The Coal Miners' slaughter: China's Olympic shame



This (below picture) is one of China's 15,000 Dickensian coal mines. Every day, ten Chinese miners like this one die in conditions so perilous even Beijing shut down the worst pits - only to allow their reopening to fuel the power-hungry Olympic machine. SIMON PARRY in Datong is the first journalist to report on China's Olympic shame.

By SIMON PARRY

Four out of every five mining related deaths in the world are in China

The private mine lies at the end of a hidden dirt track on a barren hilltop in Datong like a dirty secret, which it is; just one of the many that exist in this desolate corner of China.



The plan is to go inside. It is clearly not going to happen. A huddle of uniformed guards has been watching our approach to the fortress-like entrance with ill-concealed menace. When we get within 20 yards of the huge iron gates, they close ranks and block our way.



High brick walls topped with barbed wire surround the mine. The guards let each worker in and out. It is more like a prison entrance than a commercial enterprise.



‘No one is allowed in except workers – those are the rules,’ one of them barks at my translator and me when we ask if we can come inside.



As we turn around to leave, a guard on a motorbike follows us back to the end of the dusty track and then watches until he is sure we are not coming back.



‘That mine was shut down because of its bad safety record two years ago,’ my driver tells me. ‘Then it suddenly opened again last year, with high walls and guards.



'They’re making lots of money because the demand for coal is high now. But the bosses are scared the government will find out about what really goes on in there and close them down again.’



The coal industry used to be China’s pride. Now it is more of an embarrassment, and little wonder.



A mule and a cart are used to haul coal in a private mine

Datong is the country’s coal capital. As such, it is one of the most polluted corners of the planet, a world far removed from Beijing, where hordes of tourists are flocking for the Olympics.



Here the air is a noxious soup and the city is often cloaked in a yellow haze that all but shuts out the sunlight. No one wears face masks; pollution is the least of their worries.



For the communities that live and work in the barren, brown hillsides stretching out towards Inner Mongolia, the most pressing concern is not the long-term effects of breathing foul air contaminated by coal dust and power-station fumes, but the more rudimentary challenge of surviving to the next working day.



As has been widely reported, a new coal-fired power station opens every week in China, at great cost to the global environment.



But less known is the extraordinary mortality rates in mines. Four out of every five mining-related deaths in the world are in China; ten Chinese miners die every day, the vast majority of those at private – that is, non-state-run – mines like this one in Datong.

Two years ago, even the Chinese got embarrassed by this intolerable casualty rate. They announced a series of measures to improve safety, stepped up inspections, improved compensation levels for injured miners and families of dead miners.

Critically, they ordered thousands of smaller mines producing less than 90,000 tons of coal a year to close down. The idea was to concentrate production in the huge, state-run mines employing tens of thousands of miners each, where both safety standards and the quality of the coal are easier to control.



'There was a roar and a bright flash and then I was blinded - pieces of coal shot into my face like bullets...'



The policy was a success. Death rates fell substantially from a peak of 7,000 in 2002 to less than 4,000 last year. And then the Olympics came to town. To feed its power needs, China is opening the old mines again.



This springtime, in the snow-dusted hills of Inner Mongolia in northern China and Shanxi province where the country’s biggest coal reserves lie, the huge coal trucks that move between the privately run mines were once again rumbling back and forth.

Dozens of mines that had been shut down by the Chinese authorities due to their particularly appalling safety records have reopened. Unsurprisingly, deaths are also up again in recent months. In two separate single incidents in July, 21 and 18 miners were killed. Mortality rates, it seems, are less important than putting on a good show.





A miner coming off shift at a private mine near Datong





From the outside, the grubby, ramshackle clinic for injured miners in a village on the outskirts of Datong in Shanxi, looks like an animal shelter. It is a single-storey white building. Inside it is filled with spartan rooms packed with beds containing dozens of young men recovering from horrific mining injuries.



I meet a pale-looking man on crutches outside the desolate building. Zhu Jia Ching has been in this clinic since last September. As he greets me I’m instantly struck by his broken teeth, another consequence of the accident he was involved in ten months ago.

Zhu recalls the afternoon: ‘I was working underground when the scaffolding collapsed on me. Both my legs were broken and my teeth were smashed up in the accident, my face was forced down into the coal.’



He points to his black and swollen upper lip, saying, ‘I still have pieces of coal lodged in here.’



Zhu was carried unconscious out of the mine. He was lucky to have survived.



‘A fortnight after my accident, there was another scaffolding collapse in the same stretch of mine,’ the 39-year-old father of two says with a grimace.



