The Misery of China's Mines

The government and its safety agencies have failed to protect them adequately, miners said, because the lure of profits in China's booming coal industry has created a nexus of officialdom and businessmen eager to cash in and willing to cut corners.

"They say it's a natural disaster. Ha!" said a retired miner wearing shorts and a tank-top undershirt in the sticky summer heat. "It's those corrupt guys who run things. Don't bother to attack China," he added to a reporter who had just identified himself as American. "The Communist Party is so corrupt the country is going to collapse all by itself."

A half-dozen family members, outraged at what they said was inadequate information on their loved ones trapped in the mine, burst into the mining company offices Monday and smashed display cases. As a result, police were stationed outside the mine complex and the government assigned personnel to inform and comfort the waiting families.

"Every family wants to protest," Chen said. "But there are two rows of policemen standing in front of the mine."

The assignment of monitors, including psychologists in some cases, was designed to overcome complaints that the families were being ignored as rescue work went on. It also served to isolate upset relatives from reporters who were relaying their complaints. Family members said they were under strict orders not to talk about the tragedy, even among themselves.

"The families are desperate," Qin said.

Reflecting the tension, the Communist Party's Central Propaganda Bureau ordered newspapers to confine their coverage to dispatches from the official New China News Agency. A large number of reporters showed up in Xintai anyway, and some publications stretched the limits of the ban. But the censors' orders kept the tragedy from becoming a sensation elsewhere in the country, blunting its political impact despite the high number of victims.

For the past several years, the State Work Safety Administration repeatedly has announced enforcement crackdowns and vowed to improve its record. Hundreds of small mines have been shut down for operating outside safety regulations -- but many have reopened.

The industry, which employs an estimated 3 million people, has expanded rapidly in recent years as China's economy grows at about 10 percent a year. About 70 percent of the country's energy comes from coal -- 2.3 billion tons were mined last year, up 8 percent from 2005. Nearly 30,000 mines have gone into operation around the country, some of them fly-by-night operations with unsafe practices tolerated by paid-off officials.

Huayuan's mine, however, was a relatively large-scale operation, one of several dozen in this flat, sprawling town whose most visible features are giant slag heaps. Production was 750,000 tons last year, the New China News Agency said, and the mine executive, Wang, said 6,000 people were on the payroll.

Miners complained that Huayuan executives had a reputation for pushing hard to raise production, restricting days off to two per month. "Even when there's a wedding, they make people work," said Liu Wenkai, 72, who retired after 40 years underground.

Several went a step further, suggesting that mine executives played down the danger of flooding last Friday because of concern over production schedules. "If the miners had been warned in time, they would not have died," Chen said.

Researchers Jin Ling and Zhang Jie in Beijing and Robert E. Thomason in Washington contributed to this report.