The Tunlan mine, in Gujiao county near the provincial capital Taiyuan, was part of the state-owned Shanxi Coking Group, China’s largest producer of coking coal, and had boasted of an excellent safety record, with no accidents reported in the last five years.

Large state-run mines do have a better safety record than small privately operated ventures but as CLB showed in its research report Bone and Blood: The Price of Coal in China, many state-run mines sub-contract work to private companies leading to a chaotic system of management in which safety concerns are often over-looked or ignored.

For example, sections of the Sunjiawan mine in Liaoning province, where a gas explosion killed 214 miners on 14 February 2005, had been contracted out to several different mining teams. According to miners who worked in the Sunjiawan mine, the contractors paid management a fixed sum for a section of the mine and then hired miners to work that stretch of tunnel.

After a gas blast the Jiaojiazhai Coal Mine in Xinzhou killed at least 19 miners in November 2006, the head of China’s State Administration of Work Safety, Li Yizhong, criticized the mine for its haphazard management style that resulted in a failure to maintain safety equipment.

Investigators at Jiaojiazhai found that a faulty ventilation system in the pit pushed gas concentrations to dangerous levels, but supervisors had failed to order the miners underground to evacuate the area in time. Similarly, at Tunlan, the official Xinhua news agency quoted one survivor as saying he was ordered to evacuate only after the failure of the ventilation system led to a sudden build up of gas.

In order to improve mine safety the government needs to limit short-term mine sub-contracting and implement a system of long-term mining contracts that would establish a comprehensive and efficient management system, eliminate short-term profit seeking and cost cutting, and help build up a stable and well-trained workforce that could then play an active part in mine safety supervision through a system of workers’ safety committees.

Currently, the vast majority of miners in China are poorly paid and unskilled rural migrants who do not fully appreciate either the immediate hazards of working underground or the long-term dangers of prolonged exposure to coal dust and gas.

Despite a 15 percent fall in the number of officially reported deaths last year to around 3,200, China’s coal mines remain the deadliest in the world and will remain so for as long as local government officials in charge of coal extraction continue to put profit before lives.