Shanghai Scrap

After six increasingly lengthy posts on the subject, I am pleased to announce that Yi Jianlian has finally signed with the Milwaukee Bucks. Congratulations to the Bucks for waiting out their spoiled brat draft pick: you will soon recoup the cost (financial and psychological) of having to send a senior US senator to Hong Kong to finish the deal. In fact, that new Chinese-language Bucks page suggests that you are already well on your to recouping. As for Yi, bulk up: 100 yuan says that there’s a long line of NBA players ready to knock you flat on your back if you try any of those loping, elegant drives to the basket that you pulled when I saw you in Guangzhou last winter. And another 100 yuan says that Yao Ming – a class act – is at the front of the line.

With that, this blog goes on hiatus until Spetember 3. I’ll be traveling, and responses to emails may be spotty. But I promise to catch up early next week.

The August 19th explosion of the Shandong Weiqiao Group’s aluminum plant in Zouping County, Shandong Province has received far less media attention than the Xintai mining disaster. But, at least from the standpoint of China’s industrial modernization, it is far more consequential. As I noted in a post to this blog on Monday, the Weiqiao aluminum plant is one of the largest aluminum manufacturing facilities in China (and, by extension, the world). The description posted to the company’s website suggests a technologically modern plant (built in 2003) capable of meeting modern manufacturing standards. I wrote on Monday:

Large, modern aluminum plants don’t explode because someone failed to replace a liner. If worker error was responsible for the accident, that error could only have occurred if there was a fatal design or safety flaw in the plant itself.

This was not, however, an opinion shared by the Shandong safety authorities. According to an early story in China Daily:

Workers’ negligence has been blamed for the molten aluminium spill that killed 14 and injured 59 at a factory in East China’s Shandong Province on Sunday, the provincial work safety watchdog said on Tuesday.

Now, thanks to a late-breaking report from Xinhua, we learn that China’s national State Administration of Work Safety has a different perspective on the issue. According to the English-language Interfax report on the disaster, “project design faults” were behind the explosion. The slightly more in-depth Chinese-language story from the Jinan Times reports that the plant suffered from design and construction flaws (in addition to lacking a proper emergency contingency plan). (more…)