News, Miners Buried in China

By Dale McFeatters

Scripps Howard News Service

Chinese exports have been tarnished by reports of adulterated food, toxic toys, tainted toothpaste and formaldehyde-soaked children's pajamas prone to burst into flames.

As bad as this is for foreigners, it's much worse for the Chinese. Beijing is sensitive to the reputation of its exports and recently began a campaign to defend the quality of its products, unfairly demonized, the government says, as a backdoor form of trade protectionism.

But outside of strictly regulating speech, religion and politics, the communist government shows little interest in other forms of domestic regulation, like ensuring pure food and drugs and worker safety. Nowhere is this worse than in the Chinese coal industry.

In contrast to the government of the proletariat, turn-of-the-20th-century American coal barons were models of solicitude for their workers' well-being.

Last year, more than 2,800 Chinese coal miners died in explosions and floods. This year they are being killed at the rate of 13 a day.

Currently, 181 miners have been trapped since Friday at two mines in Shandong province that were flooded, in spite of ample warning, when a levee gave way after days of heavy rains.

The Chinese government reaction: Tell the people, including the families of the miners, as little as possible. An engineer who said it could take over three months to pump out the mines was banned from repeating publicly his judgment that, ``The rescue operation is not progressing as quickly as we hope."

Government news coverage of the disaster was limited to five paragraphs on page 3 of the party's official newspaper, People's Daily.

You may not like your job, but cheer up. You could always be a Chinese coal miner.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer of Scripps Howard News Service (www.shns.com).