Word: fanglin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...everyone is in a hurry to return, however. Lu Fanglin's investment last August brought him more pain than profit. Over six months, his investment in the stock market shrank from $28,500 to $17,100. He pulled out completely in January. "Anyone who has gone through the last few months could feel nothing but hopeless," Lu says. "I won't get near to the stock market for the rest of my life...
Zhang Weifang used to study the three Rs: reading, 'riting and rigging gunpowder canisters with flash fuses. Sitting at their desks in the Fanglin village school, she and her classmates each made 20 firecrackers per day that her teachers sold to middlemen who sold them to factories. "Sometimes the teachers beat us with a wooden plank," Zhang says. "Making fireworks is hard." It's also hazardous, especially when the workers are children who shouldn't be playing with fireworks, much less manufacturing them. Last week an explosion ripped apart Zhang's school in Jiangxi province, killing more than 40 students...
...tribulations of the tiny village of Fanglin (which means Fragrant Forest) quickly encompassed much more than the stench of saltpeter and the agony of unearthing corpses. Almost immediately after the tragedy, local officials cordoned off the area, bulldozing the school's debris and warning peasants to stop talking to the Chinese reporters who descended on the village and began writing about what they saw and heard. The Dickensian tale of children who had been, in some sense, worked to death, was a chilling and all-too believable allegory for the worst kinds of excess in the Chinese countryside. Then Premier...
...years families living along the rutted, unpaved roads of Fanglin have supplemented their harvests by making fireworks. By some accounts a good day at the fuses could bring in nearly a dollar?not bad when annual rural incomes average $272, a third of what the typical urbanite earns. Everybody knew the dangers: an explosion at a fireworks factory in a nearby village last August killed 27 people. Still, parents of last week's victims maintain that teachers augmented their incomes, or perhaps covered school costs, by forcing students to assemble fireworks. Says Ding Wenping, who had left the village looking...
...Fanglin mourns its dead, residents are coping with grief and struggling to comprehend the official spin. A woman surnamed Feng sits on a low, wooden bench cradling the body of her 11-year-old son. All she knows is that he had been making firecrackers at the school for three years. Perhaps both versions are correct: students were assembling explosives and a deranged man ignited them. But mostly there is skepticism. And sadness. Zhu's account, concludes Zhang Weifang, is "completely untrue." But even the truth wouldn't bring back her young sister...
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