Five Calls to China's Emergency Line Went Unanswered as a 73-Year-Old Died 800 Metres From Hospital
A passerby dialled 120 five times in ten minutes for a man having a heart attack in Fujin, Heilongjiang — the hospital's two emergency landlines never rang, the police's own 110 could not reach them either, and the man died less than a kilometre from care.
A 73-year-old man collapsed with a heart attack in Fujin, a small city in Heilongjiang province, less than 800 metres from the local central hospital — a drive of about a minute. What followed, as his daughter recounted to the Huashang Daily, was sixteen minutes of failed phone calls, twenty-nine minutes before he reached a resuscitation room, and a death that has turned the city's emergency line into a national argument about single points of failure.
The man had been out when the attack came. A passerby dialled 120, China's medical emergency number, five times in ten minutes; no call connected. Calling the police's 110 instead, the caller found the problem ran deeper: the police command centre could not get through to 120 either, and could only ask the hospital's security office to pass on a message by other means. The man did not survive.
The hospital's explanation, delivered after the death, has done little to settle the family or the public: a fibre-optic cable fault, it said, meant that neither of the two 120 landlines rang when people called — the calls went nowhere, silently. The family does not accept that a city's only medical emergency line can fail without anyone noticing, and neither do many commentators. "The most absurd part is that even the police's 110 could not connect to 120 — the emergency system that is supposed to work in tandem snapped at the one link that matters most," one widely shared post put it, noting that a household whose broadband dies gets it repaired faster than this line was ever tested. Under China's pre-hospital care rules, a 120 centre is required to keep its lines reachable around the clock; the fault, the argument runs, is less the broken cable than the absence of any backup, second line, or alarm while it lay dead.
The story has run on both Weibo, where a summary by Sina's hot-search account drew well over a thousand likes within hours, and Baidu's trending board, where it sat near the top with a score in the millions — traction that reflects how directly it lands on a common anxiety. China's 120 system is regional, and a failure like this one leaves no alternative number to call; the passerby who tried five times was, in effect, calling the only line there was.
Where the case goes next is procedural. It has been handed to a medical-dispute mediation committee; the hospital is advising the family to pursue litigation; and the telecom operator involved says it has opened its own investigation into the cable fault. Those processes may establish who pays for the failure. None of them yet answers the question the daughter's account poses: why a line carrying a city's emergency calls could go down without anyone noticing until someone died.