Driven by poverty, China's coal miners risk all

from The Asia Times

By Candy Zeng

SHENZHEN - China's rate of fatalities per ton of coal mined in 2005 was 70 times as bad as in the United States and seven times as high as in Russia or India. The Chinese government renews its efforts to curb fatal coal-mine accidents every year, but in vain. So why do Chinese keep going down in the mines?

In March 2005, 10 undergraduate students of Hunan Normal University began a survey on the coal miners in Hunan, a coal-producing province in central China, to find out why. They were motivated by ceaseless reports of coal-mine accidents, which drove them to know more about that special group: coal miners who risk their lives every day deep underground.

Coal-mine accidents killed 4,746 people in China in 2006. Already this year, from March 1 to April 19, 204 people were killed or missing in mine accidents, Li Yizhong, minister in charge of the State Administration of Work Safety, said at a recent national meeting on coal-mine and gas management in Chongqing municipality in southwestern China.

Quite a few of the interviewees, who earn only 1,000-2,000 yuan (US$130-260) monthly with barely any other benefits, said they were content with their current position. As to possible fatal accidents underground, many just shrugged off questions from the students, saying they were used to accidents.

"Injury or death is inevitable to us miners. It is just a matter of luck and whose turn it is. As time passes by, I have nothing on my mind but digging out more coal to get more money," coal miner Xiao Zhihai, 47, told the student investigators, China Youth Daily reported.

Cao Yu, one of the survey initiators, wrote in his blog: "Life or money? It seems a dilemma to people who have to work at the risk of life, but the answers given out by those miners are too simple to believe."

For two years, his team interviewed 545 workers in privately owned mines across Hunan province. "As coal mines are quite similar in China, I think the workers' conditions in Hunan reflect the whole picture of China," Cao wrote in an introduction to the survey on his blog.

"With the help of local miners, we visited more than 30 mines in four cities or counties. We have been expelled, threatened and even detained by mine owners and had out cameras confiscated. But we didn't give up, holding the belief that the country and the society are on our side," he wrote.

The 20,000-character report, "On Factors Affecting Psychological Safety of Human Miners and Strategies for Improvement", caught the attention of a political adviser to the government and was finally sent to the desk of Li Yizhong, the country's top work-safety official, in March.

The research indicates that most miners have a family of four or more members. They have to work underground for six, seven or even more than 10 hours every day. Some of them also have to farm while working for the mines.

The miners are content with the risky work because of the relatively high payment of 2,000 yuan each month, which is equivalent to the earnings of six months or even a whole year for a typical farmer.

They are upset with accidents not only because they take the lives of their co-workers but also because they halt production and reduce income.

The financial burden, or rather the instinct of survival, is not the only reason driving them underground. The survey shows that most of the workers are poorly educated and low-skilled. They have no other choices to make a better living.

According to the survey, 82% of the miners interviewed have less than a high-school education, 62% have no occupational skills, and 48% cannot find other jobs.

Some of them are illiterate, who can't write their names and have to press a fingerprint on to the payroll. The world outside the coal fields seems unknown to many of them. Some have no idea of what a cinema or car is. When asked for a comment on his current job, a 22-year-old worker said everything is fine as long as the country is still ruled by Chairman Mao, referring to the Communist Party leader Mao Zedong who died in 1976.

What disturbs the workers more may be the compensation-distribution system, which 52.6% of the workers regard as "unfair". Most frequently, the mine owners cash in tens of thousands or even millions of yuan annually, while the less-at-risk management staff earn double the monthly income of the workers.
The higher class is not at ease with the situation, either. A mine manager said he always fears that a simple-minded worker will do something stupid at the expense of his life. "The new Audi bought by our boss was scratched by somebody a couple of days ago, and other managers here were in fear," said the manager, surnamed Yang.

Strained labor relations were a result of abuse of workers' rights by owners and evasion of obligations in the colliery industry. Among the interviewed workers, 72% didn't sign an employment contract, 53% were not paid for overtime, and 47% were not covered by social insurance and work-injury insurance.

For historical reasons, the workers are divided into "formal" workers and farmers-turned-workers, with the latter allowed lower pay and benefits. As many as 89% of the farmer-workers are not included in any social-insurance or work-injury-insurance schemes.

Li Chengyu, governor of Henan, China's most populous province, openly criticized county and township officials who failed to supervise the mines for fear that the closures would dent local GDP (gross domestic product) growth and government revenue.

In China, there were 23 million farmers earning less than the poverty-line standard of 683 yuan per head annually and 41 million earning an annual income ranged from 686-944 yuan in 2005. If calculated by the United Nations poverty standard of $1 per day, the impoverished population in China amounted to 212 million in 2001, accounting for 16.6% of the total population. The poverty rate was reduced to 10% in 2004, with the total ranking second-largest in the world after India, according to the UN standard.

Despite China's obvious achievements in countering poverty in general, a bitter fact emerges that the earning growth of the low-income group lagged behind the high-income group in recent years, according to Professor Zheng Bingwen of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a researcher on Latin America.

"In Latin America, the poverty rates were rising, while the GDP per capita climbed to $3,000. It sets an alarm for China to prevent enlarged poverty during economic growth," said Zheng. Poverty and inequality in different regions and different groups of people will have negative impact on China's social development, he said.

Candy Zeng is a freelance journalist based in Shenzhen.