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Facing Public Fury, China Reveals Owners Of Tianjin Warehouse
Last Wednesday’s catastrophic chemical explosion in Tianjin - that at last count had killed 114 people and injured more than 700 - put Beijing in a particularly tough spot at a decisively inopportune time.
Just two days earlier, China devalued the yuan in an effort to rescue its flagging economy which has stubbornly refused to respond to multiple policy rate cuts. Of course that wasn’t the official line. The PBoC’s excuse for the move is that it’s part of a larger effort to liberalize markets and allow the metaphorical invisible hand to play a larger role in determining everything from exchange rates to defaults. But as should be abundantly clear by the near daily interventions in both the FX and equity markets, Beijing is finding it difficult to relinquish control over the narrative.
The same dynamic often plays out outside of capital markets. That is, as China’s economy marks a difficult and sometimes tenuous transition towards consumption and services-led growth (i.e. towards a more Westernized system), egregious instances of censorship and the Communist party’s heavy-handed approach to shaping everyday life are seen as evidence that Beijing isn’t truly committed to liberalization.This was evident in the wake of the Tianjin explosion when China moved to shut down hundreds of social media accounts due to the dissemination of "blast rumors." It also appeared as though China was set to leave the public in the dark regarding possible connections between the Party and the owners of Tianjin International Ruihai Logistics. As we noted on Tuesday, "it looks as though determining who actually owns Ruihai will be complicated by the fact that in China, it’s not uncommon for front men to hold shares on behalf of a company’s real owners. This is of course an effort to obscure Communist party involvement in some enterprises."
With all eyes on China in the wake of the devaluation, just about the last thing Beijing needed in terms of shaping its international image and pacifying an increasingly agitated public was to be seen as complicit in a massive coverup of a completely avoidable disaster that ultimately caused the deaths of more than 100 people and may well have far-reaching environmental consequences for the blast zone and beyond.
So faced with a swelling public backlash, Beijing has embarked on an effort to prove how serious it is about launching a transparent and honest investigation. We certainly doubt anyone was impressed with the fact that a handful of Ruihai executives had been detained but now, it looks like China has compelled the mystery owners whose shares were held on their behalf by front-men, to reveal themselves - and their ties to the Politburo - to the public. The New York Times has the story:
The mayor of the northern Chinese city where huge explosions killed over 100 people last week took responsibility for the disaster on Wednesday, as the authorities sought to contain growing public anger about the accident.
“I bear unshirkable responsibility for this accident as head of the city,” said Huang Xingguo, the mayor and acting Communist Party secretary of the metropolis, Tianjin, in his first news conference since the blasts at a chemical warehouse on Aug. 12.
The mayor’s televised mea culpa appeared to signal a shift in the authorities’ response to the political fallout from the disaster. After days of official silence, the government has begun releasing information about the owners of the warehouse company, Rui Hai International Logistics, including their admission of corruption, in an effort to quash public accusations of a cover-up.
On Wednesday, China’s state-run Xinhua news agency reported that two major shareholders in Rui Hai had admitted to using their political connections to gain government approvals for the site, despite clear violations of rules prohibiting the storage of hazardous chemicals within 3,200 feet of residential areas.
Yu Xuewei, the company chairman, is a former executive at a state-owned chemical company, and Dong Shexuan, the vice chairman, is the son of a former police chief at the Tianjin port. The two executives, who deliberately concealed their ownership stakes behind a murky corporate structure, told Xinhua that they had leveraged their personal relationships with government officials to obtain licenses for the site. Both men have been detained.
“The first safety appraisal company said our warehouses were too close to the apartment building,” said Mr. Dong, 34, referring to a residential complex that was severely damaged and now stands empty. “Then we found another company who got us the documents we needed.”
The executives established Rui Hai in 2012 but had other people list their shares to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Mr. Yu, 41, admitted that he held 55 percent of the shares through his cousin, Li Liang, the president of the company. Mr. Dong holds 45 percent of the shares through a former classmate.
“I had my schoolmate hold shares for me because of my father,” a former police chief who died in 2014, Mr. Dong told Xinhua. “If the news of me investing in a business leaked, it could have brought bad influence.”
Now clearly, these admissions are so straightforward and so obviously scripted that they almost certainly were handed down from above. In other words, rather than risk a series of exposés aimed at determining exactly who was involved in the manangement of Ruihai and how deep their political connections ran (FT had already picked up on the story), Beijing apparently thought the safer route to go was to simply out Mr. Yu and Mr. Dong along with their political connections, and force them to tell the public exactly what it wants to hear in the most unequivocal language possible.
Whether or not this will be sufficient to quell the growing public discontent remains to be seen, but it's interesting to note that Sinochem, a state-owned chemical company, controls two other warehouses in Tianjin that, as WSJ notes, are "within a kilometer of residences, a hospital, a busy highway, schools and other public facilities, despite rules forbidding such proximity."
In other words: Ruihai is more the rule than the exception when it comes to politically-connected enterprises skirting restrictions on the storage and handling of hazardous chemicals.
