The Tears of Premier Wen Jiabao

From Planet 178

James Stewart on Global Mining

Almost 6000 Chinese coal miners were killed last year. The coal they mined is fuelling the new workshop of the world. China will export goods worth more than $600 billion this year. Look at any recently-bought manufactured article and there’s a good chance it was made in the People’s Republic. Most of the factories where these exports were made run on power generated by coal. Eighty per cent of China’s electricity comes from coal and the country’s mines produce 2 billion tonnes a year. James Stewart reflects, from a Welsh perspective, on the price of coal — and of the Chinese goods we buy.

The history of coal mining is marked by incidents of mourning. Spare a thought for the men who were given the job of recovering the bodies of 116 children from the tip-slide which engulfed the school at Aberfan in October 1966. Malcolm Davies, retired superintendent of the South Wales Mines Rescue Service, recalled the impact of the task on two members of his team: “I witnessed hard rescue men who were trying to get under the desks and there were tears running from their eyes.”

Tears will be shed again for Aberfan, when the fiftieth anniversary of the disaster is marked in October this year, but in China, mining disasters bring new causes for mourning every month. I was reminded of the tears of those two “hard” rescue men, while researching the death toll in the Chinese coal mining industry, looking at photographs of anguished, weeping relatives at the scenes of colliery disasters — pictures which, for the first time, humanised the appalling statistics. We are told that the Chinese Premier wept at the Chen Jiashan colliery in Shaanxi Province in January 2005. A month earlier, 166 miners had been killed in what was then the worst incident for 44 years.

“Premier Wen Jiabao shed doleful tears for those who lost their beloved relatives. His tears moistened this afflicted land and warmed the hearts of all Chinese, who can now feel cared for and cherished by the government. From Premier Wen’s tears, we see how in touch he is with the feelings of the nation. His dining with on-duty miners in a coal shaft about 1300 metres underground, his tears for the boy who lost his father in a major coal mine accident and his pledge to help poor miners overcome any adversity, all demonstrated his love for the people.” (www.rednet.com.cn)
Premier Wen’s tearful visit was official acknowledgement of the cost of coal, but despite his pledge “to help poor miners”, the death toll in his country’s collieries continues to rise. Should we in the West not also mourn the loss of life in China, which echoes the mining disasters in our own coalfields and to which we are connected by the networks of the global economy?

We know (or think we know) from our own history what mining disasters mean. Just as the coal industry is central to the formation of modern, industrial Wales, so the history of mining disasters is central to the way that development is viewed. Children at school are taught about Aberfan and the Senghennydd disaster. They read accounts of women waiting at the pithead and learn about households where three generations of men were killed. The price of coal is etched on the nation’s memory — and the national curriculum.

In the roll call of disasters there are small communities which were hit time and again. At the Black Vein Pit in Risca, 35 men were killed in 1846, 10 in 1853 and 146 in 1860. Then in 1880, 120 died at the Risca New Mine. Ferndale was hit in 1867 when 178 died and again two years later, when 53 were killed. In 1894, at the Albion Colliery in Cilfynydd, 290 died. At the peak of the coalfield’s output, in 1913, 439 were killed at the Universal Colliery in Senghennydd. The Great War which followed did not take such a toll on villages as this. Their names resonate for us in a way that Daxian, Fanjiashan or Fuxin do not; for they are places we can visit, where people we know may live.

I came closer to the reality of mining disasters when I made a television programme about the Mines Rescue Service in 2002. I met people who had seen for themselves the human cost of coal — men who, more than once, were called to rescue fellow-miners trapped underground but found only corpses. Through no fault of their own — due to the harsh reality of gas and explosions — the men I interviewed never brought anyone out alive.

We found black and white film in the archive which had not been seen since it was shot in Abertillery in 1960. It showed crowds surrounding the pit at Six Bells, waiting for news of men trapped underground. Like many of those who had waited at Welsh pitheads before them, there was no good news: 45 men had been suffocated by gas.

Hard men wept in Six Bells. Paddy Byrne, a miner at the pit, joined the rescue team underground: “Hundreds of people were there; it was so sad; it was a very close-knit community. I came up that night and broke down in tears... I thought about the young, strong boys... it should not have happened. It’s haunted me all my life.”

