BBC News Online: World: Asia-Pacific

China's deadly fires

In the past decade, well over 1,000 people have been killed by big fires across the country.

BBC Beijing correspondent Rupert Wingfield-Hayes says that building safety standards in China are seldom properly enforced.

Chinese cities have been transformed by a recent construction boom, and cheap and rapid construction and alteration takes priority over public safety.

Here are some of the worst fire-related disasters of the past several years:

• November 1993
  87 workers die and 57 are injured in a fire that rips through a toy factory in Shenzhen city, across the border from Hong Kong.

• 27 November 1994
  234 people die in a blaze in a nightclub in Fuxin city in northeastern Liaoning province.

• 8 December 1994
  324 people, 288 of them school children, die in a fire in a cinema in the oil city of Karamay in northweastern Xinjiang region.

• 14 March 1995
  About 30 people die in a blaze in a hotel at the top of a commercial building in Anshan in northeastern Liaoning.

• 24 April 1995
  51 die in a fire at an illegal all-night karaoke and video centre in Urumqi, capital of northwestern Xinjiang region.

• 27 November 1996
  36 people killed after two retarded men set fire to a residential building in downtown Shanghai.

• 13 February 1997
  As many as 39 passengers are killed as the bus they are travelling in catches fire on an expressway in southern Guangdong province.

• 21 September 1997
  32 people die in blaze at shoe factory in Jinjiang city in southeastern Fujian province, after a dissatisfied worker sets fire to the facility.

• 26 December 1999
  20 people die in a hotel fire in Changchun in northeastern Jilin province.

• 29 March 2000
  At least 74 people die in a fire that destroys a pornographic cinema in the city of Jiaozuo in central China's Henan province.

• 22 April 2000
  A fire at a chicken processing plant in Qingzhou in eastern Shandong province kills at least 38 workers.

• 30 June 2000
  At least 36 die in fireworks factory blaze in Guangdong province