China Labour Bulletin appears in the following article. Copyright remains with the original publisher.
By Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY
Li Yizhong has been in front of the cameras a lot lately.
The Chinese government's belated admission this week that six workers have died building venues for this summer's Olympics was a reminder that the country's workplace safety standards have not always kept up with its breakneck economic growth.
As the official charged with improving that safety record, Li has launched an unusually bold and often angry campaign to cut down on the corruption and collusion that he says are responsible for many workplace accidents.
When a mine accident Jan. 20 killed 20 workers, Li accused the mine owners of exchanging "life and blood for coal and high profits."
In November, he smashed a safety helmet to pieces on a rock to show its bad quality. In December, he said a faulty mine in Shanxi province was "licensed by devils from hell."
Despite being a member of the ruling Communist Party's central committee, Li has also admitted "there are still officials who break the law for selfish ends and trade power for money."
Such statements are unusual in a country where the Communist Party has absolute authority and is often hesitant to admit mistakes.
His colleagues say Li, 62, a former state oil company boss, is merely reacting to the scope of the task that faces him. An average of 10 miners die every day in China, which relies on coal to power its economy.
Li "often loses his temper," says Huang Yi, spokesman for the State Administration of Work Safety. "In some accidents, we find people have covered up the evidence and moved the bodies."
No industry has demanded Li's attention — or captured his wrath — as much as mining. Although mining fatalities fell 20% last year to 3,786, according to official records, "the death toll is still too big, and the occurrence of major accidents has not been effectively curbed," Li said.
Those who died in the Jan. 20 accident were trying to reopen an illegal mine in Shanxi province that the government had closed for safety reasons three years earlier. "The short supply of coal and rising prices push lawless owners to take reckless moves," Li said last week. The worst winter to hit south and central China for decades is spiking the demand for coal.
Small, private mines produce a quarter of China's coal and two-thirds of its mining accidents, Li said. Most workers are peasants from the countryside, a source of labor that appeared in the 1990s as mobility restrictions eased. More than half of the 5.5 million miners are migrant laborers, cheap and often poorly trained, as portrayed in director Li Yang's 2003 film Blind Shaft.
"The day they arrive is often the day they die," said Huang, who worked in a mine in the 1970s. "I had three months' training before going down the pit; now they don't even get three days of training." The ministry is trying to shut the most dangerous mines and make miners "too expensive to kill," Huang said, by raising the compensation owners must pay victims' families.
Some question whether Li's approach is effective in a nation that forbids independent trade unions.
Li's "anger and sympathy don't solve the problem," said Han Dongfang of the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based group pushing for workers' rights in China.
"Whenever Li speaks, it is always about top-down punishment, with no word saying how we should include the workers in the process of protecting their own lives," Han said. "Li and his colleagues work really hard, flying around the country from one accident to another, but that's not their duty. Their duty is to be intelligent. They are working hard but not working smart."
Constance Thomas, an American who is director of the International Labor Organization in Beijing, said, "The demand for coal is increasing, and it's easy if someone wants to ignore the regulations and reopen a mine that's been closed." She said Li is "consumed with his mandate. … He has an instruction from the top to fix this, but it can't be done overnight."
The U.S. Labor Department helped China with a $2.3 million mine safety project. After local mine managers visited American mines in 2005, "it was an eye-opener for them that all accidents are avoidable," said Bruce Levine, the U.S. Embassy's labor officer in Beijing. "They said that wasn't the way it operated in China and felt inspired to close the gap in mine safety."
Liu Binyin, 58, is a retiree who received $11,000 for losing her son in a flooding accident that killed 172 miners last August in Xintai, in Shandong province.
"There were warnings about flooding, but the leaders still sent my son down into the mine," Liu said. "This was a man-made, not a natural disaster, as officials say, but Li Yizhong cannot understand the local situation. The corrupt owners here don't care if miners live or die."
Beijing has called 2008 "hazards-control year" to lower the risks workers face nationwide. When the Olympics open in August, the eyes of the world will be turned toward China, and Li doesn't want to be in the spotlight because of more accidents.
"Let me vanish from in front of the camera," he pleaded last week.