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Beijing - South Africa's Department of Transport announced that 845 people have died on the country’s roads between December 1 - 19, a 17% increase on the same period in 2015.
These statistics come in the wake of a report conducted in China, which documented that 58 000 deaths in more than 180 000 traffic accidents in 2015 occurred on Chinese roads.
Deaths on Chinese roads have dropped from more than 107 000 in 2004 to 58 000 in 2015, according to a report posted on Wednesday on the official website of the National People's Congress (NPC), the Chinese parliament.
Considerable reduction in accidents
The number of road accidents declined from 518 000 to 188 000 during the same period, it said.
Fatal road accidents are a serious problem in China, where traffic regulations are often flouted.
The country's frequently overcrowded long-distance buses are prone to accidents, with individual incidents regularly causing dozens of deaths.
More: Shocking December SA road death toll
Traffic law violations caused almost 90% of the road accidents where people died or were injured in 2015, with the total number of such infractions reaching an astonishing 442-million, it said.
The report also highlighted overloaded trucks and poor road and safety facilities in rural areas as two major contributors to the high frequency of road accidents.
The number of traffic accidents dropped from 197 000 in 2014, while deaths were about the same with 58 523 recorded by the National Bureau of Statistics.
A World Health Organization report in 2015 claimed that official Chinese statistics seriously under-represent the actual number of road deaths.
The study estimated that 261 367 people died in 2013, almost 4.5 times more than the official number for the same period.
