In Qijiang county near China's southern city of Chongqing, a taxi-driver approached a shopkeeper the other day and asked him to do a favour. Would he deliver a gift box to a newly-wed couple living in a nearby school?
The shopkeeper, called Jiang, strolled down to the school carrying the parcel and accompanied by his young daughter. They had just entered the school clinic when the box exploded. The girl and a doctor were killed and Mr Jiang critically injured, according to yesterday's Shanghai Express.
The incident, which occurred on Sunday, underlines the stark realities behind an official report published this week on the increasing use of explosives in a crime wave sweeping the country. A series of seven known bomb incidents since January has killed at least 33 people and wounded more than 100 in China.
The report reveals that criminals or political saboteurs caused at least 2,500 blasts throughout the country in 1998. Cheap explosives are used extensively for mining and are easy to obtain in China, the country which invented gunpowder. The previous year there were 2,250 criminal uses of explosives.
The crime rate has risen sharply too, according to the report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Police investigated 1.35 million criminal cases in the first nine months of 1998, a rise of 22 per cent over the previous year. Murder cases jumped 5.8 per cent to 21,000. The chief causes of rising crime were unemployment among a workforce of 700 million, a widening income gap between the rich and poor, and anger at rampant corruption, the report said. The official jobless rate of 3.5 per cent relates to urban workers and is said by western analysts to be much higher. By last September, there were 10.7 million workers laid off from money-losing state-owned enterprises but still receiving partial pay, the report said.
There were also 170 million surplus rural workers. "Their sense of loss is the strongest in the entire society," said sociologist Mr Lu Jianhua, one of the authors of the report. "Political stability will become the government's top theme of consideration in 1999."
A survey of about 2,300 urban and rural residents in 22 provinces last year showed that corruption was the top concern of 65.2 per cent of respondents, the report said. On a scale of one to five, the sense of security felt by residents slipped to 3.42 in 1998 from 3.57 in 1997.
The use of capital punishment on a scale unknown in any other country has failed to stop the rise in crime. In the latest batch of executions, authorities put to death 35 people as part of an anticrime drive in the run-up to Lunar New Year holiday next week. In Chongqing, where the gift box exploded on Sunday, 21 people were executed for murder and robbery after a public ceremony last month which drew 300 people.
In the southern city of Shenzhen, six members of a criminal extortion gang were executed recently after a mass sentencing rally. In December, Shenzhen executed 11 drug dealers, including a teenage girl, and 30 people were killed by firing squad in August for crimes ranging from murder to illegal weapons sales.
China executed more people in the 1990s than the rest of the world put together, according to Amnesty International.
AFP adds: China warned the United States yesterday against providing Taiwan with advanced missile defence systems, as Taipei accused Beijing of dramatically increasing its deployment of missiles aimed at the island.
"We hope the US administration can refrain from the sales of theatre missile defence and other technology to Taiwan so as to avoid the damage to bilateral relations," a spokeswoman said.
China has never renounced the option of using force to recover Taiwan.