Behind deadly Tianjin blast, shortcuts and lax rules

One partner was the son of a local police chief, the other an executive at a state-run chemicals firm. After meeting at a dinner party, they started a company here to handle the export of the most dangerous chemicals made in China, promising "outstanding service" and "good results."

Within two years, Rui Hai International Logistics had built a reputation as the go-to place for businesses looking to ship hazardous materials to customers abroad, a niche market that had been dominated by sluggish state enterprises.

Rui Hai offered lower prices, a no-hassle approach to paperwork and quick government approvals. Business was brisk. It seemed like another success story for the Binhai New Area, a thriving economic development zone established here by the ruling Communist Party around one of China's busiest seaports.

Now, more than two weeks after explosions at its warehouses levelled a section of that district, killing 150 people, injuring more than 700 and leaving millions here fearful of toxic fallout, Rui Hai has become a symbol of something else for many Chinese: the high cost of rapid industrialisation in a closed political system rife with corruption.

In interviews with more than a dozen of Rui Hai's former clients and associates - and unusually critical reports in China's state-controlled news media - a picture has emerged of a company that exploited weak governance in one of the party's showcase economic districts and used political connections to shield its operations from scrutiny.

Rui Hai began handling hazardous chemicals before it obtained a permit to do so, and it secured licenses and approvals from at least five local agencies that conducted questionable reviews of its operations. Local authorities outsourced one safety review required for a storage permit to a private contractor that Rui Hai selected and paid.

As much as 3,000 tons of hazardous chemicals were stored at Rui Hai on the night of the explosions, including 700 tons of sodium cyanide, deadly in a dose of less than a tablespoon, and 1,300 tons of fertiliser nitrates, more than 500 times the amount used in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Rui Hai's shipping yard covered more than 11 acres, but clients said it routinely packed huge volumes of different volatile chemicals together in haphazard fashion instead of storing them separately, at safe distances and in smaller quantities as recommended in the industry.

"Nobody wanted to stand in their way," said one chemicals exporter in Tianjin, who asked not to be named to protect his business from reprisal, when asked why regulators took no action.

The catastrophe in Tianjin has stunned a nation inured to living with one of the worst industrial safety records in the world. By the government's own count, more than 68,000 people were killed in such accidents last year - nearly 200 every day, most of them poor, powerless and far from China's boom towns.

© 2015 The New York Times News Service