Malcolm Davies was one of the Rescue Team called to Abertillery: “Forty-five men died through carbon monoxide poisoning. There was nothing we could do but recover the bodies. You can’t describe the feeling of losing that number of lives in an instant. Not only the valley, the whole country realised how serious it was.”

The impact of such events was felt, of course, by families more than anyone. Tyrone O’Sullivan of Tower Colliery grew up in the shadow of mining disasters. He told me his grandfather would never plan for the future after two of his brothers were killed at Mardy colliery in 1885. Tyrone’s father was killed in an accident at Tower in 1963. “He was 45 years of age. He got up in the morning to go to work and never came home. That’s the hard bit; you wonder about the day before, words you said or didn’t say. But it’s the price of mining and even today I accept it’s the price of mining.”

What is it like to be caught in an underground explosion? Malcolm Pearce from Merthyr Tydfil was working in Tower Colliery in 1962, when nine miners were killed. He suffered serious burns to the face which left scars clearly visible 40 years later. “I was knocked flat and there was a tremendous heat. I covered my face. I got up and fell down; my boot had blown off — I thought my leg had gone. I couldn’t see anything, the air was thick with dust and it was burning when you breathed. I couldn’t hear any noise so I didn’t know what happened to the other men. I was feeling my way along the conveyor belt, I must have gone about half a mile. Then I came to the end and there were men there waiting who had heard the explosion. The under manager ordered them to put me on a stretcher and take me out. I don’t know if it was shock, but I started shaking, and the men all leant over me to keep me warm.”

In 1965, the Mines Rescue Service faced what would prove to be the last great underground disaster in Wales, when 31 men were killed at the Cambrian Colliery in Clydach Vale. Film from the time shows the streets of the Rhondda lined by thousands as hundreds of black-suited miners followed the coffins of the victims to their funerals.

Now only Tower Colliery survives, like a living fossil. Because of it, there is still a Mines Rescue Station in south Wales — close to the site of the first pit sunk in the Rhondda, at Dinas. Despite these survivors, Aberfan and pit disasters are events from a Coal Age which seems long gone in Wales and the rest of Britain. Not so in China.

Week after week, month after month, year on year, since telling the story of the Welsh Mines Rescue Service, I have read on the internet brief reports of mining disasters on the other side of the world and imagined families waiting at the pitheads, as they waited here. We hear little about these disasters and rarely see the pictures, but in a faraway country of which we know little, history is repeating itself. Chinese miners are dying in numbers which put the worst years of the industry in Wales in the shade.

In 2003, China produced 1.5 billion tonnes of coal. That’s three times as much as the output of south Wales in 1913, the year of the Senghennydd disaster. At that time, 250,000 men worked in the coalfield. Over little more than a century of expansion and decline, 33,000 Welsh miners were killed, but that high price of coal does not begin to include the casualties from dust-related illness — nor the environmental costs borne by mining communities due to the pollution that coal production and combustion entailed.
In China, last year, 5986 miners were killed, according to the official figures. In February 2005, a report in the Wall Street Journal suggested the true rate of casualties in China’s mines is probably higher “as companies often cover up the deaths and buy silence from the families of casualty victims”. I have been unable to find figures for the total number of miners, but with 25,000 pits, there could be as many as 2.5 million. The vast majority of Chinese collieries are small, described as “township” or “private” mines and the received wisdom is that this is where the main problem lies. China accounts for 80 per cent of world mining deaths while producing 35 per cent of the world’s coal. Output is predicted to rise to 2 billion tonnes this year and 2.5 billion tonnes by 2010.

After his tearful visit to Chen Jiashan colliery, Premier Wen urged that mining safety must be improved, according to the China Daily. The Wall Street Journal reported that in the month of his visit, the Chinese State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS) pledged to “eliminate any single coal mine accident causing 100 fatalities or more in 2005”. Just a month later, 210 were killed in a gas explosion in Liaoning Province and there were three further incidents last year in which more than 100 miners died.