Category Archives: China

If you Google “mining disasters” you get 1.6 million search results (0.1 million more than I got yesterday), with Springhill Mining Disasters leading the list, plus a sponsored link to Public Grief by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler on ‘Coping with public loss and tragedy’.

I don’t have any coal miners in my family that I know of, but my mother was born in West Virginia’s Mercer County, one of the 11 counties in the National Coal Heritage Area (NCHA) that comprised the Pocahontas Coal Field, and she died in Roanoke, Virginia, headquarters of the Norfolk & Western Railway, which made its fortune hauling Appalachian coal to the port of Norfolk. (My father grew up on a Tidewater tenant farm down toward the Norfolk end of those tracks.)

The success of Southwest Virginia‘s coalfields–lying in Buchanan, Dickenson, Lee, Russell, Scott, Tazewell, and Wise Counties–is inexorably linked to the expansion of railroads and to northern capital. After the Civil War, rail companies expanded westward as entrepreneurs and industrialists opened coal seams in Virginia’s southwestern region. Norfolk & Western shipped its first coal from the Pocahontas Coalfield in 1883 and quickly developed lines through Tazewell to Norton. The Louisville & Nashville built into Norton and the Wise County coalfields by the 1890s. By 1900, companies developed lines that delivered coal from southwestern Virginia to piers at Hampton for shipment to both domestic and international markets. Southwest Virginia coalfields supplied high-grade coking coal to fuel the steel industry and steam coal for industrial and domestic use. The boom economy created by mining in the early 1900s faltered during the Great Depression but recovered during World War II. By the 1950s, many of Virginia’s veins, which had begun operations more than fifty years earlier, were mined out.

Beginning in the 1880s, investors in New York and Philadelphia formed mining companies that purchased large tracts of land or negotiated mineral and timber rights in these rural counties. Before the boom ended in the 1920s, as many as 125 coal camps, or company towns, thrived in Southwest Virginia. The coal camps brought together, often for the first time, miners of different cultures and nationalities. To meet labor demands, mining and railroad companies advertised for and brought emigrants not only from other states, but also from Italy, Hungary, and Poland.

That family history is probably why I spent more time watching Anderson Cooper star in the Sago Mine Disaster than I did watching him star in Hurricane Katrina. (I have family friends down there, too, but gave up on the TV coverage pretty quick.) Anderson now joins Geraldo in my expanding category of instant channel-surf inducements. Just as the most experienced fly fishermen know where to cast for trout, the stars of the 24/7 Disaster News Networks know where to cast for the best rumors. If newspapers were once the first draft of history, the 24/7 TV news networks (and a whole lot of partisan political blogs) are the first draft of hysteria. God forbid anyone should read a little history or provide a little context or verify a few facts before they reach for the smelling salts.

How much more horrible is it for the kith and kin of the mine victims to have to show their jubilation, then grief in front of international TV cameras and microphones?

As usual, the NewsHour did a decent job. When a guest on Tuesday mentioned the 200+ violations the Sago Mine had been cited for, host Jeffrey Brown actually had the good sense to ask how that compared to other mines. The Sago Mine was much worse than most. On Wednesday night, Margaret Warner had the good sense to ask a former mine inspector for historical comparisons.

MARGARET WARNER: Thank you. How dangerous is coal mining today as compared to the past?

BRUCE DIAL: Well, coal mining today is much safer than it was say even 30 years ago. One of the reasons is that the New Mine Act passed in 1977, which made the inspections, when the inspector goes on to a mine site and they write violations there is a monetary fine on every citation that they write.

Other things, there are new technologies, like long wall systems, coal systems and things like that, that get out more coal with less employees.

Used to, to run a heading [coal extraction site] it would take about 25 employees. Today, a heading is typically run with five to 10 people. So there are less people in the mine.

That left me wondering how North American mining disasters have compared to those in, say, China. Fortunately, the Guardian has already run an AP report on that very point. China accounts for 80% of all world coal fatalities.

BEIJING (AP) – Small, privately owned and worked by moonlighting farmers, the coal mine in central China’s Xin’an County was like hundreds throughout the country.

