Crisis Grows in Shanghai After Train Is Burned

Angry workers here attacked and set fire to a passenger train that ran down and killed six anti-government protesters, blocking a main rail line and creating fears of a major confrontation in a city that had seen little violence during China’s eight-week-old political crisis.

The incident, which left nine fire-damaged cars and thousands of onlookers blocking the tracks, dramatized the influence of what has become the most volatile element in China’s democracy movement--young, bored and often-underemployed urban workers.

More than a day after the Tuesday night incident, authorities had made no effort to move the train or clear the crowds. But diplomatic sources said Shanghai hospitals had prepared extra beds and equipment in anticipation of an armed move against protesters similar to Sunday’s military attack on Beijing’s Tian An Men Square.

Situation ‘Fluid’

An advisory issued by the U.S. Consulate here said the situation in Shanghai “remains fluid and could change at any moment.” The consulate offered Americans still stranded here a special flight to Tokyo today, but a consulate spokesman said there were few takers.

While students here and in other cities have organized street barricades and anti-government speeches, it is mostly blue-collar workers, far outnumbering students in Chinese society, who have resorted to overt violence--setting vehicles afire, throwing rocks at troops and, in isolated cases, looting stores.

By early Wednesday, Shanghai authorities had cleared away several of the protester barricades--made of disabled buses, trucks and metal street dividers--from major intersections, but many quickly reappeared. The roadblocks have paralyzed the city’s bus system, causing widespread job absenteeism and, according to Wednesday’s Shanghai papers, left hospitals with only two days’ supply of blood and oxygen.

Chinese sources said the railway incident began when protesters attempted to halt the train by sitting and lying on the tracks near a walkway overpass at Guangxin Road, about two miles from the main Shanghai station. In previous such attempts, trains had stopped until the protesters could be cleared from the tracks, but this train--heading east toward the station--kept going, killing four workers, two students and injuring six other protesters, Chinese sources said.

Several local residents milling about the train Wednesday night said workers using gasoline, some in Molotov cocktails, set fire to the train about two hours after it ran down the protesters. One witness said police motorcycles also were burned, and fire hoses left at the scene had knots in them.

The Beijing government’s economic decentralization program and subsequent retrenchment over the past few years have dislocated many workers and prompted many young Chinese to leave high school with few job opportunities and no chance for admission to the relatively small number of colleges and universities here.

Diplomatic sources blamed young men from worker families for the looting of a hotel in Chengdu in Sichuan province earlier this week that triggered a police counterattack that left 20 dead.

Demonstrations in Shenyang

A resident of Shenyang in northeast China reported more worker involvement in demonstrations there, as students took a loudspeaker truck to a factory district, where a Qinghua University student recounted her experiences during the Tian An Men massacre. Half the workers at the main auto factory in the northeastern city of Changchun went on strike, the resident said, and 30,000 to 50,000 people demonstrated against the government and its crackdown on democracy advocates.

The Shenyang resident said more intersection barricades, now common in most other major cities, also were being set up there, in what appeared to be an organized student attempt to force attention to democracy activists’ demands without inciting large, bloody confrontations.

In Canton, several thousand protesters were blocking bridges. A Canton university student contacted by telephone from nearby Hong Kong said that officials are putting great pressure on students and sternly warning them to stay away from the streets in order to end the blockages, Reuters news agency reported.