School Bus Incidents in China

An overloaded school minibus crashed head-on with a truck on Nov 16, in rural western China on Wednesday, killing at least 18 kindergarten children on their way to class.

China lacks a safe school bus system

On November 16, 2011, after colliding with a coal truck, 19 school children in a school bus died and the rest were all injured in Gansu Province. It turned out that 64 people were crammed into a 9-passenger van. On November 25, nine days after this incident, the Chinese regime donated 23 school buses, each with a 35-passenger capacity, to a small European country, Macedonia.  On November 26, another school bus accident resulted in 35 injured children in Liaoning Province. 

The news of the school bus donation caused an uproar. Chinese netizens mocked the regime by saying: “Laughing children are in other countries, crying children are in China,” and “The Foreign Ministry has turned into the Foreign Aid Ministry.”

Facing surging discontent, Chinese official reactions are quite interesting. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman solemnly explained that the school bus donation to Macedonia was based on an aid agreement reached in early 2011. China had received foreign aid before, including aid from Macedonia in 2008 during China’s Sichuan earthquake. Foreign aid is the manifestation of China’s international responsibility.

What can be read between the lines for the Chinese people then? Although Chinese officials know very well that lacking a safe school bus system has caused many school bus incidents in three provinces in the past two months, the regime spent a lot of money, signed an agreement with another country and provided good quality buses to secure the safety of the children of another country.  

When openly claiming that the donation of school buses to another country reflects China’s “international responsibility”, it also admits, at the same time, that the Communist regime has no intention to shoulder any responsibility for children in China; it does not care whether there is a safe school bus system, whether the buses are overloaded, or the number of incidents and casualties incurred. 

Nowadays, China’s spending on the “three public expenditures” is more than spending on the maintenance of stability and the military. The three public expenditures have become Chinese officials using public funds for transportation, dining and going abroad, a total of 900 billion yuan per year. If we could eliminate the transportation expenditure of Chinee officials – 40 billion yuan a year – we could have a good quality school bus system for all school children in China. 

While many countries, including some small and poor countries, have well-equipped and safe school bus systems now, a strong and prosperous China itself is lacking such a system. In fact, a large part of China even lacks the concept of a “school bus”.