The depths of despair in China's deadly mines
Miners wait for news of their fellow workers at the Sunjiawan coalmine in China's north-east, where more than 200 miners were killed in an explosion this week.
The Chinese coal industry is the world's largest, but the death of 215 miners in a gas blast this week shows it is also the most dangerous.
In a cliff just west of the grimy northern Chinese city of Datong, thousands of Buddha images are carved into the stone. The work of nameless craftsmen 1500 years ago, they range from massive statues occupying huge caverns to medallion-sized reliefs embossed in rows like wallpaper.
Nearby, in a village of brick courtyard houses and dirt laneways running up the hillside next to a crumbling city wall, a single gold Buddha the size of a knuckle hangs by a red cord around the neck of Shi Zhiqiang. He bought it soon after he joined his father, Shi Bing, working at the nearby Daosan County No.2 coalmine. "I thought it would keep me safe," he says.
Shi has one of the world's riskiest jobs, working underground in a small, privately run Chinese coalmine.
China has about 2 million coalminers like him, plus another 5 million mine workers on the surface. They produced 1.9 billion tonnes of coal last year, 15 per cent more than in 2003. But even this output has not met the booming economy's demand for energy to make electricity and cement. Power station stockpiles are almost empty. The price of China's high-sulphur, high-ash, unexportable coal has risen 54 per cent in the past 12 months. Output is expected to rise to 2.2 billion tonnes by 2010.
For every million tonnes produced, at least three coalminers die. They are killed, sometimes by the score, when methane gas and coal dust explode in the underground workings, and in a steady stream of less-dramatic accidents from rock falls, electrocution, machinery accidents and drowning.
That is the official number. Some labour activists believe the 6000-plus reported mining deaths a year may exclude twice as many deaths in accidents hushed up by mine owners and local governments.
For every million tonnes produced, at least three coalminers die."
Coalminers also suffer about half the 15,000 new cases of pneumonocosis - the black lung disease caused by inhaling coal dust - estimated to occur every year in China. Miners account for half the 5000 annual deaths from the painful disease.
The country's only treatment centre is a sanatorium at Beidaihe, a seaside resort near Beijing where doctors provide effective relief through an expensive operation called lavage, in which the lungs are washed free of dust with saline solution.
But it performs only 150 operations a year and there is a backlog of about 440,000 cases. Each lavage costs 8000 to 10,000 yuan ($A1200 to $A1540), putting the operation beyond most former coalminers. The Chinese Government is turning the problem over to voluntary contributions. Six big state mines recently gave 30 million yuan to a new fund - enough for about 3000 operations.
Most deaths from accidents occur in the tens of thousands of "town and county" mines operating with primitive techniques - some quietly reopened after being condemned as too dangerous. With coal prices at record levels, the temptation for quick money from digging the small seams close to the surface in China's mountainous western and northern inland is too great to resist. The costs are low - about 20 yuan a tonne - and labour is cheap and expendable.
But accidents occur also in the big, supposedly well-supervised state and corporate mines where more investment in safety is made. Among these is the Sunjiawan colliery in Liaoning province, at which 215 miners died in a methane explosion on Monday. The blast was the worst in China's recent history.
Costs at the big mines average 80 yuan a tonne, after rail charges. It is still a hugely profitable business when thermal coal is fetching about 385 yuan on the coast. Mine managers desperate for more production and profits while they last are extending the diggings underground without waiting for the roof supports, methane extraction and exit shafts that should be in place.
The Chenjiashan mine in Shaanxi, in which 166 miners died in a gas explosion in November, was working at double its capacity of 960,000 tonnes a year, according to one expert on Chinese coalmines. A manager had ordered miners to keep working underground even after fires had broken out, so that he could get a bonus of a car and 400,000 yuan for meeting production targets.
Yet work goes on. If China had to close all its town and county mines, it would lose at least half its production and the economy would grind to a halt. Even with them in operation, energy demand is still not met. Last week in Datong - a city synonymous with coal in China that produces 87 million tonnes a year - it was down the pits as usual.
