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It is a cold, cruel winter.

The first snow fell in China almost a month ahead of time. Children couldn’t wait to have a snowball fight in the yard and build their first snowman. Most major cities in China took on a new look, covered by snow, to proclaim the coming of winter.

At the same time, the demand for coal has been soaring. As demand swells, the price of coal has been shooting up. It has hit a record high this year. In tandem, stock prices of the listed coal companies have been rocketing. In fact, they started going up from September.

However, the blazing achievements of the coal companies mean nothing to a certain section of people: At 2:30 am Saturday, a gas explosion killed about 92 miners in Xinxing coal mine, Longmei Mining Holding Group, in Heilongjiang Province. At least 16 people are still trapped 500 meters below the ground.

Ironically, the security slogan of Longmay Mining Holding Group is “Life has no rehearsals, only performances. A life cannot be relived”. For the dead, the white snow and black coal will be their last memory of life.

The fancy slogans, grand plans of work safety control, and promises of “Safety comes first,” were of little consequence in the coal industry, which is driven by its own narrow interests.

In fact, gas explosions, such as the one Saturday, have always been the leading killer in Chinese coal mines. At present, the mortality rate for producing one megaton of coal in China is 1.182. This is 50 times more than that of developed countries like the US and Germany. There are many differences between the Chinese and the Western coal industry, and the two cannot be compared in several aspects.

However, the biggest, and most obvious, difference is the value placed on human life at risk in the mines.

There is a vicious circle in the Chinese coal industry, which makes winter a fraught season. Energy supply is heavily dependent on coal. The greater the demand and more the coal supplied, the better the chances for coal mines to rake in huge profits. The industry’s massive profit makes the life of miners seem cheap, if not dispensable.

Most of us won’t even be able to picture the faces of miners. We hear that their daily meal is buns with pickled vegetables; we read that their job involves the heaviest manual labor in our society; we think that this group of hardy, young men with dark faces show a flash of white teeth when they smile.

All we know is that they are the ones who provided us with a warm winter even though they labour in the coldest mines thousands of miles away.

No one wants the price of warmth to be paid with blood and life. When miners are cruel victims of the coal industry’s inhuman drive for profit, the warmth becomes unbearable. It makes our blood run cold.
 

By Wu Meng