Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

With every hour that passed they grew wearier and more depressed. It grew harder to dig, exhausting even to crawl. They filled water bottles with urine. The taste was so foul, they could only drink in small sips and felt like crying after they swallowed. Desperately hungry, Xianchen took to nibbling finger-sized pieces of coal, not knowing it had zero nutritional value.

Yet they kept digging. Their companionship was a source of comfort and strength. They slept in each other’s arms to stave off the cold and told jokes about their wives to maintain morale.

“My wife will be happy after I die. She can find a rich husband in Shenyang to replace me,” mused Xianchen out loud, then laughingly contradicted himself. “But then again, she is an ugly woman with two children so it will be hard for her to remarry.”

Humor does not get much blacker than laughter in a collapsed coal mine. But it kept them going for six days, until finally, miraculously, they scratched their way to the surface. Weak and close to starvation, they emerged blinking into the light, then staggered to the village where they were met with a hero’s welcome and incredulous joy that the dead could rise from their tombs. They were carried off to the hospital, where the doctors treated their damaged kidneys and journalists bombarded them with questions. The mine owner, meanwhile, was on the run. Aware that the standard bribes would not protect him from a deadly accident investigation, he had fled as soon as he heard of the collapse.

The survival of the magnificent Meng brothers made front-page headlines in Beijing. Their experience captured the Chinese zeitgeist of the past thirty years—gritty, poor, dirty, illegal, dangerous, willing to go to almost any lengths to get ahead, ill as a result, but surviving long after being written off. They had been trapped in a carbon hell in which they dug, ate, inhaled, and were almost suffocated by coal, yet they had lived to tell the tale.

China finds itself in a similar predicament in the first decade of this century. Demand for energy continues to grow and most of it comes from underground. The economy is utterly dependent on coal. It provided 69.5 percent of the country’s energy, a greater degree of reliance than that of any other major nation. 3Cheap coal generates electricity for Beijing, Shanghai, and Chongqing, fires the steel mills of Huaxi, powers the production lines of Guangdong, and allows consumers in the West to buy Chinese goods at a knockdown price. No other fuel has such an impact on the environment. And nowhere is this more evident than in Shanxi Province, where I went to see how the black subterranean dust fouled the skies above what had been the most polluted city on earth.

Linfen had held that unenviable title for most of the previous decade. Shrouded in a spectral haze, the city lay at the heart of a 20-kilometer industrial belt, fed by the 50 million tons of coal mined each year in the nearby hills. When the pollution was at its worst in the late nineties, the average daily level of particulate matter in the air was over 600 parts per million, far off the hazard scale. 4The New York–based Blacksmith Institute ranked the city alongside Chernobyl on a list of the planet’s ten most contaminated places.

Approaching this blackest of black lands, the smog was so thick it seemed to consume its source. On the outskirts of the city, smokestacks belched carbon and sulfur into the putrid mist that enveloped them. Iron foundries, smelting plants, and cement factories loomed in and out of the haze as we drove along the roads leading into Linfen. The skies were as grim as those of Zhengzhou during the postharvest burn-off, but here it was not a seasonal phenomenon. When we stopped in the outlying village of Liucunzhen, locals told us they lived most of their lives in smog.

“We only see the sun for a few days each year,” said Zhou Huocun, a community doctor, as we looked out over a washing line of dirty clothes hung across the walls of his brick-built courtyard home. “The color of our village is black. It is so dirty that nobody airs their quilts outside anymore so we are getting more parasites.” He had seen a steady increase in respiratory diseases among his patients as the air quality had deteriorated over the years. The unborn were at even greater risk. Shanxi’s birth defect rate is six times higher than the national average (which is itself three to five times the global norm). One industry was to blame. 5

During the past half century, Shanxi has accounted for about a third of China’s coal production. The province alone digs up more than twice as much as Britain did at the peak of the Industrial Revolution. 6Along with neighboring Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia, it is part of the so-called Black Belt in which the majority of the country’s 5.2 million miners labored.

The impact was evident everywhere. Convoys of coal trucks jammed the roads, spilling black dust into the air and onto the ground. The landscape was dotted by more than 2,000 slag heaps. The digging of a warren of shafts and empty pits had hollowed out over 5,000 square kilometers of land and left a fragile crust to support homes, schools, and roads. Subsidence affected 950,000 people whose homes and workplaces were built on land sinking into old pits. 7The industry was no respecter of Shanxi’s rich history. Ancient Buddha carvings at the Yungang Grottoes in Datong were coated in acidic soot. A section of the Great Wall had been demolished by a colliery owner so his trucks could bypass a tollbooth on a nearby trunk road. The damage done by coal to human health and the environment in the province in a single year was estimated at 29.6 billion yuan (over $4.2 billion) in 2005. 8

Yet the coal industry was growing so fast I could taste it in the air. Between 2003 and 2008, the power sector expanded at a rate of more than two new coal-fired 600-megawatt plants per week, adding more to the grid each year than Britain’s entire installed capacity after two centuries of development. 9If China’s development was indeed a “miracle,” as it was often described, then this fuel was an essential ingredient. The whole world was having to inhale it.

The more I looked into the industry, the blacker it seemed. Over the years, I had talked to black-faced miners at the mouths of illegal pits, descended deep down the shafts of huge state-run collieries, consulted labor activists, and interviewed mine owners and policymakers.

The picture that emerged was of a deadly, filthy industry that was trying to clean up but repeatedly mired by market pressures, weak oversight, and the demands of an economy that was desperate for more fuel. To boost profits, mine owners had been cutting corners on safety and environmental measures. Collieries destroyed arable land and grazing pastures, eroded topsoil, worsened air and water pollution, increased levels of river sediment (raising the risk of floods), and accelerated deforestation (especially if the coal was used to make charcoal). The country’s most pressing environmental problems—acid rain, smog, lung disease, water contamination, loss of aquifers, and the filthy layer of black dust that settled on many villages—could all be traced back in varying degrees to this single cause.

Then there were the losses caused by global warming. China recently overtook the U.S. as the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases because it is so dependent on this fossil fuel. 10For each unit of energy, coal produces 80 percent more carbon dioxide than natural gas and 20 percent more than oil. This does not even include methane released from mines, for which China accounts for almost half the global total, or spontaneous combustion of coal seams, which burn 100 megatons of coal each year. 11

Coal is compressed history, buried death. Geologists estimate the seams of anthracite and bituminate in northern China were formed from the Jurassic period onward. Within them are the remains of ferns, trees, mosses, and other life-forms from millions of years ago. Though long extinguished on the surface world, they still—like ghosts or the Meng brothers—possess form and energy. Consider coal with a superstitious eye and foul air might seem a curse suffered for disinterring preancient life. Described with a little poetic license, global warming is a planetary fever caused by burning too much of our past. But whether we prefer these archaic formulations or modern science, the conclusion is the same: the more we dig and burn, the worse we breathe.