The city of Dehui, in China’s northeast—the region of the world known as Manchuria—has, until now, benefited from the country’s expanding appetites. The slaughterhouse industry has surged to keep up with a population of urbanizing consumers. In 2011, the city produced a quarter of a billion chickens.

But just after dawn on Monday, Dehui’s Mishazi plant, which belongs to Jilin Baoyuanfeng Poultry, caught fire. At the time, some three hundred people were inside. Exactly what happened next will take a while to sort out, but the significant facts are already clear: by Monday afternoon, a hundred and nineteen people were dead, and scores of others were injured—the deadliest fire in China in thirteen years, and the worst factory blaze that anyone can remember.

Survivors gave various accounts of the particulars, all horrific: the lights went out as the fire spread; parts of the plant exploded; workers, scrambling in the dark, tried to navigate the prefabricated building’s narrow warrens, and found that some of the exits were locked; others, clamoring to escape, fell into a pool of water. Some reports blamed the fire on an ammonia leak from the cooling system; others cited an electrical fault. “I could only crawl desperately forward,” a worker named Guo Yan told local Xinhua. “I worked alongside an old lady and a young girl, but I don’t know if they survived or not.”

Unlike the Rana garment-factory complex, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, this was not a decrepit building, by all accounts. It was only four years old, and the chickens processed inside were less likely to end up on a plate in New York than on one in Nanjing. In that sense, the Jilin fire was as much a symbol of China’s internal dynamism as the Dhaka tragedy was a symbol of Bangladesh’s fragile place in global supply chains. And therein lies one of China’s vulnerabilities: that a four-year-old factory in a fast-growing economy could be run in such a dangerous fashion is a story not of poverty but of legal disarray.


After today’s fire, people wondered if bribery put the building’s construction in the hands of someone unqualified. In 2010, a welder employed by an illegal subcontractor, who had paid to win the job, was working on a dormitory in Shanghai when he dropped his torch and set the building on fire. Shanghai was building faster than city services could keep up with; when firefighters arrived, their hoses only reached halfway up the tower. Fifty-eight people died.


Most of all, people demanded information—and they wanted it to be specific and truthful. President Xi Jinping, on a visit to Latin America and the Caribbean, ordered an investigation—and if it’s like the investigation into the crash of passenger trains in 2011, which killed more than forty people, the public will be waiting for details. The days when China’s industrial accidents and mine collapses claimed dozens of anonymous workers in an instant, and went largely unrecorded, are passing into history. To this day, the government publishes only broad figures for industrial workplace deaths—fewer than ten thousand in 2011—but people are demanding the minor dignity of the names. The son of a Chinese coal miner I know told me recently that, growing up, most kids had a father in the mines, and a disaster could leave half a classroom fatherless overnight. The worst year in town was 1979, when forty-nine miners died.

For decades, coal-mine deaths went unmentioned, but in recent years the son has decided that this is wrong. “The government didn’t give them anything. You can’t find their names in the books,” he told me recently, seething. “It was just Mine No. 1 and Mine No. 2. That’s all.”

The son is not interested in politics, per se. But he doesn’t see the names of those who died on the job as a political matter. It’s a matter of respect. People of his generation were taught to avoid politics. Keep focussed on work, or on getting a job, and you’ll be fine. But what happens when, instead of looking for politics, politics finds them?

Photograph by STR/AFP/Getty


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