I took this snapshot today on the bullet train from Shanghai to Beijing. The young woman in it, a railway employee, is grabbing a quick nap in the dining car. Given the past week of news for high-speed rail in China – a wreck in Zhejiang Province last Saturday that killed at least 39, followed by confusing explanations and non-explanations by the government -- her look of utter exhaustion struck a chord.

UPDATE: Have gotten a few notes about the photograph, so I thought I'd post the other picture I took of her:

UPDATE: Adding even more to the confusion, there are reports that Xinhua mistranslated Wen's remarks today. Will review a recording of him speaking and update as needed.

UPDATE 2: After a review of the video of Wen speaking, it seems that the Xinhua translation may have been a little off the mark . Wen didn't say that he had checked out of a hospital, but he did say that he'd been in "bing chuang" (sick bed) for 11 days, a phrase commonly used to refer to a hospital bed or ... just being sick in bed. I'll be conservative and mark out the word "hospital" below, though I'll note that as of 9:41 pm Beijing time, the Xinhua article was still online.

There is a lot of confusion surrounding Saturday's crash of two high-speed trains in coastal Zhejiang Province, and Premier Wen Jiabao's reported remarks today added a small bit more. I'll go with the English Xinhua translations here.

Today, Xinhua reported Wen saying that his visit to the scene of the crash had been delayed by illness:

Premier Wen speaks to press on fatal train crash while suffering illness   English.news.cn   2011-07-28 12:59:53 FeedbackPrintRSS WENZHOU, July 28 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said Thursday that medical problems delayed his visit to the site of the fatal crash of two high-speed trains in eastern China that killed 39 people. Wen, who was in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, to mourn victims and express condolences to the relatives of the dead, did not specify the nature of the illness. "I am ill, having spent 11 days in bed, but I managed to come today only after my doctor reluctantly allowed me to check out of hospital. This is why I didn't come here sooner," the premier told reporters. Wen vowed to "severely punish" those responsible for the train crash and said safety would be the top priority for the country's high-speed rail technology exports.

Wen did not specify when he was ill, or when he was released from the hospital. But the Xinhua story suggests that he'd checked out of the hospital been ill very recently.

So, it caught my attention that Xinhua had carried a photograph and report on Sunday, the day after the train wreck, covering Wen's meeting that day with a Japanese trade delegation:

English.news.cn   2011-07-24 18:51:51

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Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (R front) meets with Kono Yohei, delegation head of the Japanese Association for the Promotion of International Trade in Beijing, capital of China, July 24, 2011. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, July 24 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Sunday called for broader cooperation with Japan, as a Japanese trade delegation is currently visiting China.

"The two sides should grasp the opportunity provided by China's developmental transformation and Japan's reconstruction (following the earthquake and tsunami disasters in March) and actively expand our cooperation," Wen said during a meeting with a delegation from the Japanese Association for the Promotion of International Trade.

And a few days earlier, Xinhua had reported Wen meeting with Cameroon's president:

English.news.cn   2011-07-21 20:26:14

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Two items yesterday suggested the complexities of the Internet in China.

There's no question that the government here has firm control of the Web -- on a daily basis, via its Great Firewall censorship program, and ultimately, through the ability to just turn the thing off.  Within those limits, though, Chinese Internet users have increasingly been pushing the boundaries of public speech. The aftermath of this weekend's bullet train crash is a prominent example.

A blog piece by Josh Chin at the Wall Street Journal noted:

"Anger and skepticism that emerged quickly after Saturday’s collision of two bullet trains in eastern China—which killed at least 39 people dead and injured more than 192—has intensified as the government has drawn fire for not being forthcoming enough with information on the disaster. Much of the criticism played out on Sina Weibo, China’s most active Twitter-like microblogging site, where the accident on Tuesday remained the most discussed item for a third-straight day.

'In the eyes of the authorities, regular people will always be gullible three-year-old children,' Weibo user Yan Youming wrote Tuesday in one of thousands of new postings on the site that took the government to task for its opaque handling of the disaster."

But there was also this reminder of how things often work in China (by Tania Branigan in The Guardian):

"Police have told cafes, hotels and other businesses in central Beijing to install surveillance technology for Wi-Fi users or face fines and possible closure, in a further tightening of internet controls.

...

The new software, which costs about 20,000 yuan (£1,900), allows officials to check the identities of users and monitor their activity. Businesses that fail to comply face a fine of the same size and could have their licences revoked."

As reporting continues on whether this weekend's deadly bullet train wreck in Zhejiang Province will affect China's ability to export high-speed train equipment, an editorial yesterday in The New York Times raised questions about exports in the other direction. 

Specifically, the Times singled out Cisco Systems, Yahoo, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for bidding on contracts, selling technology or supplying information that could help Chinese officials in their surveillance or censorship efforts. 

The Times wrote:

"American technology companies are eager to do business in China, sometimes too eager.

Cisco Systems and others are working on a government project in the city of Chongqing, for example, that includes creating the biggest police surveillance system in the world. A year and a half after Google pulled its search engine out of China to avoid censorship, Microsoft’s Bing still censors searches in China. Earlier this month, it agreed to provide search results in English for Baidu, China’s leading — and heavily censored — engine.

The United States needs enforceable standards of ethical behavior when American companies work with authoritarian governments.

...

Voluntary guidelines are insufficient. Just as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act establishes that companies cannot bribe foreign officials, legislation is needed in this area."

It's an interesting argument. There were opinions in both directions voiced by Twitter users in China yesterday and I wondered: What do you think?