Xinjiang 61st Regiment Farm fire

Coordinates: 44°15′21″N 80°29′45″E / 44.25583°N 80.49583°E / 44.25583; 80.49583
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61st Regiment Farm fire
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61st Regiment Farm fire
Native name 61团场火灾
Date18 February 1977
Time20:15
Fireworks accident
inside a hall
Deaths694
Non-fatal injuries161+

The 61st Regiment Farm fire and stampede (

deadliest fireworks accidents.[2][3][4][5][6]

After

Mao Zedong died on 9 September 1976, the Xinjiang 61st regiment ordered the locals to make wreaths to demonstrate their loyalty to Mao.[2] By Chinese custom, those funeral wreaths would have been incinerated.[a]
However, the regiment feared incinerating the wreaths would draw accusations of disrespecting Mao; later, their superiors ordered them to keep all the wreaths in a hall.

Five months later came the 1977 Chinese New Year, the first back-to-normal Chinese New Year after the

denounced in rallies. The Red Guards proclaimed a "revolutionized New Year" which people shall not set off new year fireworks, shall continue work in the regiment farm rather than going home for reunion, shall not pay respects to ancestors, and shall make the blessing "Wish you see Chairman Mao this year" rather than the traditional blessing Gong Xi Fa Cai ("Congratulations and be prosperous").[7][8][9]

At this particularly lively and awaited 1977 Chinese New Year, the regiment farm showed the movie

crowd crush.[3] The disaster was first publicly reported in China 18 years later, in 1995.[2]

Background

61st Regiment

The 61st Regiment of the

Ili Prefecture, Xinjiang, 8 km from the Soviet Kazakhstan border. When the fire broke out in 1977, the "regiment farm", a military-agricultural colony
, was supervised and investigated by the Communist Committee of Ili Prefecture.

Exits of the hall

The festival hall was built in 1966, primarily used for Maoist

denunciation rallies during the Cultural Revolution. It had an area of 760 square metres (8,200 sq ft), with a usable floor space of 601 square metres (6,470 sq ft) and a wooden roof, with reeds,[10] two layers of oiled felt and three layers of asphalt. In 1972, a vertical gallery was added outside the main door of the hall with two cylindrical pillars a metre wide. The hall originally had 17 large windows and seven doors. For an informational session on farming, the hall was modified in March 1975, bricking the lower part of the windows, leaving only 17 0.6 metres (2.0 ft) by 1.4 metres (4.6 ft) windowless holes, because the management believed the floor to ceiling windows were impractical.[3] This made it difficult for people to escape, as the height to overcome became greater.[11]
In February 1975, to welcome superiors coming for a communist propaganda meeting ("学理论、抓路线、促春讲现场会"), the hall underwent further modification, during which three of the doors were sealed and the other three were either locked or bound with steel wire, leaving only a 1.6-metre-wide (5.2 ft) main door on the south side of the building.

Fire

In 1977, according to the

Resist America and Assist Korea", was scheduled to be shown outdoors, but due to temperatures around −20 to −30 °C (−4 to −22 °F), it was moved to the festival hall instead.[3]

When the fire occurred, the rear half of the hall was still occupied by the wreaths placed on 9 September 1976 for the late Mao Zedong,[3] and the main door had apparently been half sealed, ostensibly to maintain order, leaving only an 80-centimetre (31 in) opening.[10]

At around 19:30

Beijing Time), the movie started. At 20:15 Xinjiang Time, a 12-year-old boy (grade 6), Zhao Guanghui, lit a "ground rat", a type of spinning top-like firecracker. It spun into the pile of wreaths, setting the wreaths on fire.[12] The fire climbed to the ceiling, with the projection screen and wires mounted on the roof rapidly igniting, spreading dense smoke in the hall. The burning wooden panels fell and asphalt started falling off the roof. Due to the only exit being too small, most people were unable to escape, leading to high levels of casualties. According to witnesses it took only half an hour from the start of the fire to the roof collapse.[3]

After the fire broke out, on 19 February 1977, the Yili Military District phoned

crowbar and two masks.[3] The slow response was due to the closest firefighters being 80 km (50 mi) away.[3]

看到部队官兵赶到，群众让出一条通道，但门口根本进不去，靠门口的地方，尸体堆得有近一米高。大多数人烧得和煤炭渣一样，有些人像沥青一样粘在一起。空气中充斥着一股令人作呕的味道，不戴口罩根本不可能靠近。我们拿着铁锹和十字镐站在尸体堆里不知如何下手，也不忍心下手。但是我们的任务就是清理现场，大家必须动手。

When the soldiers arrived, the spectators cleared out a path, but we still couldn't get in. Near the door, the corpses stacked up to a metre high. The majority of them were burnt like cinder, and some of them stuck together like asphalt. The air was filled with a retch-inducing smell, that you couldn't get near without wearing a mask. We held the crowbar and pickaxe, standing near the door and not knowing how to process this, and we didn't want to touch it. However, our job was to clear out the scene, so everybody had to do something.