The luckier miners have regular jobs in one of the 480 officially approved mines, such as Jinhuagong, a 3 million-tonne-a-year complex run by the state-owned Datong Coal Corp.
Its 8000 workers (including 2000 underground) live in a Soviet-style mini-city with apartments, schools and kindergartens, shops and a hospital.
The miners chancing more of their luck work in one of the estimated 2000 small mines around Datong. The Daosan County No. 2 mine, where the Shi father and son work, is one of these, producing 90,000 tonnes a year.
The visible part, on a ridge of bare yellow earth above a roadhouse, is an entrance the size of a garage door in the hillside, edged with concrete etched with a faded red star and Chinese characters that say: "Production must be safe. Safety promotes production."
Periodically, four battered railway wagons push their way out through a canvas curtain, hauled by a cable. When they stop at the cliff-edge, older miners such as Shi Bing, who has two fingers and a thumb missing on one hand from a dynamite accident, pull metal levers and tip the contents into the coal yard below. They put new drill bits - long spirals of steel - and bags of candle-sized dynamite sticks into the empty rail trucks, and they disappear through the curtain.
Through another tunnel that, according to the mine workers, drops about 300 metres over its 800-metre length, the three daily shifts walk down and back to keep up 24-hour production. Each shift includes 30 to 40 men, and half a dozen mules. The Daosan No.2 mine has four working faces, each 500 metres to 800 metres long that radiate from where the pedestrian access and rail tunnels meet. At the coalfaces, miners use two-handed electric drills to bore into the seam, then pack in dynamite to blast it loose. Others shovel and lift the lumps of coal into carts that are pulled by the mules. The coal is hauled back to the railway, loaded up and sent to the surface.
Shi Zhiqiang, 26, is one of the safety inspectors.
He spends the eight-hour shift walking around the underground tunnels with a handheld device that monitors gas levels. At 1 per cent, all miners are supposed to be ordered out. At 5 per cent, the gas is ready to explode. So far, in his two years in this job, he has not encountered a dangerous gas level. "This mine is quite free of gas," he said. "It's one of the safer mines."
In their single room, lit by a bare light bulb, Shi's wife, Lu Jinlian, 25, sits cross-legged on the kang, a brick sleeping platform covered with red floral lino that is heated underneath by vents from a coal-fired stove. She is knitting another jumper for their two-year-old son. "I still worry about him when he goes to work, especially if he's late coming back," she says.
Shi saw on television the bodies being pulled out of the Chenjiashan mine in neighbouring Shaanxi. "I don't dare think about it. I have to make a living from this job. We talk about it at the mine, and everyone shares some feelings. But if we don't do this, what else are we going to do?"
For his eight-hour stint, Shi gets 25 yuan, whether it's 7am to 3pm, 3pm to 11pm or 11pm to 7am. By working seven days a week he gets his monthly earnings to 750 yuan. There are no paid holidays. When the mine shuts down for four to six weeks at Chinese new year, everyone goes home without pay. The miners working on the coal are paid by output; 13 yuan a tonne is divided among them according to their role.
In the dark lane outside Shi's house, we encounter three bobbing headlamps. Liu San, Ye Fei and Xiao Li from Inner Mongolia are riding mules to the mine for the 11pm shift. They own the mules - which cost about 3000 yuan each - and can make about 1800 yuan a month from hauling coal underground, minus 400 yuan for mule upkeep.
Kong Yuanying, 39, another mule driver from Sansi in Chinese Mongolia, is resting in a rented room nearby, his wife nursing their second child behind him on the kang, his mule munching cornstalks outside. "I was making no money from farming back home, so I came," he says. "I've no particular feeling about mine accidents. It feels all right where we work. It's fine around here. And there's nothing else I can do."
Most of the Daosan No. 2 mine's 100 or so miners and some young families live in company-provided housing: a row of single-room hovels made of brick, roughly cut timber and tarpaper close to the mine entrance. They have electricity, but no running water. Open drains and trails of rubbish cross the pathways outside.
