Humane Progress

While the growing Chinese middle class in the great urban centres of China are flexing their buying-power muscles, travelling the world over in great droves as tourists, there still remain immense swatches of Chinese subsistence farmers and peasants who live with the uncertainty of poverty and geographic instability.

These are quite obviously not the advantaged Chinese who frequent the costly boutiques of London and Paris, but people who labour to feed their families and whose lives are impacted by the complexities of production in the many coal mines of China, both legal and illegal.

China has come far in the past few decades, enabling greater numbers of its citizens to become entrepreneurs, to own property, to live the good life. The staggering number of Chinese who had lived in extreme poverty, without even a modicum of state services, with no medical attention, has been immensely reduced as the country itself has prospered as a world mecca of cheap production and export facilities.

In the process, China's environment has famously become increasingly polluted. Dirty, heavy smog and particulate matter, impacting on the health of children and seniors. Precious water systems chemically polluted by run-off from inadequately regulated factory-production emissions. The consuming public faced now and again with contaminated food products as manufacturers seek cheaper additives to make the product go further.

And millions of people in China's coal belt, in a country continuing to be heavily dependent on coal-fired furnaces without the benefit of more environmentally-friendly scrubbers to reduce the pollutants that ensue, deleteriously impacted. In Shand province where countless subsistence farmers eke out a living for themselves and their families on the sides of mountains, the very stability of the mountains themselves is endangered.

"We cannot really sleep properly any more. At night, we can feel the shaking of the ground when they use dynamite in the mine. And when it rains, the water comes flooding in through the cracks.
We have sent our children away to live near their school, but when they come to visit I feel extra nervous, in case the roof collapses."

And this is because roofs do collapse. As do walls and floors. In fact, entire houses collapse into yawning crevices that suddenly appear as a result of the honeycombs of mining tunnels below the villages. The local government reports that 'excessive' mining produced an area of 20,000 square kilometres of unstable and dangerous terrain. Hundreds of families have been forced to abandon their homes, moving further down the mountain.

Until the situation catches up to them again, and they will have to abandon their new homes. "Water bubbles up through the floor because this whole area is hollow. The only problem is we do not have any money to move anywhere else." Miners are digging 900,000 tonnes of coal yearly from the earth. "Why would we stop? There is still coal underneath."

"I was on the other side of the mountain, in my field, and suddenly there was a huge crash. I saw a mushroom cloud of dust rise up. Many people's belongings were just buried underground." Those villagers who are too old and too poor to leave move into mining dormitories.

"The mine has been here since 1958. But they used to dig by hand and it was not a problem. Only in the last couple of years have they mechanized it all and increased their production."

Fleets of 60-tonne trucks shuttle about carrying fuel to the coal-fired power stations that provide over two-thirds of China's electricity. In Beijing and other huge metropoli in the country there are coal smokestacks everywhere one looks. All production facilities for all manner of factories use energy derived from coal. The mines operate 24 hours a day.

There is a solution, the former head of coal industry research at Shanxi's Academy of Science said. "The only solution is to fill up the mines after digging. But that doubles the cost. And at the moment, as we build the economy, China cannot afford for coal to double in price."

The lives of millions of peasants as opposed to China's booming economy. No contest.