Chinese state media agencies confirmed a massive explosion taking place at a facility owned by a biotechnology company killed at least eight people in Shanxi, northern China this weekend.
Multiple Asian news outlets identified the company involved as Shanyin Jiapeng Bio-Technology, which reportedly manufactures a host of chemicals including agricultural products and paint. None of the reports on the incident indicate any known reason for the explosion, indicating that investigations are still ongoing. The government’s Xinhua News Agency reported that the Communist Party had detained the company’s legal representative, stating that he or she was “placed under control” without any details. It remains unclear at press time why the legal representative, and no other employee of the company, was targeted.
China has a long history of industrial, chemical, and scientific research accidents, as well as corporate misconduct and corruption. Among the various scandalous incidents involving biochemical or industrial corporations is the infamous 2015 Tianjin explosion that killed 173 people, the Changsheng Biotech scandal in which nearly 1 million children were administered ineffective or watered-down vaccines, and the ongoing investigation into potential links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic.
“An explosion that occurred in the early hours of Saturday at a biotechnology company in Shuozhou, North China’s Shanxi Province has resulted in eight fatalities as of 9:30 am Sunday,” the Chinese state newspaper Global Times reported on Sunday, “and the cause of the incident is still under investigation.”
“The company is located in a mountainous area more than 40 kilometers from the county seat. At the accident site, Xinhua reporters saw thick yellowish smoke still billowing, as emergency response and cleanup operations continued,” the outlet added. The Global Times described search and rescue crews being forced to dig deep into the complex to find all the known working crew and finding multiple bodies — suggesting that more victims could still be found.
The investigation into the incident is reportedly in the hands of the State Council Work Safety Committee, suggesting that it may escalate to a national level. The state newspaper China Daily added, without directly linking this fact to the explosion, that “a nationwide campaign has also been launched to inspect and rectify illegal production sites involving hazardous chemicals and other related activities.”
The accident is the latest in several incidents that have resulted in calls for better control of chemical and pharmaceutical corporations in the country. The largest such incident occurred in 2015, when nearly 200 people were killed by a massive explosion in Tianjin, northeast China. The explosion, equivalent to that of 21 tons of TNT, was found to be caused by unsafe storage of large amounts of sodium cyanide and resulted in the imprisonment of 49 individuals tied to Ruihai Logistics. The Communist Party accused the imprisoned of bribing local officials to store the chemicals illegally without facing repercussions.
In 2018, a scandal involving biotechnology consumed the nation. A massive pharmaceutical company, Changsheng Biotechnology, was caught administering watered-down or otherwise ineffective vaccines, then producing fake vaccine records, profiting tremendously by defrauding parents of vaccinated children. Multiple batches of vaccines totaling nearly 1 million doses were found to have not met the standards necessary to properly immunize the children involved. The Communist Party heavily condemned the company, resulting in dozens of arrests and criminal charges, and made a rare allowance for the parents of the affected children to protest publicly. In January 2019, a mob of angry parents staged a protest that ended with parents beating local officials for not properly enforcing regulations surrounding vaccines.
The Wuhan coronavirus pandemic itself has become the subject of speculation that insufficient safety protocol at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) may have been the origin of the novel coronavirus. The WIV was known to study bat coronaviruses shortly before the onset of the pandemic and the U.S. government suggested that “several researchers inside the WIV became sick in autumn 2019, before the first identified case of the outbreak, with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] and common seasonal illnesses.”
“The IC [intelligence community] assesses that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, probably emerged and infected humans through an initial small-scale exposure that occurred no later than November 2019 with the first known cluster of COVID-19 cases arising in Wuhan, China in December 2019,” a Director of National Intelligence (DNI) investigation would later conclude.
Following the onset of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese government then struggled to contain the illicit sale of fake coronavirus vaccine products. In February 2021, the Communist Party announced that its officials had arrested 70 people for involvement in nearly two dozen fake coronavirus vaccine cases.
Later that year, a laboratory at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics exploded.
The incident left two dead.
Dangerous laboratory and chemical situations linked to Chinese companies have occurred outside of the country, as well. In 2023, the U.S. government identified an illegal medical laboratory in California that it found to be owned by the Chinese company Prestige Biotech. Law enforcement found the “laboratory” hidden in a warehouse and featuring a variety of dangerous pathogen samples, including malaria and Wuhan coronavirus, as well as 800 chemicals, many of an unclear nature.
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