Smoking spat on fast trains

SHANGHAI - There have been a number of complaints during the past few days about staff members smoking on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed trains.

Sun Honggang, a researcher from the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at Tsinghua University, wrote on his Sina Weibo, the Chinese version of Twitter, that four members of the train's staff were found smoking on the high-speed train he was taking from Shanghai to Beijing on the night of Aug 7.

When the train was about to approach its destination, passengers in the rear part of the third carriage started to quarrel with a group of train attendants and railway policemen who were smoking in a vacant sightseeing carriage.