WHEN the first flames flared around the theatre’s stage, many of the excited Chinese children watching must have thought it was all part of the show.

Within minutes 288 of them were dead, a tragedy that has haunted their parents for more than a decade but was forgotten by many as China began its headlong rush to prosperity.

It is not forgotten any more, thanks to a band of internet campaigners who have exposed the shameful truth: the schoolchildren perished because they were ordered to sit down in their theatre seats so that Communist party officials could leave first.

The revelations have prompted millions of Chinese to discuss the incident in recent weeks and forced the state-controlled media to acknowledge it for the first time.

The facts were suppressed for more than 12 years until Chen Yaowen, a reporter for China Central Television, posted on his website a documentary that he had made about the disaster but which the censors had banned.

Scant details of the fire, which has come to be known among Chinese as the “12/8/94 incident”, were reported by the state news agency and by a few foreign media outlets at the time.

On December 8, 1994, 500 schoolchildren were taken to a special variety performance at a theatre in Karamay, an oil-producing city in China’s northwest Xinjiang province.

Most were the best and brightest pupils in their classes, aged between seven and 14, the offspring of well educated Han Chinese engineers and physicists brought in to exploit the mostly Muslim region’s natural resources.

After they were seated, a delegation of the city’s most senior officials entered to ritual applause and took their seats. The show began.

From the accounts of survivors, it appears that lamps near the stage either short-circuited or fell. The scenery caught fire, then exploded in a conflagration that engulfed the auditorium within a minute or two.

The first few seconds became the most controversial of the disaster. Survivors insist that a woman official immediately stood up and shouted: “Everyone keep quiet. Don’t move. Let the leaders go first.”

She has since been identified in online articles as Kuang Li, who was vice-director of the state petroleum company’s local education centre, although there has been no official confirmation of this.

The teachers obeyed, telling their charges to remain seated. Children who survived recall that everyone was paralysed by fear and confusion as flames and poisonous fumes filled the air.

By the time the dignitaries had filed out, it was too late. Teachers hurried the pupils out of their seats to other exits, only to find that the emergency doors were locked.

“My teacher asked me to run out of the theatre,” said Li Xiang, then a boy of 10, “but when I stood up the hall was smothered in smoke and fire. The power then cut out. People could see nothing. The place was full of crying and shouting. I was lucky, as at last I crawled out of the hall.”

In their haste to save themselves, a Chinese court later heard, none of the officials had bothered to order the fire exits to be unlocked.

Parents and survivors alleged that Kuang took refuge in a ladies’ cloakroom that could have sheltered 30 people and barred the doors behind her.

After the fire was put out, the city’s emergency services retrieved the bodies of 288 children and 36 adults. Most of the adults were teachers who perished alongside their pupils. About 100 of the children’s corpses were heaped up outside the cloakroom.

The state media recorded the calamity in dutiful but sparing dispatches. A secret party investigation began. Legal proceedings were started, although no publicity was given to them.

For the bereaved and the survivors, the long years of silent endurance were beginning. In 1995, 300 families of the dead and injured sent representatives to the National People’s Congress in Beijing, supposedly the venue for Chinese citizens to seek justice and a fair hearing.

They were led off by security guards to a walled government compound, where five buses were waiting to ferry them back to the airport. The group were then escorted through special channels to a plane bound for Xinjiang.

Chen was filming what he thought would be a hard-hitting television report about official negligence. “Even then, 12 years ago, when I tried to set up interviews with the victims, some refused to talk because they were under pressure. I knew local officials were following me. But I never thought my report would be banned or that the local government would conceal the truth,” he said on his website.

According to a new account in the online edition of Nanfang Weekend, a campaigning newspaper, the Communist party was dealing out its own justice. A court convicted 14 people, four of them senior officials, of neglecting their duty and imposed prison sentences of up to five years. Public access to the court was tightly restricted.

Fang Tianlu, the highest ranking official in the theatre, received five years for fleeing the scene, failing to organise the escape of the children and neglecting to alert the fire brigade. Zhao Lanxie, the vice-mayor, and Tang Jian, a city education official, got four and five years respectively. Kuang was given four years.

All 14 were freed within two or three years, however. Fang was allowed to retire with a pension and others have been relocated to other cities. Kuang is said to have rejoined the Communist party and entered the insurance business.

For the survivors, the pain was just starting. The 10-year-old Li grew to adulthood with his face scarred and without his fingers, which had to be amputated from his charred hands.

“I’m now a student at Sichuan University and I can fit in because I’m an open-minded person and a great footballer,” he said, “but at first my appearance scared everyone off.”

Li Jiang, another victim with facial burns, fell in love but was rejected by his fiancée’s parents. He stays shut in his room all day.

Hu Ping, a girl of 10 at the time of the fire, refuses to meet anyone and has vowed never to marry because her hands remain fused and twisted while her legs are scarred by skin grafts. She was offered a university place to read medicine, but could not summon the courage to accept it. Her parents “cry all the time”.

“I felt constantly distressed,” said Chen. “I believed I should do something to console those innocent souls.” Emboldened by the growth of online debate in China – where at least 137m people now use the internet – he posted his material on a website last year.

It opened a door to a long suppressed public outpouring of grief and rage. Parents of the victims and badly burnt survivors of the fire have revealed their sorrow and suffering in extensive online commentaries, prompting thousands of angry internet users to accuse officials of a cover-up.

“Those leaders should have protected children but cared only for themselves,” said Gao Liwen, 54, an engineer who lost Xiaoyin, his eight-year-old daughter, in the blaze. “They should have been tried for murder.”

The father of a dead nine-year-old, who did not disclose his name, said the Chinese people would never forget the words “let the leaders go first”. The government promised a memorial, but never built one, he said.

Families received compensation of up to £4,000, yet this has failed to purchase any consensus that the case is closed. Instead people are demanding a public apology, commemoration of the dead and proper punishment of the guilty.

These are the kind of demands that are made every year on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 and which the party considers nonnegotiable.

Extraordinarily, China’s army of censors have not blocked the discussions. Chen believes that the issue of a “pure-hearted” government apology, so important in Chinese culture yet so politically sensitive, explains the huge public interest in the case.

Some Chinese internet users say they were profoundly affected by Chen’s interview with Li Ping, 47, a teacher and the mother of 10-year-old Teng Teng, who died in the fire.

Like a traditional grieving parent in ancient times, she still talks to his portrait every day. “I always address my son’s photo like this,” she says. “My dear son, in this world which you have left, there is one proverbial rule for all, be they white or black, brown or yellow: when danger strikes, let women and children go first.

“It might not be in our constitution or any party document, but it’s a basic law of human behaviour. This law broke down that day in our city.”

Explore World News

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Asia News

• Africa News

Times Recommends

• Valley of death may be $88bn key to life
• Hope fades for the missing as earthquake toll leaps
• Invasion of the computer-eating alien ants