Skip to main content

Exploding vehicles

During the summer months there have been a series of incidents where Chinese buses burst into flame. I first noticed this in a story from Beijing last month and saw another story from Tianjin today. Last year, a burning bus killed 24 people and injured 19 in Chengdu. A goole search shows reports of incidents all over the country, including a video of one in Shanghai. One article explains that overloaded buses can overheat in the summer.

Bus that caught on fire in Yan'an, Shaanxi Province, July 14

The problem is not confined to buses. Last month I saw a photo of a passenger car that had burst into flame in Beijing. The news article gave few details (such as what happened to the people in the car) and advised readers to keep their cars maintained in the summer months.

This has nothing to do with the topic of this blog but it's a reminder of potential quality problems as China gears up to export vehicles to the world.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Xi Jinping's Doctoral Thesis

Xi Jinping is the vice president and presumed next president of China but little is known about him. In this post the dimsums blog offers its contribution to the genre of Xi Jinping-ology by conveying Xi's decade-old views on agricultural markets. Ten years ago Xi Jinping wrote a thesis, "Tentative Study of Agricultural Marketization" (中国农村市场化研究) for a Doctor of Law degree at Tsinghua University in Beijing, a top breeding-ground for Chinese officials. The dimsums blogger has spent several hours poring over the 200-plus page tome to see what it reveals about Dr. Xi. The thesis is remarkably close to what China has been doing lately in agricultural policy, suggesting that Xi (or the person who actually wrote the thesis) has a major say in policy or is at least in agreement with what's being done. There is nothing adventurous, controversial (or insightful) in the thesis. It seems to be the work of a wonkish technocrat who is not prone to talk out of turn or wander from...

China's Vanishing Soybean Self-Sufficiency Rhetoric

Chinese propagandists appear to have given up on soybean self-sufficiency now that China has gained the upper hand over the U.S. on the soybean trade war front. The barrage of Chinese articles about finding soymeal substitutes, low protein animal diets, corn-soy intercropping, etc. has quietly faded from Chinese media. China's plan to bolster soybean self-sufficiency actually failed, but Brazil's bottomless soybean supplies nevertheless enabled China to snub U.S. soybean producers during last year's trade war. Xi Jinping now is free to make offers of soybean purchases to President Trump in trade negotiations without appearing to do so from a weak position. Mission accomplished, but not in the way Chinese strategists planned. Back in 2019--at the height of the first U.S.-China trade war--China's "Number 1 Document" announced a "soybean revitalization plan" to increase self-sufficiency in soybeans. Soybeans were pronounced to have strategic significanc...

Divergence in U.S. & Chinese egg prices

High egg prices are a hot topic in the United States. China, in contrast, has a glut of eggs and depressed prices.  The March 14, 2025 USDA Agricultural Marketing Service weekly eggs market overview reported that U.S. egg prices continued declining during the second week of March as the supply situation improved. No significant highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) outbreaks have occurred in March and U.S. egg demand is relatively light. The average U.S. wholesale price for Grade A large white eggs was $4.15 per dozen, down sharply from their February peak.  Until 2021, Chinese and U.S. wholesale egg prices had been roughly equal at about $1-to-$2 per dozen with no trend. U.S. prices fluctuated more than Chinese prices, so the U.S. price was sometimes higher, sometimes lower than the Chinese price after converting them to dollars per dozen.  Chinese prices converted using monthly exchange rate and assuming 0.6 kg per dozen. Sources: USDA and China Ministry of Agricult...