The conditions of industrial workers have been increasingly eroded in post-Mao China. This article examines conditions in coal mining: the industry with the worst health and safety performance in China. After briefly outlining China's record, the article analyses the fundamental causes of the high level of accidents. Despite many regulations on mine safety, governments at all levels have had great difficulty in enforcing the law. Because of the important role of township and village mines in local development, often in areas with few other sources of income, powerful forces work for the survival of many unsafe small mines. Indeed, the safety discourse in China's press partly reflects the interests of the state mines attempting to reduce competition by foisting (higher) safety costs on the small mines. The problem of coal safety will not be solved until China's rural population has other, better and safer, ways to increase family incomes so that they have the option to refuse to risk their lives.
A study of the impact of the 1930s World Depression on Southwest China
intersects with two major controversies in modern Chinese economic
history. First, there is still substantial disagreement over the severity
of the impact of the Depression on China. The ‘traditional’
interpretation inside China has focused on the ‘bankruptcy’ of
the economy in the 1930s (of which the Depression was one but not the only
cause). While many aspects of the ‘bankruptcy’ and ‘stagnation’
theses have more recently been discarded or modified by Chinese scholars,
recognition is still made of the gravity of the crisis of the 1930s: China's
leading historian of its modern economy, Wu Chengming, writes in the third
volume of the History of Chinese Capitalism: ‘The economic
crisis of 1932–1935 was, with the exception of the wars of invasion
launched by foreign countries, the single most severe blow to the Chinese
economy’.
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