As for what everyday Chinese citizens think about the public admissions of guilt and corruption by Ruihai's major shareholders, we go to Wang Baoshun, a newsstand owner in Beijing who spoke to The Times: "The corruption is like cancer, and we are a patient at a late stage. You can have a few surgeries, but you won’t be able to get rid of it for good."
We can only hope that the cancerous corruption that helped pave the way for the disaster in Tianjin doesn't end up causing an increased incidence of real cancer among the thousands of people who have now been exposed to toxic sodium cyanide and its gaseous derivative, hydrogen cyanide.
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I'd a thought that Goldman was the big owner with the property insured by AIG.
Soon.
Sun Tu Splat Insurance LLC?
Hey, they're backed by the full faith & credit of the state, so what could possibly go wrong.
They probably are. That's why the BIG story/coverup.
The commies are more forthright than the coverup of 9/11/01
The commies are more forthright than the coverup of 9/11/01
Beginning to suspect that the properties of this read and some prior to it are becoming true that it was planned from within like our's 14 years ago...
But the question is why?
Perhaps the Chinese government looks at it's 1.3 billion the same way George Soros and David Rockefeller see their 300 million?!!!
Still not enough time has passed yet to make that "gospel"!
I would have thought Larry Silverstein owned the warehouse, and had taken out "Rod of God" insurance 6 months ago...
Chinese lightning.
Larry Silverstien
bet he was insured too... twice
Bejing "compelled" some folks... uh huh.
Jump! You Fuckers!
Ok so we have this story. So what was the chemical being stored there? Can we get to that little piece of information? I mean, the fucking rain is filled with sodium cyanide for god sakes.
i can attest that this is exactly how business is done over here in china. using connections to bypass regulations. this individual incident can be extrapolated out to the entirety of the chinese economy.
Happens right here in my little town of 7,000. Good old USA
It's also my understanding that many of the companies are 'state-owned,' i.e. the Party directly owns 60% of them.
Damn communists. Always fuckin'with the corporations.
Corporations are people too, as we well know in the land of the free. Some have very delicate feelings like Monsatan
Mitt Romney says 'corporations are people' - Washington PostI thought Soylent Green was people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IKVj4l5GU4
Probably made by MonSatan
No, corporations are persons, not people. People are flesh and blood living beings. Persons are artificial creations of the mind of man. Just because you have been brainwashed into thinking you are a person doesn't mean it is so. This has to do with the legal terms in law. Get a law dictionary! You would be surprised what legalese and legal documents really mean.
If Sierra Club, ACLU, Media Matters, Friends of the Earth, Tides Foundation, NY Times, can direct billions to influence peddle, buy pols, and skin strip private property rights buy/by friendly activist judges, I sincerely fail to see your point about other corporate entities, like the ones that actually employee millions in commercial activities, not having the same rights to influence the so called system.
Don't you know, those are non-profits, which makes them automatically unquestionable because no profit = morally good /sarc
Seriously though, my wife works at a hospital network whose CEO is earning in the 7 figure range, and it's a 'non-profit.' In reality, non-profit just means that the business does not have the legal right to profit sharing, aka issuing stocks. Instead, the profits have to be recycled, typically as much as possible into the pockets of the leadership. I've even seen universities advertising careers in non-profits, so that kids can pay themselves $200,000 per year dreaming up new ways to hassle you from their moral high ground.
Dig it. Just ending the entire 503 (c) 1 fascist-socialist lifeline to the non profits would be an earth shattering reform.
"Socialism with Chinese characteristics" = capitalism with capitalist characteristics
The reality is the 1km radius is an arbitrary number. The company that had the explosion bent the rules, but the apartments are at the edge of the radius and a few more metres away wouldn't make any difference.
However the company that has a hospital and school within their 1km radius is a disgrace.
I'd guess the explosion was caused by sloppy handling and lax procedures.
There are companies in China that do things very well (by international standards) and many that doesn't. There's going to be a lot of worried business owners because China's going to come down hard on the violators.
"I'd guess the explosion was caused by sloppy handling and lax procedures. "
...OR some Oligarchs wanted to get rid of some other Oligarchs -and the collateral damage was ....acceptable.
Isn't it past time to take some SAUDI Drastic measures?
Public Fucking Beheadings?
I was expecting Larry Silverstein owned these warehouses.
I love your name, "I lack cojones"
In Fukushima terms, the Tianjin blast was akin to walking thru a Lilac garden.
Very true oddjob. The immense blast, though locally very destructive, is nowhere near the extinction level event that Fukushima is turning out to be.
When is that ice dam going to be finished?
they gave up on that.
Very sick episode there. I really hope the culprits get punished serverely. It's a shame so many innocent people are usually the victims with these crimes. Whether it's that Boston thing, or the recent Bangkok shrine mess, or any of the other thousands of violent crimes that occur every day/week/month, all those victims were innocent people.
Uh yeah, this outcome was completely unexpected...lol.
Can't help thinking of the event in Russia that was the premis of Tom clancys book red storm rising.
