Shanxi mudslide kills hundreds
Tuesday, 16 September 2008.
259 people are confirmed dead, nearly 1000 more are buried and unaccounted for after dam collapse
Chinaworker.info, Chen Lizhi
On 8th September, due to heavy rainfall there occurred a mudslide in the Taershan mining area in Taosi village, within the county of Xiangfen in the city of Linfen in Shanxi province, the mining storage areas of the privately owned and illegal mines were destroyed as a result. As of today (14th of September), there are already 254 confirmed deaths, of which 252 were discovered at the site, 36 injuries, and 2 deaths resulting from severe injuries that did not respond to medical treatment. According to extrapolation of existing data, there might be as many as nearly a thousand people buried at the site, and the local government is still in the process of organising the equipment as well as the tens of thousands of people that are required for the rescue efforts, but objectively the chances of finding more survivors among the buried are very slim. This probably will become the most severe incident due to illegal mining within the last decade, and one of the most significant safety-related incidents since the founding of the P.R.C.
What happened during the dam-collapsing incident
According to the official survey of the CCP regime, this dam-collapsing incident occurred due to a severe neglect of responsibility that was caused by the illegal collaboration of private mine-owners and local officials.
The General Secretary of the provincial government of Shanxi, Wang Qingxian, spoke out on the press conference held on the 11st of September: the mine storage at the Taershan iron mine in Xiangfen county was constructed in the 1980s, and production ceased from 1992 onwards. The mine storage at which the incident occurred belonged to the Taershan iron mine of the Xinta Mining Co. Ltd., which used to be the iron mine at the Linfen Steel Company, it has a storage capacity of 22.36 million metric tons, and at the moment it holds 3.03 million metric tons of iron. According to the original design, it should have a production capacity of 250,000 metric tons per year and a life-span of 20 years. In October of 2005, the iron mine at Taershan was auctioned off by the land resource department of the Shanxi provincial government, and afterwards as a result of the handing-over of capital, the effective owner at present is Zhang Peiliang. In April of 2006, the production permit of the Xinta Mining Co. Ltd. was suspended by the safety supervision department of the Shanxi provincial government, and the mining permit of the owner also expired in August 2007. Yet during these two years of illegal mining, the provincial safety supervision department and the county government of Xiangfen failed to order the mine to cease production according to relevant legislation or to forcefully close the mine down, despite their full knowledge of the situation.
The mine was located at about half-way up the hill on which the iron mine offices and the eastern living quarters of the miners' families are situated, it is about 50 metres higher than the office tower of the iron mine, the local market and residential areas, as well as a natural reserve nearby. It is over a hundred metres from the nearest local residential area. According to investigative confirmation, the dam-collapsing incident that occurred at the mine storage on the 8th released around 268,000 cubic metres of its content, covering an area of 30.2 acres and affected the mining office blocks, marketplaces and some residential buildings up to 500 metres in the down-flow direction. It caused the collapse of some buildings and casualties among the local population.
After the incident journalists interviewed the workers who worked at the mine, who acknowledged the existence of potential safety hazards at the site. Some of them openly reported this potential problem, but due to fear of getting fired no-one dared to refuse working there. According to the reports of villagers at the adjacent village of Yunhe, just one month prior to the incident, they told the town government and officials in village about the severe potential safety problem at the mine storage area, and demanded that the production there should cease until the site can be fixed. After this the town government did send some cadres to the mine, and production was stopped for a few days, but not long after this it began again.
At this time the production and safety permit of the mine was already suspended for 2 years and 4 months. According to Article 2 of the principal rules of The Methods of Application for the Safety Production Permits of Non-coal Mine Enterprises, published by the State Safety Production Supervision Management Bureau as a part of its Mining Safety Supervision legislation (No. 9): Non-coal mining enterprises must acquire the safety production permit according to the methods of application listed, those that could not acquire the safety production permit cannot engage in production activities. In fact, at this point even the mining permit that is not valid by itself was already out of date by more than a year. Yet under these conditions the greedy mine-owner still collaborated with local officials and carelessly engaged in the illegal mining of iron resources that belonged to the Chinese people as a whole, ultimately leading to this extremely severe incident.