And, like thousands of Chinese miners, those below ground faced the daily danger of injury or death. On Dec. 2, a nearby river overflowed, sending water pouring into the mine and drowning 35 miners.

In most other countries, it would have been the deadliest industrial accident of the year. But in China, where more than 5,000 coal miners die on the job annually, it went largely unnoticed at a time when a pair of bigger disasters killed a total of 260 miners.

The big accidents grab public attention, but small mines like Xin’an County account for 73 percent of reported deaths. Experts say if Chinese leaders are to make good on repeated promises to improve safety, they must start there. And according to the government’s own statistics, they are failing to make progress.

In the United States, 22 coal miners were killed on the job in 2005 – a record low, according to Suzy Bohnert, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration. In 2004, the number of U.S. coal mining deaths was 28.

On Monday, a coal mine explosion in West Virginia that may have been sparked by lightning trapped 13 miners 260 feet below ground.

In China, most accidents are blamed on mine managers who ignore safety rules and hide fatalities, often with the help of officials who own a stake in the mines they are charged with regulating.

The government said this year it would close 7,000 small mines – about one-quarter of the country’s total – in an effort to improve safety. The 2004 China coal mining death count – officially just over 6,000 – represented 80 percent of all world coal fatalities.

UPDATE: Of course, raw numbers don’t mean much, although Chinese workers do seem overrepresented in mining disasters even relative to their huge proportion of the world’s population. I don’t know where to find statistics on the total number of Chinese mineworkers, but the CBC has tabulated a timeline of major Chinese mining disasters since 1990, with the following introduction.

China’s mines are by far the world’s most dangerous. About 6,300 people were killed in 2004 in floods, explosions and fires in China’s mines.

China’s poor record with mine safety is a long one. In 1942, an accident killed 1,549 miners in Japanese-occupied Manchuria in China’s northeast, still the world’s worst coal mining disaster.

For the U.S., I tabulated mine fatalities as a percentage of the mining workforce over the past century, using the MHSA table. Death (and injury) rates have been steadily dropping in the U.S., from 3 deaths per 1,000 workers in 1900 to 3 per 10,000 in 2004. The big drop in death rate between 1970 and 1980 results partly from the decision in 1973 to expand the workforce numbers to include office workers. But the drops since then reflect real improvements.

UPDATE 2: Among the factors accounting for the improved safety records are pressure from unions, federal regulations, and the increasingly skilled nature of mine work. Here’s a pretty telling response during Margaret Warner’s interview with a former mine inspector on the NewsHour:

BRUCE DIAL: Well, in an area like where this accident occurred, mining is really the only big industry where a person can make a very good wage. The average miner will earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, with overtime, maybe, up to as much as $80,000 a year.

This is in a region where individual incomes average $20,000 a year, and household incomes $40,000. I wonder what the average is for teaching faculty at West Virginia University.

PressThink has a long and thoughtful compilation of assessments of the media coverage of the disaster, with a long and not always quite so thoughtful comment thread.

Fareed Zakaria, whose Foreign Exchange program is now on my regular weekly viewing list, compares educational approaches in his latest column in Newsweek‘s international edition.

Traveling around Asia for most of the past month, I have been struck by the relentless focus on education. It makes sense. Many of these countries have no natural resources, other than their people; making them smarter is the only path for development. China, as always, appears to be moving fastest. When officials there talk about their plans for future growth, they point out that they have increased spending on colleges and universities almost tenfold in the past 10 years. Yale’s president, Richard Levin, notes that Peking University’s two state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication lines—each employing a different technology—outshine anything in the United States. East Asian countries top virtually every global ranking of students in science and mathematics.

But one thing puzzles me about these oft-made comparisons. I talked to Tharman Shanmugaratnam to understand it better. He’s the minister of Education of Singapore, the country that is No. 1 in the global science and math rankings for schoolchildren. I asked the minister how to explain the fact that even though Singapore’s students do so brilliantly on these tests, when you look at these same students 10 or 20 years later, few of them are worldbeaters anymore. Singapore has few truly top-ranked scientists, entrepreneurs, inventors, business executives or academics. American kids, by contrast, test much worse in the fourth and eighth grades but seem to do better later in life and in the real world. Why?

