The incident caught on CCTV shows a woman Xiang Liujuan, 30, holding her son as they travel up an escalator, but as the woman steps off the escalator, the floor gives in and she is swallowed by the escalator. As she fell half-way through, she pushed her son forward, and a nearby shop assistant dragged him to safety. The escalator continued rolling, and several seconds later she is seen disappearing into the mechanism, even as one of the staff tried grabbing her hand. It took firefighters more than four hours to cut open the machine and recover the woman.
Maintenance had just been carried out on the escalator at the Anliang department store in Jingzhou, of Hubei province, and workers forgot to screw the access cover back into place. China is prone to safety accidents as regulations and standards are often ignored and enforcement is lax. In 2012, a nine-year-old boy was killed after he got stuck in an escalator at a Beijing department store as horrified shoppers looked on. In July 2011, a 13-year-old boy was killed and more than 20 others injured when an escalator in a Beijing underground station suddenly reversed direction during the rush hour.
The accident was viewed 6.6 million times on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo. Most comments expressed fury at the shop management: "Why didn't the staffers stop customers at the entrance to the machine or just turn it off?" wrote one. Others were moved by the woman's final actions saving her child: "I was appalled when I saw her sink and at the same time felt the greatness of maternal love -- the mother wasted no time pushing the child out when it happened.