Based on reports made by Xinhua news agency, during the fifth conference of the General Committee at the 11st People's Congress of Shanxi Province held yesterday afternoon (14th September, Sunday), the ex-head of the State Safety and Supervision Bureau, and the vice-head of the Committee for Safe Production of the Department of State, Wang Jun, was appointed as the acting provincial governor and vice-governor of Shanxi Province, and the request for resign by the provincial governor of Shanxi, Meng Xuenong, was accepted, and the vice-governor Zhang Jianmin was removed from his post. (Editor: Meng Xuenong was originally the vice-secretary of the Beijing city party committee and the mayor of Beijing in 2003, and due to deliberately hiding information at the SARS incident in 2003 he was removed from this post together with the then head of the health department, Zhang Wenkang, and after working for a while as the vice-head of the office for the project of moving water from the south to the north under the Department of State, he came to Shanxi Province and became the provincial governor) Before this, the general secretary at the county-level party committee in Xiangfen, Kang Haiyin, and the county head Li Xuejue, have already been suspended from their posts by order of the provincial-level government and placed under supervision, and the 20 or so people directly involved in this incident have been placed under arrested by the Shanxi provincial police department.
The Way Out for Workers in China
Chinaworker.info pointed out many times in previous articles that ever since the introduction of the capitalist market economic system in China, due to the fact that capitalists would try as much as possible to cut down on the fixed cost of production in order to extract the surplus value of workers' labour, they would collaborate with local bureaucrats and relevant departmental officials, neglect the lives of workers, environmental problems and social impacts, and produce one atrocious production safety incident after another. The Chinese mining industry is the most dangerous industry in the entire world. According to statistics provided by Xinhua news agency in October 2007, the death rate of the Chinese mining industry is 70 times that of America, and 7 times that of Russia and India. According to the reports of the New York times, the probability of a fatal incident for Chinese mine workers is 117 times that of American mine workers, and just in the coal mining industry alone, everyday there would be 13 deaths in China. According to the statistical data from the Chinese State Safety Production Supervision and Management Bureau, from the 1st January, 2008 to 11th September, there have already occurred 832 safety-related incidents of various kinds around the country, i.e. 3 incidents per day, and the dam-collapsing incident at the iron mine in Shanxi that happened on the 8th September shall push the number of deaths due to the lack of safety in production in China to a new historical high.
In the entire production chain of the world, the so-called fast economic development in China that came as a result of the capitalist restoration of the last 3 decades has already earned it the title of "the production line of the world". But the majority of the working class and labouring population in China have never received much concrete benefits from this. Harsh working conditions, excessive working hours, meager income, barbaric management style, the use of child slave labour, and brutal safety-related incidents, Chinese and foreign capitalists are collaborating with autocratic CCP bureaucrats to extract the surplus value of the Chinese working class like this every single day. On every piece of raw coal and iron, one could find the blood stains of the Chinese working class and labouring masses.
Surely the autocratic central government and a few "naive" neo-liberal intellectuals, in order to guarantee the "smooth" continuation of the capitalist system, and reduce "unnecessary" risks and fixed costs, would also introduce some reformist and protectionist measures, and establish some formalised legal articles that have no real substance. They would probably shed a few fake tears, and even pretentiously punish a few local officials, just like what they have done this time in the dam-collapsing incident in Shanxi. But none of these would really matter in reality, nor could they ever really improve the sad fate of the Chinese working class.
Who would really care about the safety of workers and labouring masses? Apart from workers there are no-one else!
Who knows more about the real production safety conditions than the workers? Apart from workers there are also no-one else!
Who are really creating the wealth of society that pushes forward social progress? Apart from workers there are really no-one else!