“We both have meritocracies,” Shanmugaratnam said. “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America.” …

Singapore is now emphasizing factors other than raw testing skills when selecting its top students. But cultures are hard to change. A Singaporean friend recently brought his children back from America and put them in his country’s much-heralded schools. He described the difference. “In the American school, when my son would speak up, he was applauded and encouraged. In Singapore, he’s seen as pushy and weird. The culture of making learning something to love and engage in with gusto is totally absent. Here it is a chore. Work hard, memorize and test well.” He took his child out of the Singapore state school and put him into a private, Western-style one.

Meanwhile, elite prep schools in the U.S. are increasingly emulating the Singapore model, and so are many top universities (like Levin’s) who recruit buy their students products.

It was the Manchus and the Dutch who called Coxinga a pirate, the English and the Spanish who called him a king. His Chinese countrymen called him both, depending on their mood. But he saw himself as neither; instead, he wanted to be known as a scholar and a patriot, unexpectedly plucked from a privileged upbringing and thrust into the forefront of a terrible war. A child prodigy from a wealthy trading family in seventeenth-century China, Coxinga became a nobleman at twenty-one, a resistance leader at twenty-two, and was a prince at thirty. The last loyal defender of the defeated Ming dynasty, he was the invincible sea lord who raided the coasts for ten years, before leading a massive army to strike at the heart of China itself. Still plotting to restore a pretender he had never seen, he was dead at thirty-nine, only to be canonised by his former enemies as a paragon of loyalty.

In a China that shunned contact with the outside world, Coxinga was a surprisingly cosmopolitan individual. His mother was Japanese, his bodyguards African and Indian, his chief envoy an Italian missionary. Among his ‘Chinese’ loyalist troops were German and French defectors. His enemies were similarly international, including Chinese relatives and rivals, the Dutch against whom he nursed a lifelong hatred, and the Manchus who invaded his country. Betrayed and deserted by many of his own friends and family, Coxinga’s stubborn character was most similar to that of his most famous foe–the Swedish commander whom he defeated in his last battle.

Famous for his pathological insistence on justice and correctness, Coxinga was ever troubled by his shadowy origins. His father was an admiral and the richest man in China, but also a crook who had cheated, murdered and bribed his way to the top of south China’s largest criminal organisation. Though Coxinga grew up in a palace, his family had clawed their way to their fortune, and had made many enemies in the process.

This, then, is the man that was known to European writers as that ‘heathen idolater and devil-worshipper’, the mutilator of his enemies and a heartless brute who could execute a Dutch priest and ravish the man’s bereaved daughter on the same day. But Coxinga is also the loyalist lauded by the Chinese as the last son of a departed dynasty, who steadfastly refused to surrender to foreign invaders when millions of his countrymen submitted willingly. He was demonised in Europe, deified in China, and remains a contentious figure to this day.

This is his story. It is also the story of his father, Nicholas Iquan, and of his deals and double-crosses with the Europeans he despised. To the superstitious, it is also the story of the goddess of the sea, and how she granted fortune on the waters to one family for forty long years. Though it ends with saints and gods, it begins with smugglers and pirates.

SOURCE: Coxinga and the Fall of the Ming Dynasty, by Jonathan Clements (Sutton, 2005), pp. 5-6

On the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Saipan in 1944, former Peace Corps Volunteer P.F. Kluge spoke to a group of veterans and residents on the island. The text of his speech appears in the latest issue of The Contemporary Pacific (Project Muse subscription required). Here are a couple of excerpts.

Saipan in the 1960s

In launching a large Micronesia program, the Peace Corps had advertised, only half ironically, that it was going to paradise. The result was an ambitious, overextended, and controversial program involving hundreds of volunteers. We joked that if the same ratio of volunteers to locals prevailed in, say, India, there would be no young people left in the United States.

