Xinjiang 61st Regiment Farm fire

The 61st Regiment Farm fire and stampede (Chinese: 61团场火灾) was a fire that occurred on 18 February 1977 at 20:15 Xinjiang Time in a public hall showing a movie. The direct cause of the fire was the regiment hesitating to dispose of the memorial wreaths of the late Mao Zedong for five months, and eventually the wreaths were ignited by a spinning top-like firecracker set off by a 12-year-old boy at the Chinese New Year celebrations. The farm was a military-agricultural colony run by the Xinjiang 61st regiment; hence, most deaths were among the military brats. Overall, 694 died and 161 became disabled; among the dead were 597 of the 1,600 schoolchildren on the farm. This is also the deadliest fire in China after 1949, one of the deadliest disasters in Chinese history, and one of the deadliest fireworks accidents.^{[2][3][4][5][6]}

After Mao Zedong died on 9 September 1976, the Xinjiang 61st regiment ordered the locals to make wreaths to demonstrate their loyalty to Mao.^[2] By Chinese custom, those funeral wreaths would have been incinerated.^[a] However, the regiment feared incinerating the wreaths would draw accusations of disrespecting Mao; later, their superiors ordered them to keep all the wreaths in a hall.

Five months later came the 1977 Chinese New Year, the first back-to-normal Chinese New Year after the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. During that period, the Red Guards deemed the Chinese New Year to be one of the "Four Olds" that should be denounced in rallies. The Red Guards proclaimed a "revolutionized New Year" which people shall not set off new year fireworks, shall continue work in the regiment farm rather than going home for reunion, shall not pay respects to ancestors, and shall make the blessing "Wish you see Chairman Mao this year" rather than the traditional blessing Gong Xi Fa Cai ("Congratulations and be prosperous").^[7][8][9]

At this particularly lively and awaited 1977 Chinese New Year, the regiment farm showed the movie Jeon-u (1958), a North Korean movie about the Chinese "War of Resisting America and Assisting Korea". Towards the end of the movie, during an the iconic hugging scene between a Chinese and North Korean soldier,^[2] a 12-year-old boy set off a spinning top-like firecracker ("地老鼠") to celebrate the new year and the end of a 10-year-ban on fireworks.^[2] He was unable to control its spinning path on the ground, and it spun into the five-month-old wreaths of Mao Zedong. As children brought their own chairs to the hall, when the fire broke out, they ran with their chairs to the one exit, resulting in a crowd crush.^[3] The disaster was first publicly reported in China 18 years later, in 1995.^[2]

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