According to China Daily, just after 7 p.m. on July 1, a light pickup truck careened off a village road in Lijiatai, a village in Shoule township, Ledu district, in the city of Haidong, Qinghai province, and plunged down an embankment. The truck was carrying 15 people, three times its legal capacity of five. Four died at the scene, and four more died later despite emergency treatment, bringing the death toll to eight. Seven others were hospitalized.
It’s not permitted to carry passengers in the truck’s cargo bed, but it was packed with riders that evening. The driver was among the dead.
The road where the crash occurred is an unpaved farm route that leads directly to the fields outside Lijiatai. The truck was carrying the women there when it lost control on a steep downhill stretch, left the road, and came to rest in an abandoned pit.
The passengers were residents of Lijiatai and neighboring villages, most of them middle-aged women who had just finished a day of fieldwork. According to a villager surnamed Li who spoke with the Xiaoxiang Morning Herald, the group had been weeding a plot of land that a fellow villager had leased to grow medicinal herbs. The landholder had hired several village women, most in their fifties, paying roughly 100 yuan, about $13, a day. The field sat more than a kilometer from the village, and the pickup truck ferried the women back and forth each day.
Li said he knew the passengers personally; they typically boarded the truck near his home before heading out to the fields, and he usually saw only three or four women ride at a time, seated up front in the cab. The herb field needed extra labor that week, and the truck’s owner took on more workers than the cab could hold. The overflow climbed into the open truck bed instead, a common but illegal practice in remote villages, where riding in pickup beds or three-wheeled carts is treated as routine during the farming season.
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Chinese social media reacts with grief
News of the crash spread quickly on Chinese social media. Several users pointed out that the death toll matched other recent overloading disasters almost exactly. “Fifteen people again, the same number as the pickup truck that went into the river in Huanjiang, Guangxi,” one commenter wrote, referencing an earlier crash. Another was blunter: “Hauling people, not potatoes. This is how people get treated these days.” A third drew a parallel to a separate case: “The refrigerated truck in Henan was also carrying female workers.”
“So many families just lost their mothers, all in their fifties. What a waste,” one user wrote. A second noted the depopulation already underway in rural China: “A village barely has any people left as it is, and now this happens.” A third pointed out that “not even the local news covered it.”
The Lijiatai crash is one of several nearly identical disasters to strike rural and migrant laborers in China over the past year.
According to China Daily, on May 28, 2026, thirteen people died and three were injured when an unlicensed ride-hailing van, rated for nine passengers but loaded with sixteen, rear-ended a semi-trailer truck on the G40 expressway in Nanyang, Henan province.
Blueberry pickers, mostly middle-aged and older women ferried to and from a berry farm by their foreman, were the victims on May 3, 2026, when a van rated for six passengers but carrying 21 people, including the driver, hydroplaned on a rain-slicked curve of National Highway 201 near Shihuiyao village in Donggang, a county-level city in Dandong, Liaoning province. Investigators said the driver, surnamed Chang, 39, was traveling at roughly 112 km/h in a 60 km/h zone when the van skidded off the road and struck trees, reflector posts, and a drainage ditch. Eight people died and thirteen were injured. Chang fled the scene and was later arrested; local traffic police attributed the crash primarily to overloading and speeding, Sina reported.
An October 28, 2025 crash in Chengdu, Sichuan province, killed six landscaping workers, all women and most over sixty, when an overloaded minivan, rated for seven passengers but carrying eleven, rear-ended a parked heavy trailer truck. Five others were injured, China Daily reported.
Commentators have tied the underlying cause to decades of state disinvestment in rural China. The Chinese Communist Party has directed little funding toward building or maintaining roads in the countryside, leaving villages dependent on narrow, poorly engineered routes like the one in Lijiatai. Local authorities rarely intervene to stop routine overloading before an accident happens, and rural residents have little institutional voice to demand safer transportation or better roads.
The recurring toll, critics say, falls overwhelmingly on China’s poorest and most powerless citizens: migrant and seasonal laborers with limited options for getting to and from the fields.