The Saipan we came to was no paradise, that was clear. Almost a quarter century had passed since the shooting had stopped, and yet the place was still shaped, defined, by the battle that had been fought here. Long after the combat stopped, long after the naval administration walked away from its camps and Quonsets and airfields, the island was … well … haunted. It was like a theater that had been abandoned by actors and by audience, a place still littered with costumes and props, ticket stubs and programs in the aisles. Have you ever, driving around America, gone past an old outdoor drive-in theater, the big screen still standing, weeds in the parking lot, long semicircular rows of those little parking-meter-like poles evenly spaced, and the ruins of a rickety, graffiti-marked projection booth in the middle of it all? That was what Saipan felt like.

It had a kind of sullen magic. Scarred, handsome, and in its way, beautiful. It invited exploring. It made you think. And it was all about the past; it was about some of you who gather here now. It was about you, this sighting out from the invasion beach at landing craft and tanks impaled on the reef. It was about you, when I went swimming off the rusting breakwaters and half-sunken barges at Charley Dock. It was about you, traveling in and off the islands, waiting at little Kobler Field for a DC-3. You were there, your spirit lingered at Isley Field, with overgrown bunkers and revetments, all the giant footsteps of another time. Saipan then was one of those rare, dear places where you could confront history without a ticket, a tape-recorded spiel, a forced march through a museum, and a sign warning you about all the things you weren’t supposed to do. In the villages–­Garapan, Susupe, Chalan Kanoa–­it was about you, in the remnants and ruins of destroyed Japanese buildings, bullet-pocked walls and cisterns, overgrown gardens; about you as well in the scrap metal and lumber taken from the emptied internment camps, hammered into houses, and collected and rehammered after typhoons, when people came back from bunkers and old Japanese buildings where they had taken shelter during the storms. You were on the roads, in surplus jeeps the Saipanese had purchased at $1 each. You were in the roads themselves, those roads that, more than anything else, made Saipan special: it was the only Trust Territory island west of Majuro where you could spend more than a minute in third gear….

Saipan Today

Now, in an island vastly transformed since becoming part of America, there remains cause for celebration and concern. What I love, maybe more now than before, is the wild-card vitality, the buzz and hurly-burly, the characters who land­in some cases, wash up­here, searchers, dreamers, tax-dodgers, flimflam men, the hits just keep coming. What characters, what schemes, especially in the early years: an X-rated Doonesbury cartoon. This was let’s-make-a-deal time, the coming of disco, duty-free karaoke, poker machines, etc, etc. A time in which opportunity shaded into opportunism. The world discovered Saipan; Saipan discovered the world. Things got complicated and still are. The Saipan tourist industry is at the mercy of ups and downs in Japan, the wanderlust of mainland Chinese, the health of airlines, the outbreak of SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome], the risk of terrorism. The garment industry thrives in the shadow of regulations, soon to go into effect, that will permit Chinese garments made in China into the US market. Will Chinese need to come to Saipan to sew? In its moment of greatest strength, Saipan is singularly vulnerable to outside forces beyond its control. All this is another way of saying it has ceased in an important way to be an island at all. Forget your images of island life: Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island, Shakespeare’s Tempest, Fantasy Island, Napoleon on St. Helena. Forget the familiar island adjectives: remote, isolated, lonely, insular, self-sufficient. They don’t apply. Saipan’s not an island anymore. It’s all connected.

The island’s main export may be irony. I saw the first Japanese tourists in the late sixties: decorous, dark-suited, camera-toting groups, middle-aged and older. I attended the opening of the first hotel, the Royal Taga. First and last, I thought. Was I wrong! Who could have guessed that a World War II battleground would turn into a Japanese Florida? Or that its transformation would mimic the 1944 campaign, first taking the invasion beaches, then heading north toward Marpi, duty-free shopping, souvenir and convenience stores and gaming emporia shooting galleries following along behind? And, among these nearly 500,000 visitors per year, there are fewer and fewer who come for the reasons that unite us today. They walk past pillboxes and monuments on their way to the beach. Was there a battle here? Well, that was then and this is now. A famous victory? Never mind: sunburn lotion is their armor. Against this tide of indifference and forgetting, the memories we share and renew may amount to more than history. They may offer guidance in times ahead.

