When a Billion Chinese Jump (30 page)

Coal is compressed history, buried death. Geologists estimate the seams of anthracite and bituminate in northern China were formed from the Jurassic period onward. Within them are the remains of ferns, trees, mosses, and other life-forms from millions of years ago. Though long extinguished on the surface world, they still—like ghosts or the Meng brothers—possess form and energy. Consider coal with a superstitious eye and foul air might seem a curse suffered for disinterring preancient life. Described with a little poetic license, global warming is a planetary fever caused by burning too much of our past. But whether we prefer these archaic formulations or modern science, the conclusion is the same: the more we dig and burn, the worse we breathe.

Given the low priority the Chinese coal industry places on ecological and health concerns, it is little surprise that safety standards are also appalling. The country’s collieries are the most dangerous in the world. Since the start of economic reforms, the equivalent of an entire city of people has died underground. More than 170,000 miners have been killed in tunnel collapses, explosions, and floods, a death rate per ton at least thirty times higher than that in the United States.
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Countless more will perish prematurely of pneumoconiosis, also known as black lung disease, because there is little or no protection from the dust in the enclosed tunnels. Mine deaths are so frequent that if the Meng brothers had been less stubborn about surviving, the collapse at their pit could easily have gone unreported. All that is unique in their story is that they emerged to tell
the tale. In many other cases, the bereaved have been silenced by mine bosses, censors, and local officials terrified that these underground horrors would come to light.

I saw that at Chenjiashan in Miaowan, a mining community in Shaanxi (distinguished from its neighboring province only by its extra “a”) and the scene of one of the worst mining accidents in recent memory, when 166 men were killed in a pit explosion. I was there to interview a group of the bereaved at the small brick home of one of the widows. Less than an hour after I arrived, a neighbor burst into the room with a warning: “Someone has snitched. The security men are coming. Shut the door, close the curtains, and stay quiet.” Moments later we heard footsteps outside, then a rap on the door. A mother squeezed her child tightly to her breast to muffle his cries. An older woman held back sobs, her eyes red with tears. Two others sat on a bed, exchanging anxious glances.

I was worried. By talking to a foreign journalist, these people could get in trouble. But I was angry too. The women were not subversives; they were widows and bereaved daughters. At small, unregistered mines, deaths went unreported because the owners, often in collusion with local officials, bought off or threatened the victims’ families. But this was a legal colliery. Why where the victims being treated in this way?

“It’s said there is blood on every piece of coal in China,” one of the widows had told me earlier. “My husband used to talk about the danger all the time. But we are very poor. We have children. What else could we do?”

The 800-meter-deep pit at Chenjiashan had a particularly bad reputation. Four years earlier, thirty-eight men had died there in a gas explosion. Five days before the latest accident a fire had broken out underground. “We came up, but the bosses told us to go back. We didn’t want to, but we had to,” said Li, a miner who had lost his brother in the explosion. “We all needed the money and there is a penalty of 100 yuan for refusing to go down.”

The managers, who had reportedly been promised a hefty bonus to increase production, ordered the men to keep working even though it had become hard to breathe underground. On the morning of the accident, Li had been preparing to start his shift when workers came running out of the
shaft saying they had seen thick clouds of smoke. “Every miner knows that means there’s been an explosion,” he said.

Many widows said they could not hold a proper funeral. “Our husbands’ bodies are still underground,” said Mrs. Zhang. “But when we went to ask the mine supervisor for action, the security men beat us. One woman was hurt so badly she is still in hospital.”

I feared the same might happen again. As the footsteps crunched around the widow’s home, we tried to stay silent and pretend no one was in. But one of the children thought it was a game and yelled out loudly. The footsteps moved off, perhaps to call a superior. I had to leave quickly so these people would not be seen with me; so they could deny that we had met.

On our way back to the car we were quickly spotted and followed, first by one man, then three, then five. The goons kept their distance. None of them was of high enough rank to confront us. If we could get to the car before their superiors arrived, we might have been able to flee the village unimpeded. But the vehicle was locked. The driver had wandered off for a cigarette. We had no choice but to wait as a crowd gathered.

