Three people died and 31 others were injured, seven severely, in a stampede triggered by sales promotion in a Carrefour outlet in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality on November 11.

People began queuing at the entrance around 4 a.m. that day, waiting to buy bargain priced cooking oil. The oil was marked down by 11.5 yuan ($1.5) from the original price of 51.4 yuan ($6.9) for a five-liter bottle.

Although security guards tried hard to keep order, people jumped the queue pushing and shoving despite being told the crush had caused severe casualties.

People tend to panic when disaster strikes, but emergency training can help the situation. In daily life, training for such emergencies as fires or floods can greatly alleviate disasters. In many foreign countries, primary and middle schools offer emergency training courses and it would seem that children in these countries can cope better with various disasters than their Chinese peers.

What happened in the Carrefour outlet in Chongqing shows the necessity for public emergency training. More effective precautionary measures should also be taken to prevent such tragedies from happening again where public gatherings are involved.

The Beijing News

Face Inflation Facts

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, October’s consumer price index (CPI) rose by 6.5 percent over the previous year. It was the sixth consecutive month that the year-on-year increase of the CPI, a main gauge of inflation, exceeded the warning of 3 percent set by the government earlier this year.

There has long been a debate on whether China is faced with inflation. Some mainstream scholars tend to believe that even if there is, it is not so serious.

However, food prices increased by 17.6 percent year on year last month, with pork prices soaring by 54.9 percent.

Rocketing prices will make the poor even poorer. Besides, when a sharp income increase is unexpected, the whole nation’s purchasing power begins to fall, and domestic demand shrinks.

With the certainty that the whole year’s average CPI growth will exceed 4.5 percent, the severity of inflation is no longer the issue-how to lower inflation is.

Guangzhou Daily

Must We Have the World’s Highest?

On the morning of November 5, the highest Ferris wheel in the world officially broke ground in Beijing’s Chaoyang Park. This Ferris wheel will stand as high as 208 meters, with a diameter of 193 meters.

Shanghai had earlier planned to build the world’s highest Ferris wheel along the Huangpujiang River, with a height of 200 meters. But this plan was canceled after it was strongly criticized as a useless and luxurious “vanity project.” To the public’s surprise, soon after, Beijing began work on a similar project.

To build the highest Ferris wheel in the world will undoubtedly cost a large amount of money, but is China wealthy enough to build this kind of structure?

Many places across China are still enthusiastic about construction projects bearing the title of “China’s first” or “the world’s highest.” Despite public opposition, the limited finances available always seem to go to these projects.

Does the world’s highest Ferris wheel have nowhere else to be built apart from China? Isn’t it better to invest the limited finances in projects that improve people’s livelihood? Even if Beijing is forced to take on new scenic spots and structures, it is not an inevitability that the highest Ferris wheel must be built in the capital.

Sanqin Metropolis Daily

Students Have Rights Too

In order to have clean streets before an inspection by senior government officials in early November, more than 20 primary and middle schools in Xinyang City, central China’s Henan Province, were asked to allocate students to remove rubbish during lesson time.

The question to ask is whether the local government has the right to deprive students of their study and free time just to prepare for the arrival of senior officials? Is it that students’ individual rights can be easily sacrificed for the so-called good city image and public interests?

It’s easy to organize students and they are always obedient, but they have rights too. It’s unfair to drag them from classrooms to the streets. Besides, even if students are too young to stand up for their rights, why do teachers turn a blind eye to the whole thing?

To casually tramp on students’ rights is unacceptable as this violation may become a habit. When a child grows up in an environment without a guarantee of rights, they may lack the sense of safeguarding their rights.

Jinan Times