An auxiliary building of a hotel in eastern China’s Jiangsu province collapsed on Monday, killing at least eight people, China’s state-run Global Times reported on Tuesday.
“The auxiliary building of Siji Kaiyuan Hotel collapsed at 3:33 pm Monday in Wujiang district, Suzhou city,” the Global Times reported. Suzhou is located 60 miles west of Shanghai.
“A total of eight people died in the hotel that collapsed Monday. Six were rescued from the wreckage while nine are still missing as of 10 am Tuesday,” the newspaper relayed, citing official statements by local government agencies.
“An all-out rescue is still ongoing,” the publication added.
“According to the hotel check-in information, 18 people were in the building. After further analysis and screening, it was found that there were five unregistered guests trapped inside, and the total number of trapped people at the scene should be 23,” the Suzhou municipal government said in a statement released Tuesday morning.
“Public information shows that Siji Kaiyuan Hotel opened in 2020 and has 54 guest rooms,” according to the Global Times. The Associated Press cited the Chinese booking app Ctrip on Tuesday to report that the Siji Kaiyuan Hotel “opened in 2018.”
The state-run Global Times was careful to distinguish between the newly built Siji Kaiyuan Hotel and its now collapsed “auxiliary” building on Tuesday. The Paper, a Chinese Communist Party-controlled digital newspaper based in Shanghai, claimed on Tuesday the hotel’s doomed auxiliary building was “nearly 30 years old and has been undergoing frequent renovations in recent years.”
Similarly, the Global Times cited “emergency rescue personnel at the scene” on Tuesday who suggested the collapse may have occurred “due to the property owner privately modifying the structure of the [auxiliary] building.”
“In the collapsed auxiliary building was mahjong parlor with which was a booming business [sic],” the Chinese Communist Party mouthpiece cited “local residents near the scene” as saying on July 13.
“The [auxiliary] building used to have only three floors, but over the years they have been adding extra floors,” a local resident surnamed Liu told China’s Red Star News site on July 12, as quoted by the Global Times.
Chinese government authorities said Tuesday the exact cause of the hotel’s collapse remains unclear and “is being investigated.”
Agence France-Presse (AFP) described the Siji Kaiyuan Hotel as a “budget hotel” on Tuesday, noting Suzhou is a popular tourist destination owing to its historic gardens and canals.
“Building collapses or accidents are not uncommon in China and are often blamed on lax construction standards or corruption,” the French news agency further noted.
“The collapse of a quarantine hotel in southern China’s Quanzhou city last March killed 29 people, with authorities later finding that three floors had been added illegally to the building’s original four-storey structure,” AFP recalled.