THE PLIGHT of “Little Yiyi”, a two-year-old girl pulled from the wreckage of last month’s deadly bullet train crash, has moved a nation and the Chinese government has sent a team of experts to save the toddler’s leg.
Xiang Weiyi was nicknamed Little Yiyi by the Chinese media and she has come to symbolise the spirit of defiance in the country since the collision on July 23rd that killed at least 40 people, including her parents, near the eastern city of Wenzhou.
She was rescued unconscious 21 hours after the crash, just as the search mission was being called off, prompting accusations that the rail company was not diligent in finding survivors, and was more interested in getting the service up and running again.
Her legs were badly crushed and because she was buried so long, she could be left disabled.
"Crush syndrome is among the most serious injuries and the longer one has been buried the more likely it is that a person will suffer lifelong problems," Deng Jingcheng, who heads the paediatric orthopedics department of the Capital Institute of Pediatrics told the newspaper China Daily.
High-speed rail has gone from being a flagship undertaking to causing popular unease about the apparent readiness to sacrifice public interest in pursuit of prestige engineering projects. The government has frozen approval of new railway schemes and halted some bullet train manufacturing after the crash.
In the days after the crash, the Economic Observer, a highly respected business weekly, ran a powerful editorial written in the form of a letter to the girl, saying: "Yiyi, when you grow up, will we and this country we live in be able to honestly tell you about all the love and suffering, anger and doubts around us?"
The decision to send a team of experts came after Yiyi’s uncle Xiang Yuyu posted online an open letter to the ministry of railways.
“There has been too much suffering for her at such a young age and she needs her legs in good shape,” he said on the microblogging site Sina Weibo.
“We have to make sure that in the future we can say to her that we really tried our best,” he said, adding that he posted the letter because the rail ministry had not contacted the family to find out Yiyi’s condition. The ministry denies his claim.
The Beijing-Shanghai line, which opened at the beginning of July to highlight the ruling Communist Partys 90th anniversary, was hailed by senior railways officials as the pride of China and a feather of technological progress in the nations cap.
Now Chinese leaders, chastened by last month’s crash, are rethinking the pace of rail growth.
Additional reporting: Reuters