In the city of Liuyang, in Hunan province - known as „the centre of China's pyrotechnic industry" - a fireworks factory exploded on Monday afternoon. The toll - 26 dead, 61 injured. The site - the „Huasheng" plant - is one of hundreds that make up the city's industrial cluster.

The rescue operation mobilised over 1,500 emergency personnel, specialised search robots, and a full string of mass-casualty response services. President Xi Jinping ordered a „thorough investigation", a phrase that in the Chinese official lexicon can mean literally anything - from a real technical review to a political reshuffling of the responsible heads. Authorities claim that environmental monitoring showed „normal conditions" - the kind of statement that rarely arrives at this stage without raising suspicion.

The exact cause of the explosion - has not been specified. China's pyrotechnic industry is the biggest in the world - producing around 90 percent of global supply. But it's also an industry with a steady history of incidents. Similar explosions have happened in Liuyang several times over the past 20 years - 2002, 2008, 2014, 2019 - each time with deaths in the dozens. Clearly, something doesn't change.

Why? Because the structure of the industry is decentralised. Hundreds of small and mid-sized factories, many of them family businesses, with widely varying safety standards. Local authorities protect the industry because it's the economic backbone of an entire region. Central China calls for stricter oversight - but when push comes to shove, there's always an excuse. Those excuses arrive in our own Balkan reality too - „safety standards aren't enforced because that would cost jobs". The lives lost don't enter that calculation until they become news.

For the Balkan pyrotechnic shops - which are always packed in December-January for the holidays - this is a quiet signal. Nearly every fuse, rocket and firecracker sold in our markets comes precisely from this region. We're buying a blood-stained product built on the backs of workers in a distant industrial half-shadow. How often do we think about that when our kids set off firecrackers on 31 December? Almost never. And that's part of the problem.