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 | | Thursday, 10 January, 2002, 17:15 GMT Firework ban leaves 200,000 jobless  Even schools are used as workshops Firework factories are to be closed down in China's impoverished eastern province of Jiangxi following a series of fatal explosions. Jiangxi was the scene of an explosion at a school which killed 42 people, the vast majority of them children, last March. The tragedy led to an unprecedented public apology by Premier Zhu Rongji. Meng Jianzhu, the province's Communist Party secretary, said firework factories would be closed because "We absolutely should not build our economy on those highly dangerous enterprises", according to the official Xinhua news agency. About 200,000 people work in 9,000 firework factories in Jiangxi and will need to find new jobs.
The ban comes less than fortnight after another blast destroyed a warehouse and 10 workshops in the small town of Huangmao. Local press reports quoted rescue workers as saying about 40 people had died, though the official Xinhua news agency put the death toll at nine. At the time of the primary school explosion in March, local people said pupils as young as eight regularly assembled firecrackers for a local factory. The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights in China said officials used the fireworks business to subsidise the education department's income. The ban will be phased in over 12 months. The announcement comes at peak season for the firework industry, ahead of the Chinese New Year in February. Traditional firecrackers have been banned from many cities, including Beijing, because they are both dangerous and extremely noisy. Guangdong in south China has a similar ban on firework production. | | See also:  Top Business stories now:  Links to more Business stories are at the foot of the page. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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