Feng Fanmu, 26, is eating rice and stir-fried pork, relaxing in clean clothes and plastic slippers after a night shift. A coal stove throws off a pleasant heat, steaming the clothing hung across the room. Grimy quilts are jumbled on a wooden sleeping platform above the brick-and-earth floors.
Six months after starting work underground, the young farmer from Sichuan province in China's west already has a blue-black scar full of coal dust next to one eye. He has left his parents, two sisters, wife and four-year-old child back home in his village on their tiny corn patch. Most of the 1000 yuan he earns each month is sent to them.
On arrival, Feng was issued with overalls, rubber boots, a hard hat, a headlamp, a belt with a battery and a portable respirator. For a week, he and other new recruits were taught how to use their equipment. Then they were sent down to shift coal from the mule carts to the rail trucks. "I felt a bit nervous when I first went underground. Now it feels normal." But when he sees mine accidents on television, he says, "it makes me afraid".
As we talk in Feng's room, the door is suddenly kicked open and a lean middle-aged man in a black leather jacket stalks in, shouting at us to show our identity papers. It is the personnel manager, the miners say. He tries to make a phone call, fails to get through and leaves with a sullen expression. Later, a tough young man at the mine office says in a stream of obscenities: "You are not welcome here."
Zhou Daohu, 40, a farmer from Hubei province, has come on a contract with some friends to dig access tunnels. The money, 60 to 70 yuan a day, is good, but Zhou has already had enough. "When we finish this tunnel, we'll go back home," he says. "I don't want to work in the mines. However much money you make, it's still too dangerous."
The mine is owned by the Daosan county Government, which three years ago leased out the mine, so it is effectively a private enterprise. The lease was taken up by a group of investors from Wenzhou, a city in the Shanghai hinterland that was one of the first to get into the Chinese export boom, first supplying most of the world's cigarette lighters and more recently its no-brand sunglasses. Their investors' leader is Lin Taige, who lives in Datong city and manages the mine himself.
According to China's 21st Century Economic Herald newspaper, about 60 per cent of small and medium mines in Shanxi province have been leased by businessmen from Wenzhou, with a total investment of 4 billion yuan. They now control about 80 million tonnes of output. Other investors from Wenzhou have taken over coal interests in Inner Mongolia, Shaanxi, Shandong, Anhui, Hunan and Guizhou. Lin is hard to track down, with no listed phone numbers for his company, and disappears on a sudden trip when we arrange to call his home. But he speaks by telephone later, saying his mine faces additional safety requirements since the string of accidents elsewhere. All his miners now go for a weekly safety drill in the local mine bureau, he says, and receive a bonus for each 100 days of safe production - something none of his employees had mentioned.
The mine is under threat unless it meets production, management and mechanisation levels. "There is a new regulation that mines producing less than 150,000 tonnes a year will be closed this year, so I will try to expand the mine up to that level of output," Lin says.
But Chinese experts say the emphasis on production gains is behind much of the accident toll, keeping unsafe small mines going and pushing the bigger mines beyond the capacity of their safety systems. Pu Hongjiu, vice-president of the China National Coal Association, told the Xinhua news agency recently that 50 billion yuan in safety investment was required. Some funds are being allocated under a special levy on coal sales, but calls for action by China's top leaders have not changed much in the pits.
"All the facts and records in the past show quite a large part of our safety work is limited to slogans and formality," said Zheng Gongcheng, a sociology professor at the Beijing People's University, who has criticised industry priorities in the official media.
The culture of cover-up remains. Shortly after the two big disasters in Henan and Shaanxi late last year, a gas explosion killed 12 workers in the 30,000-tonne-a-year Honghuagou mine on the outskirts Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province. The mine managers failed to report the accident, then filed a false report. The deaths only came to light when local residents raised a storm.
At the Daosan County No .2 mine, gas monitor Shi Zhiqiang and his father, Shi Bing, smile when asked about safety checks by government inspectors. The younger Shi gestures as if poking something into his trouser pocket. "Only the low-ranking ones go underground," he says. "They come, they get money, they go."