36 Dead in Shanghai New Year's Eve Stampede; $100 Nightclub Flyers May Have Been Cause

[Updated 1/1 4.04pm] Beijing passed a safe New Year's Eve last night but the same cannot be said for Shanghai, where at least 36 were killed and 47 injured in a stampede at the overcrowded Bund.

News reports are coming in that the event happened at around 11.35pm Tuesday night as tens of thousands of people poured onto the Bund to celebrate the New Year.

No cause of the stampede has been determined, but rumors and photos are circulating on Weibo that a 4th floor club located on the Bund, M18, had tossed promotional flyers down on the crowd that looked like USD 100 bills near the time of the accident.

Though purely speculative at this time, the location of the accident – at Chenyi Square – is very close to M18's location and indeed their New Year's Eve party flyers are designed to look like USD 100 bills.

One witness interviewed by an Eastday reporter who was at the site at the time of the accident claims to have seen someone toss the flyers down from the upper floor of the Bund No. 18 building, which is where M18 is located.

However, others on Weibo indicate the flyers were spread after the incident.

The primary site of the incident was a set of stairways leading to a viewing platform next the Huangpu River, across the street from the Peace Hotel. One reporter who was at the scene said the flood of people coming up and down the stairs resulted in no one in the area being able to move and panic quickly setting in.

The identities of those killed and injured have not been released to date, though news reports say the injured include 12 men and 28 women, ranging in age from 16 to 36. Forty of the injured remained hospitalized as of 2.30pm this afternoon. One news report indicated that one Malaysian and three Taiwanese were among the casualties.

The Bund has been home to massive New Year's Eve gatherings before, and in fact yesterday afternoon the Huangpu District Government announced that the area's New Year's Eve countdown party was being moved to the Bund Origin Cultural Square near Yuanmingyuan Road to "improve traffic flow," the Shanghai Daily reported. The news report indicated that last year officials were "surprised when nearly 300,000 people turned up for the countdown show at the Bund, which led to traffic chaos."

The accident is the worst incident of stampeding deaths in the last decade in China. In 2004, 37 people were killed and 15 injured in the Beijing suburb of Miyun when a pedestrian bridge collapsed during a Chinese New Year ice festival.

Follow updates on the Shanghai incident live (in Chinese) on Weibo here. We will post updates as the become available.

Meanwhile in Beijing, New Year's Eve celebrations appear to have taken place without incident, though one breathless CNN reporter claims “the Chinese government is cancelling” it’s New Year’s celebrations just before midnight in a “stunning turn of events”. Standing outside China World Tower 3, the reporter implied that the city had just ruthlessly clamped down on what was supposed to be the city's official party.

Focusing on a crowd that had gathered at the base of the tower, the reporter failed to inform his viewers that there was no official city celebration planned for anywhere except the Olympic Park, nor did he contextualize the report by saying that midnight countdowns on December 31 are not a popular form of celebration in China.

Images: Weibo.com