Talk about garment industries, talk about hotels and realize that they have one thing in common: a reliance on outside capital and outside labor. The Saipanese are agents, middlemen­not bosses, and rarely employees. Where are the Saipanese? The most enthusiastic celebrants of the US Commonwealth–­and there is much to celebrate: hospitals, businesses, a likeable junior college–­turn quiet when I inquire. The Saipanese are outnumbered, nearly two-to-one, on their own island, that’s for sure, outnumbered by those waves of foreign workers, garment makers, security guards, barbers and beauticians, hostesses and maids, farmers and hard-hats who have come to do the island’s heavy lifting. There were around 11,000 people in the Northern Marianas in 1967, mostly local, and now there are 75,000, mostly alien. Be careful what you wish for. Saipanese are a minority on their own islands­–an elite minority, to be sure, and determined to stay that way, but a minority nonetheless. What, then, are they up to? What is their work, job, occupation, trade, calling? Their purpose or their passion? This is something that they may still be discovering. It’s taking time. For the moment, most island citizens who work are employed by local and commonwealth government. That is cause for wonder. It will take a few trips to know whether the situation I’ve described can last: an entrenched government contending with outside money, transient workers. I will not predict the worst: the island has a way of dodging bullets, pulling through. It has some magic. But if I predicted happy endings, we’d have to define terms.

No island is an island anymore.

Today’s Tacoma News Tribune carries an earlier Washington Post report on the outbreak of violence in coastal Guangdong northeast of Hong Kong.

DONGZHOU, China – Paramilitary police and anti-riot units have opened fire with pistols and automatic rifles for the past two nights on rioting farmers and fishermen who have attacked them with gas bombs and explosive charges, according to residents of this small coastal village.

The sustained volleys of gunfire, unprecedented in a wave of peasant uprisings over the past two years in China, have killed between 10 and 20 villagers and injured more, residents said…. As far as is known, previous riots have all been put down with heavy use of truncheons and tear gas, but without firearms.

This time, according to a villager who heard and saw what happened, police responded to the launching of explosives by repeatedly firing “very rapid bursts of gunfire” over a period of several hours Tuesday and Wednesday nights. Some villagers reported seeing People’s Armed Police carrying AK-47 assault rifles, one of the Chinese military’s standard-issue weapons. There were no reports of violence Thursday night.

The villagers who rose up against land confiscations in Dongzhou, a community of 10,000 residents 14 miles southeast of Shanwei city, in Guangdong province near Hong Kong, also opened a new chapter – the use of the homemade bottle bombs and explosive charges that local fishermen normally use to stun fish.

Belmont Club has compiled a range of background information about economic projects in Shanwei City, as well as an intriguing story in the People’s Daily on 29 January 2000 of the arrest and execution there of 13 pirates, including an Indonesian national.

The executions of Weng Siliang, Indonesian citizen Soni Wee and the other 11 who committed the crimes on China’s territorial waters in the South China Sea were enforced in Shanwei City of Guangdong.

The gang started planning the robbery in August of 1998 with illegal purchase of guns and buying ships. On November 16, they intercepted the Cheung Son cargo ship from Hong Kong by masquerading as Chinese police.

They robbed the ship and killed all of the 23 seamen. Later they sold the contraband for 300,000 US dollars. They also stole a total of 970,00[0] yuan in cash.

Wen and Soni Wee also were involved in the pirating of two foreign ships, and Wee was found with 156 grams of narcotics when arrested, according to court hearings.

UPDATE, 18 December – Yesterday’s Washington Post has a fascinating story about how Chinese bloggers are evading censors by discussing this event in the guise of a similar event in 1926.

HONG KONG, Dec. 16 — At first glance, it looked like a spirited online discussion about an essay written nearly 80 years ago by modern China’s greatest author. But then again, the exchange on a popular Chinese bulletin board site seemed a bit emotional, given the subject.

“In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen,” which Lu Xun wrote in 1926 after warlord forces opened fire on protesters in Beijing and killed one of his students, is a classic of Chinese literature. But why did thousands of people read or post notes in an online forum devoted to the essay last week?

A close look suggests an answer that China’s governing Communist Party might find disturbing: They were using Lu’s essay about the 1926 massacre as a pretext to discuss a more current and politically sensitive event — the Dec. 6 police shooting of rural protesters in the southern town of Dongzhou in Guangdong province.

via Crooked Timber