chinese are like that”, or sometimes “young Chinese are like that, they like to push and shove”, or occasionally “Chinese from outside Shanghai are like that, they don’t know how to behave in a civilised fashion”.