Society

A strike by Chinese cab drivers in the eastern tourist city of Hangzhou stretched into a third day on Wednesday, highlighting frustration by migrant workers nationwide struggling with high costs.

More than 100 drivers, mostly from heavily rural central Henan province, as well as their families, gathered under a bridge in the suburbs of the scenic city about 190 km (120 miles) southwest of Shanghai, demanding higher wages.

About 1,500 disgruntled taxi drivers started the strike at rush hour on Monday morning, according to state media. Cabbies said many thousands more have since joined, but more taxis were seen on roads in the city centre, a popular tourist destination with the famed West Lake, on Wednesday compared with the previous day when they had all but deserted the area.

Partly because of a string of malfunctions and the July 23 train crash in Wenzhou, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway was not as popular in its first month of operation as many had expected.

In a news release on Monday, the Ministry of Railways said the railway had transported 5.26 million passengers from July 1 to July 31, or 170,000 passengers a day on average.

And an average of 179 trains - including both those that run at 200 km/h and at 300 km/h trains - were on the line every day, and the trains had an occupancy rate of 107 percent, the ministry said.

The 915,000 yuan ($142,000; £87,000) total is double the initial offer made to the families of the 40 victims.

There has been widespread anger at the official response to the disaster.

Wenzhou commemorative activity of CRH crash 15th July 2011.

The crash happened when one train came to a standstill on a viaduct near the eastern city of Wenzhou, and another ploughed into it.

State media say that 10 families have accepted the compensation offer.

Two knife-wielding men hijacked a truck and killed its driver, before ramming the vehicle into a crowd and getting out and attacking the pedestrians, leaving seven people dead and 22 injured in northwest China, a police official said Sunday.

The attack happened in the Silk Road city of Kashgar in northwest Xinjiang, a region rocked by ethnic violence in recent years.

State-run Xinhua News Agency reported that two blasts were heard about an hour before the incident Saturday night - one from a minivan and the other from the food stall-lined street where the hijacking took place. The police official, from the information office of the Xinjiang regional public security bureau, said she could not confirm whether there were explosions.