A fire erupted at a shoe factory in south-east China, killing 37 people in the latest industrial accident to hit the world’s fourth-largest economy, officials and state media said on Monday.
The blaze at the Feida workshop, located near the city of Putian in coastal Fujian province, broke out at 9.50pm local time on Sunday and was extinguished an hour later, the official Xinhua news agency said.
“Initial investigations showed 56 workers were in the workshop at the time of the fire,” Xinhua quoted provincial government spokesperson Zhu Qing as saying.
A hospital official said some of the 19 people injured were in critical condition.
Further underlining the hazardous state of Chinese industry, at least 16 people were killed and 15 injured on Sunday in a massive explosion at a fireworks factory in a county outside Chongqing in south-west China.
Pictures posted on the Fujian provincial government website showed firemen standing by a scorched and still smoking concrete building with iron doors.
“It happened on the sixth floor of the building where workers work, eat and sleep,” a township official, surnamed Fang, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) by telephone. “The workshop is on the first and second floor, while workers sleep above.”
Safety and law enforcement officials have launched an investigation to determine what caused the blaze, Xinhua said.
Chen Zongfei, the owner of the factory, and his wife Huang Shubin, its manager, had been detained by police, according to Xinhua.
Local government sources earlier told the agency that the factory had been operating without a licence, although officials contacted by AFP on Monday could not confirm this. Xinhua also quoted Zhu as saying it did have a licence.
However, Zhu added that the couple had ignored two separate government injunctions to improve safety standards.
Fujian is home to one of China’s biggest concentrations of sweatshops, often staffed by migrant workers from around the country who produce relatively simple products for world markets in often poorly regulated conditions.
Despite repeated attempts to improve workplace safety in China, officials have little incentive to crackdown on such factories as their operations help local economies grow.
Accidents regularly happen across the country due to companies neglecting fire and safety codes, using poor equipment as well as ignoring environmental standards in pursuit of profits.
Government data showed that 898 were killed and 488 injured in the first half of this year in more than 95Â 300 fires, not including forest blazes or those happening in mines.
In China, considered one of the world’s most dangerous places to work, 320 people are killed each day in work-related accidents, the government has said, many in industrial, coal mining and traffic accidents.
Massive fires are also common here.
In 2000, 311 people died in a disco fire in the central city of Luoyang. In 1994, more than 300, most of them schoolchildren, lost their lives in a blaze at a movie theatre in north-west China’s Xinjiang region. — AFP