| Tibet railway's safety record offers food for thought
2006-07-03
China Daily
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.  | 