Specific to this dam-collapsing incident, Chinaworker.info calls for:
1) The immediate establishment of a investigative committee for this incident, but not the kind that exists now which is completely controlled by upper-rank bureaucrats, it should include various kinds of technical experts, and more importantly the participation of mine workers' representatives and the relatives of injured parties. Every participant should have concrete rights of voting and veto.
2) This investigative committee should immediately arrange for the medical treatment and care for all injured parties, and attend to the needs of the relatives of the deceased and the fulfillment of their funeral requirements. The investigative committee should determine and decide the most rational plan for compensation.
3) Based on the relevant reports and evidence provided by the investigative committee, the responsible parties should be arrested, sued and punished according to the proper legal procedures.
4) After the termination of all investigations by the committee, it should establish corresponding methods for reform and management, and create a long-term supervisory committee in order to prevent another incident like this that could threaten the lives of workers and nearby residents from happening ever again.
However, Chinaworker.info will not just make these demands, we believe it is more important to establish a supervisory and management system that allow workers to democratically control themselves across the entire country:
1) Immediately build up in every workplace in the entire country, but most importantly in the industries that involve a greater amount of safety hazard, such as mining, steel production, ship-building, chemical engineering and low-value processing, a democratically-elected safety and production supervision system that is paid by the workers themselves.
2) These supervisors must be experienced workers from the grass-root levels, and democratically elected by all of the workers in their relevant workplaces.
3) Full-time safety supervisors should have a salary income that is paid by averaged-out contributions made by all workers in the particular workplace, and the amount should not exceed the wage for a experienced skilled worker. Part-time safety supervisors should also have their income that pay for the supervisory work paid by averaged-out contributions made by all workers in the workplace.
4) Since the factory management layers and bosses have saved on their corresponding management and operational costs, so they should use the amounts they have saved, as well as government subsidies to the enterprise for safe production, to increase the income of all workers in an averaged-out manner.
5) The production safety supervisor is only responsible to the workers that elected him or her, the workers can re-elect the supervisor after a specified limited term according to regulations, or remove incompetent supervisors through the election method. The bosses and management layers of the factory have no rights to remove the production safety supervisor or limit the supervisor from acting within the range of his or her responsibilities to supervise the safety of the production process.
6) In large mining industry enterprises where there are 3 or more production safety supervisors at the same workplace, the supervisors can meet together and the electoral representatives of the workers can elect a chief production safety supervisor.
7) The production safety supervisor has the rights to determine whether or not the workplace he or she is responsible for is required to cease production and engage in systematic reform, based on the concrete safety conditions of the relevant workplace. Once the supervisor has made his or her decision, it can only be reversed by the democratic voting of the workers in the particular workplace, but not by the factory bosses or the management layers.
8) The production safety supervisor can issue a formal report of complaint that call for further investigation to the relevant governmental supervisory department either in his or her own name or in the name of the workplace as a collective, in order to urge the government to fix the potential safety hazards that exist in the particular enterprise.
9) The production safety supervisor is only responsible to and for the workers to guarantee the proper production safety.
10) Specific to some production enterprises that determine workers' salaries through the number of items produced, at the production stages that supervise the check the quantity and quality of products, democratically-elected quantity and quality supervisors should also be established. They should also be paid by the workers at the particular workplace.
But Chinaworker would also like to point out that this would only be the first step in the protection of workers' basic safety and security.
Only through the establishment of genuine democratically-elected and independently organised trade unions, and through the acquisition of the rights to completely freely organising strikes, can the working class and labouring masses gain some of the most basic economic and political rights. Only an organised working class can fight in solidarity for its own individual and collective interests.
Ultimately, only through the establishment of a political system in which there is a bottom-up structure for the working class to engage in democratic supervision and management and an economic system in which the productive resources are owned by the entire population and used in a rationally planned economic method throughout China and the entire world at the same time-the establishment of a genuine socialist system-can there be a real path ahead for the liberation of the working class as well as for all of humanity.
