December, 2011

Risk Society and an Organized Irresponsibility

Fan Lap-hin
Director of HKCI

　　23 July, 2011 marks the saddest day in the Chinese Railway history, for there is a high-speed train crash in Wenzhou. The Chinese model of development is again under question. A critique from the internet pleas, “China, please stop your rapid pace, wait for your people, wait for your soul, wait for your ethic and wait for your conscience!” (by Tong Dahuan). The ridicule remark from Wang Yonping, the spokesperson of the China Ministry of Railway, of that ‘no matter you believe or not, I do believe’ has become a joke on weblog. People are angry at the system that chooses to resume the train operation at the expense of human lives. People are dissatisfied that their lives are being hijacked by high-speed train. High-speed train is designed to meet the relatively rich, for the fare is relatively expensive. The regular train schedule has been cut back by two-thirds after the high-speed train is in operation. As a result, most tickets of the regular trains are quickly sold out, and only tickets for the high-speed train are available. Despite the inconvenient location of the high-speed train, awkward schedules and expensive tickets, passengers are given no choice but to take the high-speed train. The Chinese can only laugh at themselves of being hijacked by high speed train.

　　The collision of trains in Wenzhou has raised people’s awareness of their own danger. Since high-speed train has already become a popular transport, its risk of accident has made us worried. Beck’s and Giddens’ theory of risk society asserts that the contemporary society has developed from an industrial society to a risk society. Social, political, economic and individual risks have pervaded the existing risk precaution and regulatory mechanism of our society. Besides, Beck and Giddens have identified risk as a fundamental organizing principle of contemporary society, spread over our social life and dominated our lives.1 Just when we begin to feel safe under the social protection, series of tragedies have taken place, namely, terrorist attack of September 11; poisonous milk powder, vegetables and fish in China; the hostage accident in Manila; Sichuan earthquake; tsunami in Asia; financial crisis….. and the July 23rd train crash in Wenzhou.

　　Japan as recognised by her advanced technology and the chief supplier of high-speed train is under question. People come to recognize after the tragic train crash that all professional jargons and computerized automated control simply means computer game. A controller who pushes few buttons to determine the safety of trains and thousands of passengers is from a controller room thousand miles away from the spot. Under this model of operation, the pilot’s judgment is crucial.2 In a highly modernized society, a sense of continuous reflection has become a kind of reflexivity. It endeavours to identify crisis, construct a safe system and structure, but this creates a distance between human relations in time and space. Giddens calls this “disembedding” 3, a crisis in trust that finally leaves individuals to bear their own risk.

　　Webloggers laments, “There is no bystander in tragedy, because everyone is a passenger on the high-speed train”. The mission of Christian community in this organized irresponsible risk society is how to construct a responsible community which emphasizes mutuality and social capital. Besides, our society needs to rethink how natural resources is used in the sense of procedural and distributive justice, and the need to return to the wisdom tradition of nature and the interconnectedness with the nature. We need to find a haven that can bear the risk in our highly modernized society.

Translated by Pearl WONG

The saddest day in the Chinese Railway History