‘Four miners were killed. All of them were from my home province.’



With no salary and only hospital meals to live on, Zhu is waiting to recover enough to return to his family in his home village hundreds of miles away.



‘The mine manager came to see me a few weeks after my accident and offered me 10,000 yuan (£730) compensation if I took the money and went straight home,’ he says.



‘I refused. At the time he came, I couldn’t even walk.



‘The manager left and hasn’t been back since. He won’t discuss the matter and I’ve been living in the hospital ever since. I want him to pay for the treatment to my broken teeth and give me proper compensation – then I’ll go home for good.’



Zhu’s experience is far from unusual.



Miners on the train that takes them underground

On a dusty roadside in nearby Guanzhong village, Wan Ming Yong, 35, smokes and chats with friends as he waits to begin his eight-hour underground shift.



He was working in another privately run coal mine in May last year when a wall of coal exploded in his face. Wan’s face and neck are still peppered with tiny lumps of coal.



‘There was a roar and a bright flash and then I was blinded. Pieces of coal shot into my face like bullets and I was covered in blood. My first thought was, “Am I blind?” I spent a month in hospital but I was very lucky. I could easily have been killed,’ he says.

‘I was given 5,000 yuan (£365) compensation by the coal mine’s bosses. I wasn’t happy with it but what could I do? I had to look after my family so I got out of hospital as quickly as I could and went back to work at the coal face.’



Wan has particular reason for realising how lucky he was.



‘My brother-in-law was crushed when scaffolding collapsed on him in the same mine in 2004. He was badly injured but he should have lived. He was left to die in hospital on the orders of the coal mine owner so that he wouldn’t have to pay out more compensation,’ he says.



‘We believe they may have even given him a lethal injection to finish him off. At that time, if a miner died, his employer had to pay the family 50,000 yuan (£3,650) compensation.



'If he was crippled, the amount would be three times as high because he had to be paid disability benefit. So it was much cheaper to make sure my brother-in-law didn’t survive.’



Zhu and Wan are the walking wounded of a ragtag army of tens of thousands of workers labouring in private run mines in Shanxi and Inner Mongolia.

The insatiable demand for the coal dug by these miners was made clear earlier this year when President Hu Jintao himself travelled to Datong to appeal to its 200,000 government mine workers to dig harder.



A worker pushes a wagon loaded with coal at the Dingxing colliery in Sichuan province

Not only was coal needed to help fuel the booming economy and the imminent Olympics, but the country was emerging from its harshest winter in half a century.



‘The President’s visit made us very happy,’ says Li Ming Xin, 58, a retired miner working as watchman at the Datong’s Xin Zhaoyiu coal mine – officially known as Government Coal Mine Number Five – where more than 10,000 miners are employed.

‘We felt very proud,’ says Li. ‘The President of our country had come and asked for coal to save the country, so we all made a special effort.



'Everyone gave up their Lunar New Year holidays. We increased production dramatically and all the coal went to the south for electricity production. We were very happy to be called upon to help at the time of our country’s great need.’



Behind the high brick walls that surround the private mines is a Dickensian world where mules and oxen are still used to haul coal out of tunnels dug into the hillside.

Hand-pushed carts are used to move the coal around the complex. Miners with blackened faces and no more than a basic helmet to protect them from rock falls are sent into tunnels to dig the ground with picks and axes.



This is a world that harks back to a different time, to the 19th century when modern technology and equipment did not exist. Gas explosions are frequent in these privately run concerns due to poor management and lack of ventilation. There is no machinery to test the density of the gas, or at least the equipment available is of such poor quality that it is pretty useless.



But these small ventures attract workers with higher wages than offered by the state-run mines. Salaries in government complexes are around 3,000 yuan (£220) a month, much more than the national average, with a pension of 2,100 yuan (£155) for retired, long-serving miners. In the smaller private ventures, however, miners can earn up to twice that amount, taking home 6,000 yuan (£440).



But the high salaries come at a terrible price: accidents in privately run coal mines account for around 70 per cent of China’s mining deaths.



Sitting in his watchman’s hut beneath a portrait of Chairman Mao, Li, who spent 41 years working as a miner, shakes his head and frowns as he speaks of the dangers facing workers inside the privately run mines.



Nevertheless, he claims safety has improved: ‘Here, we have very few accidents because the attention to safety these days is much greater than in the past.’



In Datong, the vast majority of workers in government-run mines are locals and, in many cases, jobs are passed on from generation to generation with the sons of miners being given priority for jobs in the city’s 18 state-run coal mines.