Chinaworker.info, Chen Lizhi
On 8th September, due to heavy rainfall there occurred a mudslide in the Taershan mining area in Taosi village, within the county of Xiangfen in the city of Linfen in Shanxi province, the mining storage areas of the privately owned and illegal mines were destroyed as a result. As of today (14th of September), there are already 254 confirmed deaths, of which 252 were discovered at the site, 36 injuries, and 2 deaths resulting from severe injuries that did not respond to medical treatment. According to extrapolation of existing data, there might be as many as nearly a thousand people buried at the site, and the local government is still in the process of organising the equipment as well as the tens of thousands of people that are required for the rescue efforts, but objectively the chances of finding more survivors among the buried are very slim. This probably will become the most severe incident due to illegal mining within the last decade, and one of the most significant safety-related incidents since the founding of the P.R.C.
What happened during the dam-collapsing incident
According to the official survey of the CCP regime, this dam-collapsing incident occurred due to a severe neglect of responsibility that was caused by the illegal collaboration of private mine-owners and local officials.
The General Secretary of the provincial government of Shanxi, Wang Qingxian, spoke out on the press conference held on the 11st of September: the mine storage at the Taershan iron mine in Xiangfen county was constructed in the 1980s, and production ceased from 1992 onwards. The mine storage at which the incident occurred belonged to the Taershan iron mine of the Xinta Mining Co. Ltd., which used to be the iron mine at the Linfen Steel Company, it has a storage capacity of 22.36 million metric tons, and at the moment it holds 3.03 million metric tons of iron. According to the original design, it should have a production capacity of 250,000 metric tons per year and a life-span of 20 years. In October of 2005, the iron mine at Taershan was auctioned off by the land resource department of the Shanxi provincial government, and afterwards as a result of the handing-over of capital, the effective owner at present is Zhang Peiliang. In April of 2006, the production permit of the Xinta Mining Co. Ltd. was suspended by the safety supervision department of the Shanxi provincial government, and the mining permit of the owner also expired in August 2007. Yet during these two years of illegal mining, the provincial safety supervision department and the county government of Xiangfen failed to order the mine to cease production according to relevant legislation or to forcefully close the mine down, despite their full knowledge of the situation.
The mine was located at about half-way up the hill on which the iron mine offices and the eastern living quarters of the miners' families are situated, it is about 50 metres higher than the office tower of the iron mine, the local market and residential areas, as well as a natural reserve nearby. It is over a hundred metres from the nearest local residential area. According to investigative confirmation, the dam-collapsing incident that occurred at the mine storage on the 8th released around 268,000 cubic metres of its content, covering an area of 30.2 acres and affected the mining office blocks, marketplaces and some residential buildings up to 500 metres in the down-flow direction. It caused the collapse of some buildings and casualties among the local population.
After the incident journalists interviewed the workers who worked at the mine, who acknowledged the existence of potential safety hazards at the site. Some of them openly reported this potential problem, but due to fear of getting fired no-one dared to refuse working there. According to the reports of villagers at the adjacent village of Yunhe, just one month prior to the incident, they told the town government and officials in village about the severe potential safety problem at the mine storage area, and demanded that the production there should cease until the site can be fixed. After this the town government did send some cadres to the mine, and production was stopped for a few days, but not long after this it began again.
At this time the production and safety permit of the mine was already suspended for 2 years and 4 months. According to Article 2 of the principal rules of The Methods of Application for the Safety Production Permits of Non-coal Mine Enterprises, published by the State Safety Production Supervision Management Bureau as a part of its Mining Safety Supervision legislation (No. 9): Non-coal mining enterprises must acquire the safety production permit according to the methods of application listed, those that could not acquire the safety production permit cannot engage in production activities. In fact, at this point even the mining permit that is not valid by itself was already out of date by more than a year. Yet under these conditions the greedy mine-owner still collaborated with local officials and carelessly engaged in the illegal mining of iron resources that belonged to the Chinese people as a whole, ultimately leading to this extremely severe incident.
