Much media coverage of the newly completed engineering feat of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway has focused on its safety record. Indeed, when the building of subways in Beijing can still result in fatalities, as it did last week, it sounds almost futuristic for the builders of this railway of the roof of the world to claim not a single fatality after finishing a 1,100-kilometre project at an altitude in excess of 3,000 meters.

It is like comparing some 21st century technology with simple industry. And when it comes to mining, where the lax enforcement of safety rules can cause the loss of hundreds of lives, it is like comparing rocket science with the 19th century coolie economy.

But when both can happen in the same country, it means that greater use should have been made of what looks like rocket science, while the 19th century way of working ought to have been done away with.

The central government should use the completion of the new railway to start a campaign to educate all industry officials and business leaders in safety management. The successful experience should be included in textbooks and manuals, and be made required courses.

In particular, Sun Yongfu, the railway's leading executive, should be made chairman of the board of directors of a new national work safety academy funded by the central government, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and large corporations.

To start with, the State Administration of Work Safety should perhaps establish some crash courses, based on the experiences of building the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, for the nation's coal mine executives.

It has been reported that when the project was due to start, its managers made clear their goal that the project should have no fatalities despite the fact that fatalities had occurred during all previous civil engineering endeavors on the Tibetan plateau.

They achieved their goal. In the subsequent five years, all standards and procedures were strictly adhered to in order to ensure lives were safeguarded.

Unfortunately, from reading the Chinese-language press coverage of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway, one gets the impression that this success is not getting the attention it deserves.

When the railway's record of no fatalities is reported, more is written about the scientific aspect, such as Doctor Wu Tianyi's medical research into high-altitude human activities.

But the railway's success is not just one of pure science. It was a five-year project involving thousands of workers undertaking various tasks, most of which were presumably not of a very high-tech type and not that different from those performed by coal miners. It is even more of a feat that, through this complex process, the advice of medical professionals could be followed to the letter.

The success in safeguarding lives during the construction of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway is therefore one of successful management. The whole nation owes special thanks to the project's managers.

It might not be a market-economy success in terms of financial management, or a sales and marketing success. But that doesn't matter, because it is a government-funded project. So long as it can, by an objective standard, outperform most other companies, its example should be recognized to contain a greater value, and be followed by all other companies.

Even the government itself will have to learn from the builders of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway. As we can see from the frequent tragedies in the nation's coal mines, safety rules are often ignored in the interests of making a short-term profit. Criminal investigations of negligent executives are unable to deter other executives from acting the same way.

To really ensure humanist values prevail in key industries, a certain degree of government interference does seem necessary. But in many cases, officials have yet to learn how much interference is reasonable to just get the rules followed without upsetting the work plans.

(China Daily July 3, 2006)