Chinese Rail-Signal Executive Dies - Wall Street Journal

As Beijing pledges it will soon identify the culprits for a deadly high-speed rail crash last month, a Chinese railway signaling company that earlier apologized for its responsibility in the accident said its 55-year-old general manager collapsed and died during an inspection.

China Railway Signal & Communication Corp. on Tuesday identified the deceased executive as Ma Cheng and said he died Monday "during a safety inspection in Shenzhen."

A spokesman for the state-owned company couldn't be reached to comment.

Hours after the July 23 crash that killed 40 people, government inspectors began pointing to flawed signaling as the explanation for why a speeding train on a two-year-old track rammed the tail of a nearly stationary train outside the eastern city of Wenzhou.

The government said this week that it has concluded a preliminary assessment of what went wrong and will make public the results by mid-September. Until now, officials have said only that a signal light flashing green should have been switched to red and that lightning may have played a part.

Huang Yi, spokesman of the State Administration of Work Safety, said Monday in an online interview with state-run Xinhua news agency that preliminary investigations revealed serious design flaws in railway-signaling equipment, as well as poor emergency-response and safety-management loopholes. He reiterated a position voiced by inspectors earlier that the crash should have been avoided.

"The next stage will be to identify those who are responsible for the crash," Mr. Huang told Xinhua.

A handful of railway officials have already been dismissed from their posts. The government has warned that individuals, and possibly their supervisors, will be punished if found at fault for the accident.

The dead man, Mr. Ma, was an important Communist Party official in the railway industry and held the post of deputy party secretary at the signaling company. He was closely identified with China's high-speed rail signaling system, a homegrown version of a European standard, and was honored in April as one of China's top innovators at a Beijing conference called the World Metro Rail Summit.

In September 2010, Mr. Ma sounded triumphant in announcing plans to install control systems on a Beijing-Shanghai high-speed line. "We are going to improve ourselves through the construction of Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail...aiming at lifting CRSC up to the world's first class high-tech group on railway signaling and communication," he said, according to the company's website.

Chinese media reports Tuesday said he collapsed with an apparent heart attack as government investigators were probing for details of the July 23 crash. The reports carried no suggestion of foul play.

China Railway Signal, known as CRSC, is the country's dominant producer of the signaling equipment that allows dispatchers to organize rail and subway carriages. One of its subsidiaries is the only company so to far accept blame for a role in the Wenzhou accident. The unit, Beijing National Railway Research & Design Institute of Signal & Communication, on July 28 issued a statement expressing "deep" sorrow about the loss of state property and individual lives. "We will shoulder our responsibility, accept the deserved punishment," the institute said without elaboration.

CRSC has a broad footprint in railway signaling and operates ventures in at least 20 countries including Zambia, Iran and North Korea.

—Yang Jie contributed to this article.

Write to James T. Areddy at james.areddy@wsj.com

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