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Six deaths when a ride malfunctioned at an amusement park in Shenzhen's Overseas Chinese Town (OCT) East last month  have not derailed the operator's plans for further expansion. 
As the operator of the mainland's most popular theme parks, the state-owned OCT Group runs 10 parks, resorts and attractions in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Changsha, Chengdu  and Jiangsu  province, under different brands, including OCT resorts and Happy Valley.  
It plans to invest some 6 billion yuan (HK$6.87 billion) to copy its successful business model in Tianjin , Xian , Wuhan  and Kunming , cashing in on  a burgeoning leisure  market. 
But OCT is looking to cash in on more than just theme parks.
State media reports say real-estate projects contributed 60 per cent of its revenue last year, while tourists visiting the amusement parks contributed  some 30 per cent. 
At OCT East, a luxury villa costs 50 million yuan - 120,000 yuan per square metre. 
Given the pay-off from property development, it's no surprise that mainland media has reported that OCT has kept a tight rein on investment in the amusement-park side of the business. 
The company invested just 3.5 billion yuan in the 9  sq km OCT East, which features rides and interactive attractions. By contrast, Hong Kong Disneyland spent HK$14.1 billion on its 1.26  sq km park - nearly 30 times more per square kilometre. 
Industry insiders say many mainland park operators  use domestically designed rides and attractions to save money. 
'For example, a mainland-made Ferris wheel costs 300,000 to 600,000 yuan while an imported one costs US$800,000. But their service life is almost the same,' The Southern Metropolis News quoted one insider as saying. 
The killer Space Journey ride at OCT East - designed to replicate the experience of a rocket launch - was designed by a People's Liberation Army-backed design college with very little experience in designing similar rides and was manufactured by Beijing Jiuhua Amusement Rides Manufacturing  last year. 
It passed a safety check by the China Special Equipment Inspection and Research Institute  but a retired Hong Kong amusement park engineer told the  Southern Weekly  it had huge design defects. 
The engineer, who visited the amusement park in December, said the ride didn't have a life-saving automatic-stop system and the device that fastened the 12 cabins while they were operating at high speed was too thin. 
'The ride was too dangerous. Cabins could collide with each other if one of them fell off,' he said. 
Shenzhen's safety watchdog said the tragedy happened when a cabin crashed into the ground and collided with six other cabins. 
Space Journey is just one of some 2,000 rides and  attractions operated across the Pearl River Delta that are required to undergo only annual safety checks, with no legal limit on their service life. 
Questions have been asked about whether the management of a state-owned company can be made to make safety their top priority.  
Shenzhen police detained 11 lower-level staff from the park for further investigation a week after the accident but none of them have been charged. No one from senior management has been detained. 
Park management has also been criticised by the victims' families for the 'inhumane and unreasonable' way they handled the tragedy's aftermath.  Victims' families say they were denied permission to enter the park to perform  mourning rituals for the dead at the accident scene.  
 Mainland newspapers reported that the families would be offered 620,000 yuan in compensation for each person killed in the accident, paid over 20 years at a rate of 2,600 yuan a month. A number of families say that's not enough. 
OCT East may earn staggering profits from the park and its property projects but it will never earn people's respect if that's the way holidaymakers are treated.



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Mishap reveals fatally skewed priorities of theme park company