Based on reports made by Xinhua news agency, during the fifth conference of the General Committee at the 11st People's Congress of Shanxi Province held yesterday afternoon (14th September, Sunday), the ex-head of the State Safety and Supervision Bureau, and the vice-head of the Committee for Safe Production of the Department of State, Wang Jun, was appointed as the acting provincial governor and vice-governor of Shanxi Province, and the request for resign by the provincial governor of Shanxi, Meng Xuenong, was accepted, and the vice-governor Zhang Jianmin was removed from his post. (Editor: Meng Xuenong was originally the vice-secretary of the Beijing city party committee and the mayor of Beijing in 2003, and due to deliberately hiding information at the SARS incident in 2003 he was removed from this post together with the then head of the health department, Zhang Wenkang, and after working for a while as the vice-head of the office for the project of moving water from the south to the north under the Department of State, he came to Shanxi Province and became the provincial governor) Before this, the general secretary at the county-level party committee in Xiangfen, Kang Haiyin, and the county head Li Xuejue, have already been suspended from their posts by order of the provincial-level government and placed under supervision, and the 20 or so people directly involved in this incident have been placed under arrested by the Shanxi provincial police department.
The Way Out for Workers in China
Chinaworker.info pointed out many times in previous articles that ever since the introduction of the capitalist market economic system in China, due to the fact that capitalists would try as much as possible to cut down on the fixed cost of production in order to extract the surplus value of workers' labour, they would collaborate with local bureaucrats and relevant departmental officials, neglect the lives of workers, environmental problems and social impacts, and produce one atrocious production safety incident after another. The Chinese mining industry is the most dangerous industry in the entire world. According to statistics provided by Xinhua news agency in October 2007, the death rate of the Chinese mining industry is 70 times that of America, and 7 times that of Russia and India. According to the reports of the New York times, the probability of a fatal incident for Chinese mine workers is 117 times that of American mine workers, and just in the coal mining industry alone, everyday there would be 13 deaths in China. According to the statistical data from the Chinese State Safety Production Supervision and Management Bureau, from the 1st January, 2008 to 11th September, there have already occurred 832 safety-related incidents of various kinds around the country, i.e. 3 incidents per day, and the dam-collapsing incident at the iron mine in Shanxi that happened on the 8th September shall push the number of deaths due to the lack of safety in production in China to a new historical high.
In the entire production chain of the world, the so-called fast economic development in China that came as a result of the capitalist restoration of the last 3 decades has already earned it the title of "the production line of the world". But the majority of the working class and labouring population in China have never received much concrete benefits from this. Harsh working conditions, excessive working hours, meager income, barbaric management style, the use of child slave labour, and brutal safety-related incidents, Chinese and foreign capitalists are collaborating with autocratic CCP bureaucrats to extract the surplus value of the Chinese working class like this every single day. On every piece of raw coal and iron, one could find the blood stains of the Chinese working class and labouring masses.
Surely the autocratic central government and a few "naive" neo-liberal intellectuals, in order to guarantee the "smooth" continuation of the capitalist system, and reduce "unnecessary" risks and fixed costs, would also introduce some reformist and protectionist measures, and establish some formalised legal articles that have no real substance. They would probably shed a few fake tears, and even pretentiously punish a few local officials, just like what they have done this time in the dam-collapsing incident in Shanxi. But none of these would really matter in reality, nor could they ever really improve the sad fate of the Chinese working class.
Who would really care about the safety of workers and labouring masses? Apart from workers there are no-one else!
Who knows more about the real production safety conditions than the workers? Apart from workers there are also no-one else!
Who are really creating the wealth of society that pushes forward social progress? Apart from workers there are really no-one else!