The police arrived. We were led away for interrogation. Whom had we been speaking to? What was our purpose? Why didn’t we get permission in advance from the authorities? Didn’t we know we had committed an offense? Four hours in detention. One of the junior officers came across as sympathetic. He asked the routine questions, but he did not push to find out which villagers we had spoken to. Perhaps he was a local man who did not want to get his neighbors into trouble. Perhaps he already knew who had been talking.

We were led off to a meet a foreign affairs official. More questions. I asked them why they were treating the victims as criminals, while those responsible for more than a hundred deaths were still free. It was dark by the time we were let out. The officials were getting hungry. They couldn’t find anything to charge us with and keeping us longer was not worth a missed dinner.
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The high death rate was a simple matter of economics. Life in China was cheap, while coal was increasingly dear. In calculating compensation for the victims of the Chenjiashan blast, the state estimated the value of a miner’s life at 51,000 yuan (around $7,300). An extra 20,000 yuan was paid as a widow’s allowance and another 20,000 yuan for an unrecovered
body. By contrast, mine operators were reportedly promised a 400,000 yuan bonus if they could raise output by 400,000 tons in the last two months of the year. The math was brutal. They could afford at least three deaths and still come out with a profit. There were no reports of punishments for any of the mine operators who forced their men into a burning pit.

Soul-destroying materialism is the theme of
Blind Shaft,
one of the darkest and strongest Chinese films of the past ten years. It tells the tale of two migrant miners who literally make a killing from unsafe illegal collieries. From the descent down the mine in the opening scene to the final shot, the director Li Yang presents an unrelentingly bleak view of how humanity is debased by the dark and narrow physical and moral environment. The central characters, Tang and Song, cheat their way from pit to pit, murdering fellow miners and then claiming to be family members so they can demand hush money from the colliery bosses.

Their cash is blown on school fees for their kids and hookers in a country where education is supposed to be free and prostitution illegal. In one scene they go whoring in a karaoke brothel, where they sing “Long Live Socialism.” The prostitute sneers at their backwardness and croons the same song with rewritten lyrics: “Americans are taking over China with their dollars.”

The con men befriend a naïve sixteen-year-old boy whom they line up as their next victim. Song has qualms about killing the teenager. To delay the day of reckoning he tells his partner the boy must have his first drink of baijiu, smoke his first cigarette, and lose his virginity before he can be killed. But such glimpses of humanity disappear when they return to the pit.

Coal and money degrade the characters and the land. Li bribed colliery bosses to let him film in real mines in Shanxi and Hebei. On the surface, the dusty, windswept landscape is unfailingly devoid of life and color. It is the setting for a moral apocalypse. If humans are to survive here, they must sacrifice their humanity.

Blind Shaft
was banned in China. This was not the glory of modern development the government wanted people to see.

But the country was trying to clean up its mines and its skies. Linfen, the model of so much that was wrong, was in the front line of the charge. On
the orders of the central government, it was closing down small, illegal collieries and the worst-polluting factories. I dropped in at the city’s environment bureau to ask whether these measures were working. The director, Yang Zhaofen, had progress to report. Of a sort. “Linfen is no longer the most polluted city in China,” he announced proudly. “It is the second worst.”
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The city had dropped below Urumqi, but I wasn’t sure if this was because Linfen was getting better or Urumqi worse.

The local government was taking countermeasures. As in many other cities, it was switching to gas-powered central heating instead of coal. Yang told me they had already shut down hundreds of small mines and were in the process of closing 160 of 196 iron foundries and 57 of 153 coking plants. Small, dirty, and dangerous plants were to be replaced by large, cleaner, and more carefully regulated facilities. But I had heard that before. Over the years, local governments announced coal-mine closures as often as crackdowns on markets of pirated goods. Neither usually lasted long. As soon as the price rose and attention shifted, the illegal mines and fake DVD shops reopened. Yang insisted it was different this time because the changes were being driven by business (nobody wanted to invest in a polluted place), bureaucratic self-interest (local officials needed to meet “green targets” to be promoted under a national reward scheme), and shifting political priorities. Cleaner skies and safer mines were a focus of the central government’s Scientific Outlook on Development.