His wife gone, while he was at sea, and a weapon made for only One purpose. First Strike.
you mean that one :)
egad everyone everywhere is corrupt
Unposseeebull!!!
Communists & socialists are a loving, caring people depending wholly on the state for it's guidance on their altruistic tendencies!...lmao!
Testing
You know reality is getting awfully "harry" when it mimics fiction.
I went to the latest release of Mission Impossible - Rogue Nation and it's turning out that the story theme of this movie is pretty exactiing to the truth.
The only thing that turned my stomach was that the IMF actually played the role of "good cop" which is the antithesis of their role in bankrolling and money laundering everywhere the CIA/Mossad and MI6 step foot in real life!
Stinking corrupt Chicommie govt isn't 'changing' and becoming more open - the top-rung commie leaders are just pushing the lower echelon leaders and their corporate slimebags under the bus so they themselves don't take a well-deserved hit.
We have real serious corruption here in America and it permeates every level of government and business.
But China's got us beat all to hell on the corruption meter.
Ah, pay more attention to the myriad of issues here involving the ruling pigs, and "real serious corruption" presents as on the edge of raging tyranny.
Oh no, the Chinese are merely *learning* how to be corrupt. Over here in the west, we've had it down pat for at least a few hundred years.
When the corruption becomes exposed here, it's because someone even MORE corrupt just shifted the blame to them. The Chinese have a bit to learn about blaming others for the sins they have created, yet.
IED was a popular discussion during the Iraq war. Let's use this as a chinese port explosion. How to fuck up a port and get paid insurance claims in the hundreds of millions. Get ready for massive arrests.
Trigger/Deactivate Any Circuit With A Call To Your ...
You see what happens La Yi?
You see what happens when you fuck a currency in the ass?
You see what fucking happens La Yi when you Fuck a Currency In The Ass?
Funny, I always heard liberals, commies, progressives CARE so much for the little people
I hope the multitudes drag their civic leaders outside and pull them apart literally. The Chinese have done that to overeager police just in the past year or so. Justice demands retribution. ;)
So poweful people with close ties to the government are going to be held accountable? That shit sure wouldn't fly here in 'Murica!
Government, being nothing more than a racket of theft and violence, can only produce four things: Poverty, misery, death, and lies.
There are no exceptions, except those attached to the horn of a unicorn.
Zion is a scheme, not an ethnicity.
I finally got one of my boss's opinions on the explosion footage I also sent him a description of what was allegedly on site. He is a fuel expert, chemical engineer and too many other things to list, he is basically an inventor genius. He said he thought the explosion was incredible and he said that it was very clean burning, too clean burning, he thinks it was likely a controlled explosion.
That was more than surprising to me.
The jim stone website (I have no history of reading him) claims the large explosion that has caused a pond was not located at the warehouse but was a short distance from it. His theory was that it was nuclear but was located some distance below ground. Thus the ground disguised the signature and kept the cameras from being affected by radiation.
Interesting concept and I have no opinion yet.
what does he say to particle beam weapons?
two things are clear. WHATEVER blew up at Tianjin, it probably wasn't just simple hazmat chemicals. There was something explosive there.
And the falls guys for Rui Hai ... well they are fall guys. Chances are good that they will be shot. And that will put an "end" to all discussion about Tianjin.
The earliest reports (before being wiped) suggested that a ship was loaded with explosives at the dock. Who knows? Also there is more than one RuiHai with chemicals stored at the site (all of which was 'approved' before the residential developments were built). The trail is now leading to SinoChem and if so major gov/cronies are involved. Li Keqiang's belated visit to the site means that finding scapegoats was a top priority before the fingers point to gaofus in gov.
These are just the two Chinese fall guys. The warehouse story sourced from the Wall Street Journal. Wasn't the WSJ website hacked and taken offline by the Chinese just awhile back? LOL.
Hasn't mainstream media always been onboard with the false flag narrative? The box cutter wielding Saudis took down the towers, incinerating the alloy beams, but their passports landed around the collapse debris in pristine condition, LOL.
But the importaning thingy is who had the knowledge of hundreds of tons of explosives as well as cynaide stored in a close space, and especially when there was a recent crash in stock market & yuan devaluation.
Since america always bombs everywhere , it might be CIA trying to kill Chinese economy to shatter BRICS in order to save american dominance , dollar, economy & cabals.
Time to stir up some shit in the Spratly... ehr... "Nansha..." Islands... Entertaining foreign diversions... never fails to distract the chimps.
LMFAO... China. The gift that keeps on giving.
Rui Hai Int.Logistics is 55 percent owned by Li Liang, the son of Li Rui-hai, brother of former Politburo Standing Committee member Li Ruihuan. Patience , more will surface even though fire walled.
"at last count" is probably closer to 2000 dead
http://theunhivedmind.com/wordpress3/did-the-rod-of-god-weapon-hit-tianjin/
The Chinese are simply following the playbook of the Democrats and Republicans.
It's interesting that other nations' people are capable of fury and Americans are not. Fluoridation?
"HEY FRED, THERE'S YOUR CHINA-MAN...."
"HEY DONG!"
AUTOMOBILE???
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