Who Was Really at Fault in the Shanghai Business School Fire?

This article was extracted from my early NetEase blog. NetEase Blog is no longer operating, but looking back, these words are still quite interesting, so I decided to move them over as intact as possible. This is mainly kept as a record; after all these years, the quality of the text, images, and links may all have been affected.

This article was originally published on November 16, 2008. I was about 19 years old at the time and was in college.

After the 11/14 fire at Shanghai Business School, almost everyone focused their attention on the issue of illegal electricity use. But if we think about it from another angle, perhaps the school and education also bear an unavoidable responsibility! I just read a diary entry written by a student from the business school. "We did nothing wrong" was his cry. He aimed all his criticism at the mismatch between the school's 1,500-yuan accommodation fee and its hardware facilities. Maybe it was a little extreme, but incomplete hardware facilities and inadequate firefighting equipment were indeed indirect killers in this accident! The school certainly has responsibility, but the lack of emergency safety knowledge among the students should also draw our attention! If they had rushed into the hallway first instead of the balcony, if they had chosen to climb over to the balcony of Room 601 instead of jumping down or trying to jump to the fifth floor, perhaps the tragedy could have been avoided! Themselves? The school? Education? …?? Who exactly was at fault?

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