With more than 1.1 billion views on Weibo, the news of a bus plunging off a bridge in Chongqing is the top trending topic on Chinese social media today (#重庆公交车坠江原因#). Some threads on the incident received over 235,000 comments.
Although the incident occurred earlier last week (Oct 28), the reason for the crash only became known on Friday, after authorities released security footage recovered from the black box (see footage below, viewer discretion is advised).
The footage (other link) shows that a female passenger, who apparently had missed her stop, asks the driver to let her off the bus. When he does not, the woman gets angry and starts hitting him with her mobile phone.
The attack causes the driver to lose control over the steering wheel, and to plunge 50m (164ft) off a bridge into the Yangtze River, causing all (estimated) 15 passengers to die.
A big rescue operation was set up to recover the bus from the water, look for any survivors, and retrieve passengers’ bodies. On Wednesday, rescue workers were able to pull the bus out of the river.
This is not the first time a serious incident occurs because of bus passengers’ aggression towards the driver. Similar scenarios were caught on security footage in 2016 (Chengdu), or in 2017 (Guangdong and Yancheng).
Netease posted a compilation of these scenes, where agressive passengers sometimes even grab the steering wheel, on their video channel (see video below).
Other videos of similar incidents are also making their rounds on social media (see below).
On Friday, state media outlet Xinhua posted an article on WeChat, in which they highlighted a scene that occurred on a Hunan bus earlier this year.
While the bus was riding from Hengyang to Changsha, a middle-aged man suddenly runs towards the driver, yells at him, and reaches for the steering wheel, causing the vehicle to swing.
Another passenger then surges forwards and kicks the aggressive man in the face, away from the driver – saving the bus and other passengers from a potentially very risky situation.
“When encountering this kind of behavior that endangers public safety,” Xinhua writes: “Don’t be a bystander, resolutely say no [shut it down].”
On Weibo, similar sentiments pop up in response to the Chongqing crash. A popular comment, with more than 130,000 likes, said: “If you see a passenger attacking a driver, and you think it doesn’t concern you and you’ll just watch the scene – you might actually lose your life in the next second. So for your own life and safety, get up and do something!”
By Miranda Barnes and Manya Koetse
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