Specific to this dam-collapsing incident, Chinaworker.info calls for:
1) The immediate establishment of a investigative committee for this incident, but not the kind that exists now which is completely controlled by upper-rank bureaucrats, it should include various kinds of technical experts, and more importantly the participation of mine workers' representatives and the relatives of injured parties. Every participant should have concrete rights of voting and veto.
2) This investigative committee should immediately arrange for the medical treatment and care for all injured parties, and attend to the needs of the relatives of the deceased and the fulfillment of their funeral requirements. The investigative committee should determine and decide the most rational plan for compensation.
3) Based on the relevant reports and evidence provided by the investigative committee, the responsible parties should be arrested, sued and punished according to the proper legal procedures.
4) After the termination of all investigations by the committee, it should establish corresponding methods for reform and management, and create a long-term supervisory committee in order to prevent another incident like this that could threaten the lives of workers and nearby residents from happening ever again.
However, Chinaworker.info will not just make these demands, we believe it is more important to establish a supervisory and management system that allow workers to democratically control themselves across the entire country:
1) Immediately build up in every workplace in the entire country, but most importantly in the industries that involve a greater amount of safety hazard, such as mining, steel production, ship-building, chemical engineering and low-value processing, a democratically-elected safety and production supervision system that is paid by the workers themselves.
2) These supervisors must be experienced workers from the grass-root levels, and democratically elected by all of the workers in their relevant workplaces.
3) Full-time safety supervisors should have a salary income that is paid by averaged-out contributions made by all workers in the particular workplace, and the amount should not exceed the wage for a experienced skilled worker. Part-time safety supervisors should also have their income that pay for the supervisory work paid by averaged-out contributions made by all workers in the workplace.
4) Since the factory management layers and bosses have saved on their corresponding management and operational costs, so they should use the amounts they have saved, as well as government subsidies to the enterprise for safe production, to increase the income of all workers in an averaged-out manner.
5) The production safety supervisor is only responsible to the workers that elected him or her, the workers can re-elect the supervisor after a specified limited term according to regulations, or remove incompetent supervisors through the election method. The bosses and management layers of the factory have no rights to remove the production safety supervisor or limit the supervisor from acting within the range of his or her responsibilities to supervise the safety of the production process.
6) In large mining industry enterprises where there are 3 or more production safety supervisors at the same workplace, the supervisors can meet together and the electoral representatives of the workers can elect a chief production safety supervisor.
7) The production safety supervisor has the rights to determine whether or not the workplace he or she is responsible for is required to cease production and engage in systematic reform, based on the concrete safety conditions of the relevant workplace. Once the supervisor has made his or her decision, it can only be reversed by the democratic voting of the workers in the particular workplace, but not by the factory bosses or the management layers.
8) The production safety supervisor can issue a formal report of complaint that call for further investigation to the relevant governmental supervisory department either in his or her own name or in the name of the workplace as a collective, in order to urge the government to fix the potential safety hazards that exist in the particular enterprise.
9) The production safety supervisor is only responsible to and for the workers to guarantee the proper production safety.
10) Specific to some production enterprises that determine workers' salaries through the number of items produced, at the production stages that supervise the check the quantity and quality of products, democratically-elected quantity and quality supervisors should also be established. They should also be paid by the workers at the particular workplace.
But Chinaworker would also like to point out that this would only be the first step in the protection of workers' basic safety and security.
Only through the establishment of genuine democratically-elected and independently organised trade unions, and through the acquisition of the rights to completely freely organising strikes, can the working class and labouring masses gain some of the most basic economic and political rights. Only an organised working class can fight in solidarity for its own individual and collective interests.
Ultimately, only through the establishment of a political system in which there is a bottom-up structure for the working class to engage in democratic supervision and management and an economic system in which the productive resources are owned by the entire population and used in a rationally planned economic method throughout China and the entire world at the same time-the establishment of a genuine socialist system-can there be a real path ahead for the liberation of the working class as well as for all of humanity.
| 抢救现场1 |
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