SEEKING A GEORGE ORWELL FOR CHINA.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell describes the condition of Depression-era coal miners in Britain.  A recent documentary suggests working conditions in contemporary China are no better.

In [journalist Yuanchen] Liu's film, the miners venture underground without protective masks. China's mines suffer from inadequate ventilation systems, and Liu told me that dangerous coal dust sparkles like fireflies in the light from the miner's helmets. They use old fashioned pick axes instead of jackhammers, and crouch or lie down in three foot high side tunnels for hours at a stretch, hacking away at the rock faces.

The central government does not lack safety regulations on the books. In practice, however, these rules are often ignored in the rush to get more coal out of the ground.

Columnist Richard Schiffman describes the lot of the miners as "paying in blood for China's economic miracle."  It's possible that there is no Chinese economic miracle, only an increasingly unsustainable mirage, in which case the lot of the miners is the lot of working people in poor countries more generally.