— Chen Fuyuan, (陈福元) deputy regiment leader at the scene[3]

After a cleanup lasting around four hours, the job was mostly done. The deceased were placed in the yard surrounding the ruins of the hall.[3]

Casualties

This was the deadliest fire in China after 1949 and one of the deadliest disasters in Chinese history. In total 694 died and 161 became disabled.[3][4][5][6] Among the 1,600 schoolchildren in the regiment's farm, 597 died.[4][5][6] Many had been found at the front door, in a stack of people around 2–3 metres (6.6–9.8 ft) high, while those unable to reach it were killed by burning asphalt or falling roof tiles.[10] The stack was made worse by those who brought their own chairs to watch the movie, which further blocked exits. Eventually, a hole was smashed in a sealed door on the northern side, allowing a few children to be rescued.[13]

Settlement

The deputy party secretary of the Yili Farming Bureau, Ma Ji, was the leading investigator for the "2.18" fire. He arrived at the scene on the morning of 19 February. Some relatives on site were angry, and tried placing the blame on Zhou Zhenfu, the local party secretary of Yili, unaware that he had lost his daughter in the fire. To calm the anger, at the end of February, Ma Ji also took the role of the party secretary of the 61st Division and took charge of the aftermath of the "2.18" fire.[3]

After all the deceased were buried, some families of the deceased remained angry, and plotted to exhume the corpse of the daughter of Zhou Zhenfu in protest. Ma Ji convinced the upper-level leaders to not prosecute any of the protestors, and he resolved the disturbance through his grants for families of victims to take holidays or switch to other jobs.[3]

Due to the sensitive nature of the news[

class enemies. Afterwards, the fire was largely blamed on Zhao Guanghui, the child who set the firecracker, without seriously considering the effect of the abandoned wreaths.[10]

Zhao escaped unhurt before the main panic. Eventually, with his parents, he surrendered himself to the police. The month after the fire, he was sentenced to

juvenile detention. After being released, he went to Guangdong. The people who organized the movie showing were detained for almost two and a half years, until the local court chose not to prosecute. The party officials responsible for the festival hall were demoted and sent to farms.[13]

In July 1978, after the investigation was complete, Ma Ji was promoted to deputy party secretary of Yining.[3]

Media coverage

The Soviet press picked up the news instantly because the fire was within 8 km of the Kazakhstan border. The Chinese propaganda initially claimed the disaster was started by "class enemies" and those aligned with Soviet Revisionism.[14]

Memorials

A memorial park, named Jianyuan started construction in 1997 after bulldozing the remains of the hall. It was designed to be a theme park on fire safety, but was yet to be finished in 2007.[3]

The victims of the fire are buried at Sandapian, so named as this cemetery was formed by joining three pieces of land.[3][10]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ Funeral wreaths are either incinerated or transferred to the deceased person's cemetery.[2] Since Mao was buried in Beijing, the only option was to incinerate the wreaths.

References

  1. ^ a b 六十一团杨江生; 师史志办张萍 (2008-07-29). "六十一团概况". 新疆生产建设兵团第四师政务信息网. Archived from the original on 2013-04-22. Retrieved 2013-02-22.
  2. ^ a b c d e f 西夫 (1995). "694条生命化为灰烬——一场没有公开报道的特大火灾". 新世纪 (4). Archived from the original on 2023-01-04. Retrieved 2023-01-04.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p "一九七七年 六十一团那场大火" [The great fire to the 61st Regiment in 1977]. 伊犁晚报. 2018-03-28 [2007-02-26]. p. B06. Archived from the original on 2023-01-04 – via 老知青家园.
  4. ^ a b c "China's deadly fires". BBC. 2000-12-26. Archived from the original on 2002-10-28.
  5. ^ a b c "China 1994 fire killed 288 pupils as officials fled-expose". Reuters. 2007-05-08. Archived from the original on 2011-08-05.
  6. ^ a b c "Christmas Day Fire in China Kills 309". ABC News. 2006-01-07. Archived from the original on 2020-09-01.
  7. ^ "不准放鞭炮不准滚龙舞狮：四十多年前的革命化春节". 山西日报. 2013-02-28. p. C4. Archived from the original on 2023-01-04. Retrieved 2023-01-04 – via 鳳凰歷史.
  8. ^ 向显桃 (2015). "知青的革命化春节". 文史博览 (1). Archived from the original on 2023-01-04. Retrieved 2023-01-04.
  9. ^ 胡伟祖 (2017-01-30). "我们曾经历的"革命化"春节". 解放日报. Archived from the original on 2023-01-04. Retrieved 2023-01-04.
  10. ^ a b c d e "697人丧生的新疆61团场火灾" [The fire in Xinjiang 61st Division that caused 697 deaths]. Archived from the original on 24 July 2020.
  11. ^ 建國後一次性亡人最多的火災啥情況？ [What was the fire that killed the greatest number of people at one time since the founding of the People's Republic of China]. 禪茶詩書 (Zen Tea Poetry Book). 5 December 2018. Archived from the original on 19 September 2022.
  12. ^ 建国后一次性亡人最多的火灾啥情况？_礼堂. www.sohu.com. Archived from the original on 2023-08-25. Retrieved 2021-11-13.
  13. ^ a b "新疆伊犁农垦局61团场礼堂发生火灾(2008年2月18日)【历史上的今天】". www.hao86.com. Archived from the original on 2021-11-13. Retrieved 2021-11-13.
  14. ^ 高栋 (2010). "697人丧生的61团场火灾". 炎黄春秋 (8). Archived from the original on 2020-07-24. Retrieved 2020-07-24.
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