SHANGHAI ? A crash on one of Shanghai's newest subway lines is the latest stumble in China's rush to roll out modern services, often sacrificing safety for fast results.
The collision Tuesday, which injured 271 people, has also focused attention on a state-owned venture that supplies signal systems, including one implicated in a deadly bullet train crash in July.
The subway operator, Shanghai Shentong Metro Group, said the line which opened last year was experiencing signal problems when one of its trains crashed into another near the city's scenic Yuyuan Garden.
It was not the first problem on the line. A mishap involving the misdirecting of a train two months earlier had resulted in assurances of no more accidents from the maker of the signal system, Casco Signal Ltd.
"We certainly intend to get to the bottom of this," the metro's chairman Yu Guangyao told reporters.
Casco, a joint venture of China Railway Signal and Communication Corp., or CRSC, and France's Alstom, SA, was set up in the mid-1980s and is a major supplier of signal systems and other electronic equipment for China's railways and subway systems.
It also supplied a centralized traffic control system for the railway in east China's Zhejiang province where two bullet trains crashed on July 23, killing 40 people and injuring 177.
While the two systems are not the same, the problems with signaling and communications on the subway line raised eyebrows: At the time of the crash, the crowded trains were operating at lower than usual speeds and being directed via phone by subway staff rather than by electronic signals.
As with the bullet train crash, which experts say resulted both from equipment and human error, its problems likely are not limited to the signaling equipment.
"There is no doubt that the signaling equipment is the most direct and obvious cause," said Li Hongchang, a professor of economics and management at Beijing Jiaotong University. "The deeper cause lies in maintenance, management and even in whether contracts were awarded in a fair an open way in the first place."
Staff at Casco's headquarters refused comment Wednesday.
China's multi-trillion dollar building boom is knitting the country together as never before, with high-speed trains, smooth new super highways, cruise terminals and brand new airports.
But many of the projects, built at hyper speed to meet deadlines that often appear geared more to political grandstanding than safety, have fallen prey to quality and safety problems.
"Given the serious traffic jam problems in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, generally it is better to have more subways and have them earlier," said Li, the professor.
"But the rush is too hot in some places, too many subways built too quickly," Li said. Construction often starts before projects are fully designed to save time, he said.
The momentum to build quickly and massively is built into a system dominated by state-owned companies whose party-appointed top executives often enjoy insider influence with the officials awarding contracts.
CRSC, for example, is among the many big state companies that have thrived on China's massive railways buildup, further fortified by huge cash pools from share listings. Most of the company's overseas projects, according to its website, have been in the developing world ? North Korea, Pakistan, Iran and Tanzania ? or at home.
The subway crash was a shock for Shanghai, a city of 23 million that prides itself on its fancy new infrastructure ? roads, airports, ports, tunnels and subways all expanded dramatically ahead of the city's 2010 World Expo.
But as with elsewhere in China, the cracks in the veneer already were showing, just like the recent reports of shattering glass and crumbling concrete at the city's new Hongqiao International Airport terminal.
Tuesday's was the third system failure in two months on the subway's "Line 10", which reportedly was set to switch to completely automated operations next month, eliminating the need for train attendants to drive or operate the doors of the trains.
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Researcher Fu Ting contributed.
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