BEIJING — Days after a nine-seat van crammed with 62 kindergartners slammed into a coal truck in northwest China this week, killing 21 children and two adults, the 21st Century Business Herald — a state-run, reliably nationalistic newspaper — did something extraordinary.

It published a chart.

In one column, the paper recounted recent school-bus accidents in which about 60 children had died. In an adjacent column, it listed the sums that selected Chinese government departments had lavished on new cars in 2010.

No Chinese citizen needed a pencil to connect the dots.

Since the accident on Wednesday in Gansu Province, China’s Twitter-like microblogs and other social media sites have been alight with heartbreak and outrage over the tragedy — and they have been subsequently red-carded by government censors for unpatriotic emotion.

But there are few more devastating statements about what gnaws at modern Chinese than the state-run newspaper’s two columns of numbers.