At least 36 New Year’s Eve revellers were killed and another 47 injured in a stampede just before midnight in downtown Shanghai, marking one of the worst disasters to hit a major Chinese city in recent years.
Shanghai local officials said they were investigating the cause of the tragedy, which occurred at 11:35pm on Wednesday at the Chen Yi Square, in the downtown area of Shanghai known as the Bund.
Local media said that the stampede was possibly caused by people rushing to pick up fake money thrown from a building overlooking the Bund.
Zhang Jianchao, an eyewitness to the stampede, said that he saw slips of paper that looked like US currency floating down from a nearby building. “They were grey, they didn’t look like renminbi,” said Mr Zhang.
News Year’s Eve celebrations in Shanghai regularly attract 300,000 to the downtown area, but this year, the countdown celebration and annual 3D laser show had been cancelled amid concerns about crowd control, according to the English language Shanghai Daily.
According to the paper, the countdown was to be replaced by a smaller celebration which was not open to the public. However, revellers still turned out en masse on Wednesday night to stroll along the Bund, the broad boulevard that runs along the Huang Pu river and is popular with tourists.
Local media showed photos of people collapsed on the ground at the intersection of Nanjing Road and Zhongshan East Road, in the area of Chen Yi Square. Police vehicles were shown on the scene.
They also reported that relatives of the victims clashed with staff at least one hospital treating victims as tempers flared following the tragedy.
Users of social media sites such as Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, reported that police had struggled to control the surging crowd around midnight.
At the scene of the stampede on Thursday morning, at a public park bordering the Bund, large crowds are enjoying the sunny New Year’s Day watched by a large police presence.
Police repeatedly intervened when television cameramen attempted to interview eyewitnesses who had returned to the scene of the tragedy. The only pushing and shoving in evidence was at the deep discount sales on the nearby Nanjing East road shopping street.
At Shanghai Number One People’s Hospital, one of the main hospitals where victims from the stampede were taken, a large cohort of police blocked the entrance on Thursday morning.
With official media closely censored by the authorities, many Chinese turn to social media for reporting on disasters such as this.
Chinese official media appeared to be cautious with the story — most government news websites, such as official news service Xinhua and Communist party mouthpiece the People’s Daily, instead focused on President Xi Jinping’s New Year’s Eve speech. However, most also included a smaller item about the tragedy on their homepage.
The tragedy was reminiscent a 1993 stampede that killed 21 and injured 63 New Year’s revellers in Hong Kong’s Lan Kwai Fong area, where wet weather and a hilly ground created dangerous conditions.
Additional reporting by April Ma
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