The news that at least 52 miners were killed in accidents in China in the last couple of days would surprise no one, least of all the Chinese. As in the case of many other developing countries, safety is not yet a strong point of the Chinese mining industry.
One reason is that minding has become too much of a free-for-all activity in many regions. For example, the northern province of Shanxi is in the grip of a gold rush. Thousands of peasant farmers have been drawn to the region by the booming gold mining industry, which is, however, illegal. Beijing has frequently demanded that Shanxi’s mines be closed but the local authorities have often ignored the orders of central government. In the few cases where mines have been closed, new diggings have sprung up elsewhere. So now the authorities have tried a new tactic and are shipping home thousands of the workers, without whose efforts, they hope the illegal mining industry will collapse. The government is acting with the best of intentions. The safety record in all types of Chinese mines is little short of outrageous. Thousands of miners are killed or injured every month. Even in state-owned coalmines, disasters happen with horrific regularity.
The scandal of Shanxi’s gold mines, however, underlines three contradictory threads in Chinese life. The first is cultural. The Chinese, again like many other parts of the developing world, seem to be careless of human life. They may have the added reason that the sheer number of people in the world’s most populace country somehow undermined the people’s ability to worry about the safety and fate of a relatively few number of their fellow countrymen. The second conflicting thread is the Chinese acumen for commerce. The country’s business genius has been unleashed by the Communists in Beijing to astonishing effect in the last 20 years. At every economic level from the stock market to manufacturing, growth has been breathtaking. And the illegal gold mines in Shanxi province are part of this entrepreneurial explosion.
The final conflicting thread is, however, perhaps the most worrying to the government. The illegal Shanxi mines are only a single example of hundreds of thousands of unauthorized business operations all over the country. Once the central government lifted the lid on this Pandora’s box, it was hard to see how they could control the size of the opening, let alone ever shut it again. Yet control is what Beijing is struggling to assert, every day in virtually every sphere of the economy.
This is not, however, something to do with Communist command economics being applied perversely to a free market. It rather reflects the historic nature of Chinese society. Whenever there has been strong central government, be it by the dynastic emperors or by the communist “emperor” Mao, China has been stable and prosperous. When regional power bases emerged to challenge the central authorities in Beijing, the result has always been long years of civil war, famine and chaos, often boosted by outside invasion.
So Beijing’s clampdown on Shanxi’s illegal gold mines is more about the safety of China itself rather than the peasants who have flocked to work in them.
