China Cracks Down on Coal Mines

There’s not much to this village in northern China: a few crumbling stone houses, a dusty store, parched hillsides too steep to farm.

Only underground is there any real wealth, in coal seams so shallow they can be seen on the surface, cutting like scars across the ravine that boxes in the village.

Now that’s out of bounds too. Villagers say that when gas exploded in a mine in April, killing seven miners, officials finally did what they were ordered to do long ago: shut down the village’s small, unsafe mines.

As it goes in Shuangshitou, so it goes nationwide.

After years of talk about curbing the death toll in China’s coal mines--the world’s deadliest--the communist regime in Beijing is promising money for safety improvements and forcing officials to close hazardous operations.

The government says this year that it has shut 12,000 small mines, which account for most deaths, and vows to punish officials who let dangerous mines stay open. It plans to spend $65 million to upgrade safety equipment at 81 mostly large state-owned coal mining companies.

China’s mines are plagued by cave-ins, explosions, fires, flooding, unsafe equipment and untrained workers. In just nine days in November, according to state media, explosions killed 99 miners in five coal pits in Shanxi, a northern province known as China’s “sea of coal.”

The government says 4,547 miners died in the first 10 months of this year. That was down 7.2% from the same period last year, but still high by international standards.

Last year, 17 Chinese miners died for each 1 million tons of coal extracted from small mines, and just under two deaths were recorded for every million tons at large state-owned mines, the government says.

By contrast, the United States, the largest coal producer after China, had just 0.039 deaths per million tons. Australia, another producer, had a total of just five coal mining deaths last year.

Energy-hungry China relies on its cheap, abundant coal to supply power for factories and heat the homes and cooking woks of many of its 1.26 billion people.

Officials in poor towns are reluctant to close mines, no matter how dangerous, because they provide jobs and taxes. Some hide accidents, and mines sometimes operate at night to avoid daytime inspections.

Crackdowns by the national government come in waves. The target may be smuggling one year, violent crime the next. Mine operators know to lie low and wait for the storm to pass.

Some experts say government vows to hold officials responsible for accidents may make them more likely to conceal disasters. The government’s industrial safety bureau says more than 1,000 mining deaths are covered up each year.

After an underground flood killed dozens of tin miners in July in the southern Guangxi region, mine bosses who had operated with the connivance of local officials tried to suppress news of the disaster. State media said they hired armed thugs who tried to intimidate reporters and victims’ families.

Poverty drives men underground. Young men from poor farming areas dig with little or no training.

“They have no safety awareness to speak of,” Huang Yi, spokesman for the government’s industrial safety bureau, said in an interview. “Some workers ask, ‘Can I smoke in the mine?’ before they go down.”

Shuangshitou, which translates as “Double Stone,” is only 40 miles from Beijing as the crow flies, but driving takes more than two hours on twisty mountain roads.

Before Shuangshitou’s No. 1 mine was shut down, its miners lived in a cramped dormitory, sleeping on grimy mattresses. The manager’s shiny new black sedan was parked outside.

Miners sat around after work, picking coal from under their fingernails, smoking and chatting wearily in a tapestry of accents from around China.

The mining operation was basic. Miners, black from head to toe, brought out coal on carts that wobbled along a narrow track. Some shouldered picks. One carried a bag of explosives and a string of detonators.

“My granddad was a miner, my dad was a miner and I’m a miner. All we have is coal, so we mine it,” said Gu Jun, the manager. “If we didn’t mine coal, we’d starve.”

A worker who watches over the now-padlocked mine still pumps it out, filling up his kettle with the water. Power still flows to the winch house that used to haul out the coal carts.

“It’s all repairable,” the watchman said. “We’ll open again.”