“We have more power than before,” Yang said. “The mayor says we can sacrifice economic growth in order to improve air quality. That used to be unthinkable.”

Outside, there were signs of change. Many factories appeared to be closed: not a wisp of smoke emerged from their chimneys. Over the previous year, Linfen’s residents had breathed fifteen more days of “blue sky”
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air than during the preceding twelve months. But it was progress from a low base. Official statistics noted the air was unhealthy for 163 days of the year. Even those data were hard to verify. A political haze obscures the subject of pollution. In another off-the-record meeting, a local government official and a people’s representative told me about the city’s problems and the difficulties of dealing with them. But neither was willing to speak officially. It was too sensitive a subject, they said. It seemed that the authorities were genuine about pushing for a
clear-up and had orders to do so from on high, but old habits would die hard. Precedent suggested many of the closed factories and mines would reopen. As long as the demand for coal persisted, the risks to the environment and health would not go away. Not long after I was there, 254 villagers were killed in a mudslide after a mine’s waste pond burst its banks.
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The next morning as we were leaving Linfen, I made a bet with my assistant how long we would have to drive before we saw blue skies again. Ever the optimist, I guessed two hours. She opted for three. Neither of us came close. We never did escape the haze in Shanxi. It lightened slightly as we lifted out of the Fen River valley but persisted all four hours to Taiyuan Airport. Even on the plane, we failed to climb above it. The pilot saved fuel by flying at a low altitude, entirely through the smog. When we landed forty minutes later, the familiar murky shroud was there outside the plane to meet us. It was almost comforting.

Satellite images of northern China show this is far from unusual. In the energy-intense seasons of winter and summer, when millions of heaters and air conditioners are switched on, all it takes is a few windless days and a murky haze thickens over Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan, and Beijing. It is usually darkest in Shaanxi, where the smog becomes trapped by the Qinling mountain range. Traffic is only partly to blame. Coal-fired industrial boilers, furnaces, and home heaters are the main source. They belch out 85 percent of the country’s sulfur dioxide,
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which—mixed with another coal by-product, soot—forms the acid rain that now falls on 30 percent of the Chinese landmass, ruining crops and corroding buildings.
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The World Bank estimates the damage caused by acid rain at 37 billion yuan every year.
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Air pollution is appalling in almost every city in China. The toll on human health is enormous.
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Barely 1 percent of the urban population breathes air considered healthy by the World Health Organization, and it is worst in northern China. The result is premature death, lung cancer, bronchitis, and other respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Another high-risk group are poor peasants who slowly poison themselves by heating their homes with dirty coal. But the full risks are obscured. The toxic buildup of lead, mercury, and other heavy metals in the soil and water near
coal plants and smelting factories is not usually measured. Entire communities are being poisoned without realizing it.
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Yet coal mines are as much a part of China’s civilization as paddy fields. Mining and industry have been crucial in ensuring the longevity of the Middle Kingdom. Despite its reputation as an agricultural civilization, for most of the last 2,000 years China has been by far the biggest producer of coal and iron in the world, a status lost only temporarily in the early nineteenth century when Britain began industrializing. It is no coincidence that the country’s recent return to great power status has come at a time when it is once again number one in these basic industries and when large numbers of peasants are working below rather than on the surface.

People in northern China have been burning coal since the Neolithic era 10,000 years ago, which is said (by the China Coal Information Institute) to be a first for the world. The fuel was a source of power and survival. Coal was used to smelt iron as early as the Warring States period (475–221
BC
), when it was considered essential to mass-produce weapons. By the Song dynasty (960–1279), smithies were so expert at steel production they could equip an army of a million men with swords, armor, and steel-tipped arrows.