15 Held in Alleged Cover-Up of Deadly Chinese Mine Accident

In a fast-unfolding tale that says much about power relationships and the pace of change in modern China, police in the southern autonomous region of Guangxi have detained 15 people suspected of trying to cover up a mining disaster last month that killed at least 76 people and possibly close to 400.

The official China Daily reported the detentions Tuesday in the latest of its stories about the accident, which occurred July 17 after water flooded a tin mine about 150 miles north of the Guangxi regional capital, Nanning. The official New China News Agency has said that more than 70 miners are confirmed dead, and on Tuesday it reported that three local officials were fired and two others suspended in connection with the accident.

More than 300 miners are believed to be still trapped in the mine. If they perished, the disaster would be one of the worst in recent Chinese history in an industry whose safety record is notoriously poor.

The detentions made public Tuesday came one day after the same newspaper reported that mine owner Li Dongming, a onetime teacher turned entrepreneur with a variety of large business interests in the region, had been taken into custody on suspicion of trying to conceal the disaster. Reuters news service reported that several of Li’s bodyguards and business associates were among those detained.

The detentions came after days of confused media reports, which included initial denials by the mine’s owner and local officials that an accident had occurred. There were also reports that mining company officials were trying to block local journalists from entering the vicinity of the mine and to buy the silence of victims’ relatives with large lump-sum payments.

But as more details tumble forth, the disaster has become more than just a human tragedy.

At one level, it is a reminder of how the divergent interests of China’s central government and its far-flung provincial and local authorities frequently produce a chaotic governance far from the vision held by many Americans of China as a lock-step Communist state.

Perhaps more important, the disaster stands as an example of how difficult it has become for authorities in China at all levels to suppress news in the Internet age. It also provides evidence both of the courage of local journalists determined to get their stories out and of the new commercial pressures to print those stories driving regional newspapers in China, which are heavily reliant on street sales.

After being threatened by thugs hired by the mining company and forbidden by regional authorities to publish news of the accident, local reporters refused to give up. Instead, they e-mailed their accounts to newspapers in other parts of the country not bound by the regional ban.

The first reports of the disaster bubbled to the surface early last week in newspapers scattered across China, including in Shanghai, Wuhan and Guangzhou. In a July 30 article, for example, Shanghai’s official Wenhui Daily reported that rescuers had recovered 70 bodies from the flooded mine and that about 200 people were still trapped below ground.

(A representative of the Guangxi industrial safety bureau, reached Monday by Associated Press, placed the death toll at 76 “for now.”)

Other details emerged, including that the disaster was apparently triggered when miners inadvertently drilled into an unused shaft nearby that had been filled with water to better support the ground above. A Guangzhou paper said that most of the miners were itinerant workers from neighboring Guizhou province, one of the poorest in China.

News of the disaster was quickly picked up by major Web sites in the country.

Initially, local officials dismissed the media reports as fabrications and rumors. When that failed, they declared that they were sending their own safety experts to investigate. Local officials in China frequently allow mines operating in their areas to ignore national safety standards because these enterprises provide jobs and lucrative tax revenue.

In the poor, mountainous region of Guangxi, mining companies are believed to contribute more than half of regional government tax revenue. The People’s Daily Web site claimed that the mine owner employed nearly 6,000 people in the region and has paid the equivalent of more than $27 million in taxes to the Guangxi government during the past 12 years.

Because of such dependence, rules are rarely enforced, and the country’s mining safety record is poor. An explosion at a coal mine in eastern China five days after the Guangxi disaster killed 92 miners.

By contrast, the central government wants to appear as a champion of safer working conditions, especially during the run-up to next year’s 16th Communist Party Congress. As details of the disaster emerged, Beijing late last week wheeled out its main media organs, including the China Daily, the People’s Daily, China Central Television and the New China News Agency, turning them loose as crusading voices demanding truth and justice in the aftermath of the accident.

Beijing also dispatched its own team of investigators to the disaster site, headed by a minister of the State Economic and Trade Commission, Li Rongrong.

By early this week, the pressure appeared to have yielded results, with once-stonewalling local officials suddenly joining the call for a full disclosure.

But by all indications, the turnabout came too late for those still missing below ground. Although the team of central government investigators has urged accelerated efforts to pump out the flooded mine, the passage of time and reports of water temperatures in the mine as high as 120 degrees would appear to rule out the possibility of any survivors.

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Times special correspondent Anthony Kuhn contributed to this report.