CHINA, NEWS, OPINION: Mine Blasts, How Many More?
By Jenny Dan
166 miners died in an explosion earlier this week in the Chenjia Mountain Mine, Tongchuan City, Shanxi Province, China. This was the third serious mine accident in China within two weeks, at a cost of at least 247 dead miners. According to the mother of a miner killed in the blast in the Chenjia Mountain Mine there was a fire in that working section of the mine six days before the accident. The principals of the mine refused to stop production although many experienced miners had warned management of the potential danger and requested that the mine be shut down. The principals forced the miners to keep working, intimidating them with threats of punishment if they stopped mining. And disaster happened.
Three years ago, at the same mine, a similar explosion claimed 38 lives, and left a deep scar in the residents' hearts. According to the investigation of that explosion, the principals had not obeyed basic safety rules and it resulted in disaster.
I really wonder what has gone wrong with these principals? Where is their sense of responsibility? Maybe they do have a sense of responsibility--but it is for profit, not for the people who actually do the work to make the profit for them. I'm sorry to see that these principals are so profit-hungry that they fail to care for their workers, or I should say for their fellow citizens. I want to ask a principal what he felt when he saw the corpses of the miners being carried out from the collapsed mine one by one. Did he feel sorry? Or did he feel bad that their tools were lost?
This phenomenon is rooted in a wrong notion of the principals. In their eyes, the miners that work for them are inferior; they are not equal to them. They are just tools used to make money. They don't regard the miners as human beings. Once they get this wrong idea, it's not strange for them to ignore the miners' lives. The government banned the production of small-scale mines several years ago. Yet many of them continue underground production, at the risk of the lives of the miners. But why is that? Why has the ban failed to put an end to these dangerous productions?
Apart from the irresponsibility and ignorance of the principals of the mines, I believe the government should also bear some responsibility. It is their job to find out if the ban is being obeyed and what problems remain. Once they realize that such serious problems exist, they should be more severe on the illegal production of the small-scale mines--severe enough that they are completely put to an end.
166 miners died in an explosion earlier this week in the Chenjia Mountain Mine, Tongchuan City, Shanxi Province, China. This was the third serious mine accident in China within two weeks, at a cost of at least 247 dead miners. According to the mother of a miner killed in the blast in the Chenjia Mountain Mine there was a fire in that working section of the mine six days before the accident. The principals of the mine refused to stop production although many experienced miners had warned management of the potential danger and requested that the mine be shut down. The principals forced the miners to keep working, intimidating them with threats of punishment if they stopped mining. And disaster happened.
Three years ago, at the same mine, a similar explosion claimed 38 lives, and left a deep scar in the residents' hearts. According to the investigation of that explosion, the principals had not obeyed basic safety rules and it resulted in disaster.
I really wonder what has gone wrong with these principals? Where is their sense of responsibility? Maybe they do have a sense of responsibility--but it is for profit, not for the people who actually do the work to make the profit for them. I'm sorry to see that these principals are so profit-hungry that they fail to care for their workers, or I should say for their fellow citizens. I want to ask a principal what he felt when he saw the corpses of the miners being carried out from the collapsed mine one by one. Did he feel sorry? Or did he feel bad that their tools were lost?
This phenomenon is rooted in a wrong notion of the principals. In their eyes, the miners that work for them are inferior; they are not equal to them. They are just tools used to make money. They don't regard the miners as human beings. Once they get this wrong idea, it's not strange for them to ignore the miners' lives. The government banned the production of small-scale mines several years ago. Yet many of them continue underground production, at the risk of the lives of the miners. But why is that? Why has the ban failed to put an end to these dangerous productions?
Apart from the irresponsibility and ignorance of the principals of the mines, I believe the government should also bear some responsibility. It is their job to find out if the ban is being obeyed and what problems remain. Once they realize that such serious problems exist, they should be more severe on the illegal production of the small-scale mines--severe enough that they are completely put to an end.
1 Comments:
At 11:41 PM , Anonymous said...
Jenny ,
Let me begin by saying that I really enjoyed your article, both for the writing and the humanist tendencies on display. Kudos, as some say in the west. You raised a valid point with your speculation that some of the mine operators view the miners as less than human, and that this allows the mine operators to expect behaviour they would not demand of a dog.
However, there are also some things to consider before we harshly condemn the mine operators. One is that no one is forced into the mines. While I hate to echo Scrooge so close to Christmas (Are there no poor houses?), no one forced the miners into the mine. All were free to leave, albeit into uncertaintity and troubles. Perhaps they would face social censure, condemnation even, let alone a lack of gainful employment. Yet the world is full of the successful grandchildren of those who had to cast all aside and strike out for new lands-braving unknown dangers and perils we can only imagine. How many of America's citizens have ancestors who gave up all they knew for a better chance tommorrow? How many in Harbin have Shangdongnese parents? How many Shanghainese grandparents speak with a slight Hunanese accent? The fact remains is that those men, foolishly or not, chose likely death over uncertaintity. Perhaps they are braver for doing so, but somehow part of me feels they were suckers...
As for the principals of the mine operators, well, that is much easier. One could blame the operators greed, or the government's lack of regulation enforcement, but the truth, naked and ugly (as it usually is), is that China demands coal to power her progress, and unfortunately that is of far more concern-China's progress-than the safety of the miners. The needs of one must always be sacrificed for the needs of the many.
Cheer up, though, all is not lost. Sometimes more good can come from a disaster than the efforts of the sacrificed alone could have provided. Outrage and a sense of injustice has always been a powerful motivator. It took the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire to establish a modicum of modern work safety laws in the US. Perhaps, if, in the end, more concern for those who work so hard to help power China's growth (pun intended) arises from the ashes of the fire, all will not have been in vain. I certainly hope so. At the very least, remember that the electricity in your domecile is powered by coal fired electricity, and, by extension, the blood of thousands of miners. Keep that in mind, and honor them by turning the lights out when you leave the room.
Keep up the good work, and keep a small place in your heart for those who pull so hard for so little. Sympathy is one thing that helps to make us human...
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