Incomplete News...and a DalianTravel Warning

There was a fire aboard a ferry in the sea off Dalian's coast last week. I know this not because I read about it online at Daliannews.com, but because my dad asked me about it when I talked with him last week. I had to do a google search on this incident and found a writeup about it in a Taiyuan newspaper. Taiyuan is a city in central China thousands of miles away from Dalian on the northeast coast of China.

I did a search of the daliannews.com website and the story was conspicuously missing. Sure, it happened during the May 1 holiday, even hard working reporters like Farah and Caroline at daliannews.com need a rest. But hey, why not mention it when they got back from their well deserved holiday? I consider daliannews.com to be the best source of information about Dalian for foreigners. Whether this story was reported in Chinese newspapers or not is irrelevant to me, I am a foreigner living in Dalian who travels quite a bit. I feel I should I have the right to know when things like this happen.

However, daliannews.com did mention the last ferry fire in November 2004. Yes, there have been a number of fires including one in which a ferry caught fire and capsized in 1999 that killed 280 people.

Recently, I got an email from a reader asking me about the ferry service between Dalian and Tianjin. Since nobody's said it yet, I'll say it now: don't take the ferry service operating out of Dalian. 2 fires aboard ferries in 6 months is a bit too scary for me. Take the train instead.

I must give credit where credit is due. The China rail service is excellent. It's comfortable (if you get a sleeper ticket that is), safe (watch your belongings) cheap, clean and so punctual it's scary (they leave on the dot and arrive within 2-3 minutes of intended arrival time). The only real downside are that tickets can be hard to get (corruption rares it's ugly head again) especially during the peak holiday times and you may feel like a needle in a stack of needles at the train station.

Back to the 'reportlessness' of the ferry fire last week, it takes me back to this story I read recently about the Beijing coverup of the SARS crisis back in 2003. I came across a paper copy of the Time magazine in a local coffee shop and found that this story is still posted online.

"You foreigners value each person's life more than we do because you have fewer people in your countries," says a Shanghai-based respiratory specialist, who sits on an advisory committee dealing with epidemic diseases. "Our primary concern is social stability, and if a few people's deaths are kept secret, it's worth it to keep things stable."

Wow. When officials believe a few deaths here and there are OK for social stability..how do you argue with that? I hope that respiratory specialist or any of his family members didn't end up contracting SARS or they'd be a vitim of their own policy.