Shanghai nixes famed lantern festival after deadly stampede

Chinese paramilitary policemen and uniformed policemen form human chains to guide pedestrians crossing a major intersection near the site of a deadly stampede in Shanghai

China’s financial hub of Shanghai said yesterday it was canceling its famed Lunar New Year lantern festival in the wake of a stampede that left 36 people dead.
The announcement illustrates the spreading effects of the Jan. 1 disaster, in which surging crowds trampled people along the city’s legendary Bund riverfront walkway.
Events as far away as in Beijing have been canceled and security tightened in subway stations and other crowded public spaces.
The upcoming three-day festival in the city’s Yuyuan Garden, a warren of narrow alleys and ancient buildings in the heart of the ancient walled Chinese city, drew more than 1.3 million people in 2013. The lantern festival comes on the 15th day of the Lunar New Year marking the close of the annual festivities.
The festivities typically draw massive, sometimes unruly crowds and in 2004, 37 people were killed in a stampede in the Beijing suburb of Miyun.
The company that runs the Yuyan Garden and the Shanghai city government said in separate statements that the event was being canceled out of “safety concerns.”
Neither directly mentioned the stampede, pointing to official worries over continuing public outrage over security lapses and a lack of government explanations.
Authorities allowed only one day of tightly-controlled public mourning at the site, which has since been fenced off on the pretext of making aesthetic improvements.
Some victims’ family members and others have reported being followed and harassed by security personnel, a typical tactic by authorities who tolerate little criticism and fear any chance of unrest coalescing around sympathy for those killed. For that, Chinese authorities have been criticized all over the world.
“Seven days after a stampede on New Year’s Eve in Shanghai, the souls of the 36 people killed in the crush came back, according to traditional Chinese beliefs, for a brief visit to this world. For the return of the dead, city officials spared no effort in their preparations,” wrote the Economist in an article last week.
In a critical tone, the London-based magazine, continued, “Had there been such extensive preparations for New Year’s Eve, the stampede might never have happened. Instead, a light police presence was overwhelmed by the vast numbers who flocked to the Bund for the countdown to 2015. The local government cannot claim to have been taken totally by surprise. Concerns about overcrowding had led the city to cancel a firework-and-light show on the Bund, and the government had warned people to stay away for fear of packed streets.”
Following tragedies of this kind, it is normal and indeed important to ask if the authorities could have done more to ensure safety. But in Shanghai, such questions from the public have been seen as almost subversive. Dozens of people who dared to criticise the city in online blog posts were interrogated by the police, according to the South China Morning Post.
After wall-to-wall, often emotional, coverage of the stampede in its immediate aftermath, domestic media have also been reined in. They are now limited to republishing a handful of state-sanctioned reports. Yang Xiong, Shanghai’s mayor, said that “lessons must be learned from blood”. Covering up criticism is a poor way to start, said the Economist. MDT/Agencies