China's rail minister has ordered a two-month safety check on railway operations and apologised for an accident on Saturday in which 39 people were killed.
Efforts by the propaganda department to bar Chinese media from questioning official accounts of the accident only fuelled the anger and suspicion.
The People's Daily quoted Sheng Guangzu, minister of railways, as saying a range of railway officials were directed to work on frontline operations during the next two months and to learn from the accident.
He said the safety campaign will extend through the end of September and will focus on high-speed rail and passenger trains, such as implementing maintenance standards and reinforcing checks on power connections to pre-empt outages.
Special attention would also go to prevent accidents caused by flooding and inclement weather, the minister said.
The government has begun paying compensation to the victims' families of the crash, with the first family accepting 500,000 yuan (€50,000), according to state news agency Xinhua.
The ministry is still investigating the cause of the accident.
State media said a bullet train hit another express that lost power following a lightning strike. The power failure knocked out an electronic safety system designed to alert conductors about stalled locomotives on the line, it said.
The accident has raised concerns about the safety of the country's high-profile and fast-growing rail network and threatens to undermine its plans to export high-speed train technology.
China had reportedly banned local journalists from investigating the cause of the deadly high-speed train crash.
China's propaganda department issued the order on Sunday, according to a copy of the directives published by the China Digital Times, a US-based site focusing on internet news from China.
News that journalists had been ordered to focus instead on 'touching stories' about blood donors coming forward and free taxi services emerged as the official death toll from Saturday's crash near the eastern city of Wenzhou rose to 39.
Nearly 200 more were injured when two trains collided during a heavy thunderstorm.
The government ordered the media to 'use information released from authorities' and not 'conduct independent interviews', according to the directive, details of which also appeared on several blogs in China.
Saturday's accident was the worst ever to hit the country's high-speed rail network, which only opened in 2007.
The network is already the world's biggest, triggering questions over whether safety had been compromised in the rush to modernise.
