How to avoid another Carrefour stampede

Domestic and foreign media reported today that following the stampede at a Chongqing Carrefour that left three dead and thirty-one injured, China has moved to ban the type of sales promotion that led to the incident. Here’s the AFP’s account:

China has banned time-limited sales promotions in retail outlets following a stampede at a Carrefour supermarket that killed three and injured 31, a government circular said.

The commerce ministry ordered local authorities across China to overhaul safety requirements in shops to prevent similar occurences, said a statement dated Monday on its website.

“In order to eliminate safety concerns, companies are required not to organise time-limited sales promotions which may lead to traffic congestion, bodily harm and disorderly conduct,” it said.

In an opinion piece for the Southern Metropolis Daily, blogger and popular historian Ten Years Chopping Timber argues that the “time-limited sales promotion” in this incident, an 11-yuan discount on vegetable oil, was merely one facet of a whole host of larger social problems:

What can you do with 11 yuan these days? It’s about enough to buy a pound of pork, or five pounds of rice or a few heads of cabbage, or to park for two hours in the downtown areas of big cities like Beijing or Shanghai. But when a Carrefour in Chongqing cut the price of vegetable oil from 51.4 yuan to 39.9 yuan as part of a sales promotion, a shopping rush turned into a stampede, leading to three deaths and thirty-one injuries. At practically the same time this tragedy was going on, crowding and fighting broke out at the provincial museum in Wuhan, another massive city on the Yangtze River. The museum, which was holding its first free-entrance day, had to limit visitor traffic to avoid an even nastier outcome.

Public disturbances resulting from discounted or free item promotions and leading to injury and death have occurred in more than a few cities in China. The stampede at the Chongqing Carrefour took place at a time when the price of goods is rising quite fast, so it has social implications: many commentators place the blame for this tragedy on the hardships faced by those living on the lower rungs of society, but this writer believes that this is just one of a number of causes. The tragedy can almost be seen as the collected manifestation of certain ills afflicting Chinese society today.

The primary cause is the one mentioned above: lower income populations in urban society do not have enough protection. According to reports, the shoppers lined up very early in the morning; some of them came out in full force, with all seven members of their family, old and young. Investing such an immense amount of human capital just to save a small bit of money is not something that urban white-collars, burdened with their huge home loans, would think of doing, to say nothing of that minority that got rich first. Of course, this is not because white collars and the rich are so generous with their money that they don’t care for such small savings. Rather, it is because they tend to be economically rational: to many people, expending that much effort for such a small return is not worth it. But many of the people who lined up are retired or laid-off city dwellers whose manpower under normal circumstances not only produces no benefit, but continues to eat away at their assets—they live solely on a pittance of retirement allowance or social security. As opposed to doing nothing, why not stand in line to buy vegetable oil that has been discounted 11 yuan? When a poor person’s labors cannot create new wealth, then any amount of savings counts as earnings. Thus, when low-income groups encounter benefits that are extremely limited, it is even worse than the three knights who died for the sake of two peaches. These peaches won’t stop with just three nights, I’m afraid; they’ll take the lives of thirty, or three hundred.

But chaos is not an inevitable outcome when poor people gather together. When the Soviet Union had just dissolved, certain media outlets in our country ran extensive reports on how intolerable life was for the Russian people, but even in our media it was hard to find reports of Russians rioting to receive aid or while lining up to buy staples. In the chilly winds, the Russians were orderly and organized when they queued up. The comparison with Russia does not prove that we as Chinese people have an intrinsic disrespect for discipline, or that we do not value order; in the planned economy of the 1960s and 70s (and even today), when daily use items were scarce, very rarely was anyone trampled to death while waiting in line. The differences in governmental control between the different eras is one reason, but it cannot be denied that the overall downward slide of social morality is another important cause. When many people believe that tomorrow will be even better, and when individuals who respect social morality are rewarded rather than being shunned, then social morality will be upheld by the majority instinctively. However, when people feel that they can benefit more from not following the rules than from following them, then someone who lines up honestly will probably get nothing. Such a reality leads people to ignore the system because the cost of following the rules is too high. Uncertainty about tomorrow makes people trust only what they can see in front of them; they own only what they can get their hands on. Who knows what lies ahead—you might never get that eleven yuan discount if you are just one step too late.

Another reason is that merchants have an insufficient understanding of “China’s national conditions.” Administration and service in some regional governments is slow and inefficient. Carrefour, a well-known international company, has been in the Chinese market for quote some time now and has localized fairly successfully. Nevertheless, it could hardly have anticipated that this promotion would cause such a major disaster. In addition, there are some local governments that are only interested in the fee collection side of things and are passive about preserving social order. Time and again the play the game of repairing the gate after the sheep have escaped. Following the stampede at Carrefour, the local government immediately sent out an urgent notice—is this sort of urgent notice such a rare thing for the public?

The combination of the size and lack of protection of low-income groups, the downward slide of social morality, and the high cost and low effectiveness of local governments provides fertile ground for catastrophes like the Carrefour stampede. I believe that we can consider this catastrophe as the first leaf of Autumn.