Miners coming off shift walk out of the coal field.





Privately run mines – usually owned by district or village governments but leased out to private companies to manage – are, by contrast, staffed by migrant workers from poor provinces who move from mine to mine in search of better salaries and conditions.



One miner who works as an explosives specialist in a private mine outside Datong rues the day he turned down the chance to work in a state-run mine because he wanted to maintain a higher salary.



‘I didn’t realise at the time that if you work in a government mine for ten years, you get a pension for the rest of your life,’ says Yang Hua, 39.



‘As migrant workers in privately run mines, we take much greater risks and we move from mine to mine.



'I will have to carry on working until I am 60 to support my family. It’s very different for the coal mine owners of course. They drive luxury cars and they can make ten million yuan (£730,000) in just one month.



'Because of the coal shortage, they have never been able to make so much money.’



Stung by the government criticism of their safely standards, private mines now operate amid tight security. In the current sensitive climate, even government-run mines refuse to let outsiders visit.



Even though guided underground tours are advertised on giant faded billboards outside the showpiece Government Mine Number Nine, when we arrive at the visitors’ office an official eyes us suspiciously and says: ‘Sorry. We can’t take you in. Our visitor insurance has expired.’



When we assure him that our own insurance will cover the visit, he flicks distractedly through a pile of papers before announcing: ‘The tour is very time-consuming and expensive and there are only the two of you. I’m afraid we can’t afford to take you inside.’



It was clear the last tour down the mineshaft took place a long time ago. Its office walls are lined with decades-old pictures of Chinese leaders on official visits. Government Mine Number Nine is no longer the shining example of China’s industrial muscle.

Meanwhile, the price continues to be paid by miners like Zhu in the clinic outside Datong.



‘I had only been there for three months and it happened because of neglect,’ he says. ‘The managers knew there were cracks in the scaffolding but they still made us carry on working beneath it.’



It is exactly this dismal level of safety standards that the government attempted to control when it ordered such mines be shut down back in 2006. The fact that the authorities have recognised the dangers of these small private concerns enough to take action makes the fact that they have now reopened even more shocking.



As a relatively new employee, Zhu was earning only 100 yuan (£7.30) a day to work underground, laying explosives to blast into virgin coal faces. He often worked 26 or 27 days a month to earn enough money to send home to his family in western Sichuan province.

‘I used to be a farmer but I have a daughter aged 17 and a son aged 14 and I couldn’t earn enough to pay for them to go to school, so I decided to come to the coal mine to work,’ he says.



‘Now my family is in an even worse situation because of what has happened to me. My wife has had to borrow money to pay for the education of our two children and we also have my parents to support. It is very hard for them. I will go back to farming when

I recover – I can never go back to working in a mine.’



His wait for a fair payout could be a long one if the experience of other injured miners is anything to go by. ‘I’ve been in this clinic for five years since I broke my legs in an accident and I still haven’t got a proper settlement,’ says He Yao, 65, from Inner Mongolia.



‘I’ll never work again now and I have three children to support – so I’m not going home to my family until I’ve got the compensation I deserve.’



For Wan Ming Yong and the other miners continuing their daily shifts underground, however, the biggest immediate concern is keeping their jobs.



‘We have been told that 90 per cent of coal mines in the area will close because they don’t want any stories about gas explosions coming out during the Olympics,’ he says.



Nevertheless, the trauma of his accident last year and his relative’s death in 2004 have clearly affected Wan deeply. ‘My brother-in-law was only 30 when he died and he had a seven-year-old son. The family hired a lawyer and proved in the court case that he should have survived.



'In the end, they got compensation of 180,000 yuan (£13,200) for his death – more than three times what they were originally offered,’ he says.



‘Since then, the policy has changed. Now, when a miner dies, the family might get more. It’s a special concession to the migrant workers and we’re grateful for it.



‘We have higher safety standards, too. With the Olympic games so close, the inspectors have become stricter and are doing more to guarantee the safety of workers. If they check a mine and it isn’t safe, they close the mine down.’



Despite the new level of official concern, coal mining in China remains exceptionally dangerous by any yardstick – and being a worker in a privately run mine is a daily game of roulette with a strong chance of ending up another casualty.



If the Olympic Games pass without an embarrassing, deadly explosion in one of the country’s mines, it will only be because the country has temporarily halted production.

Without a doubt, after the closing ceremony mules will start dragging out coal from the depths of the earth again.



And the miners that fill the carts will be risking their lives once more.

