THE ecology of the Tibetan plateau, noted the Ministry of Land and Resources two years ago, is “extremely fragile”. Any damage, it warned, would be difficult or impossible to reverse. But, it went on, the China National Gold Group, a state-owned company, had achieved “astonishing results” in working to protect the environment around its mine near the region’s capital, Lhasa. On March 29th at least 83 of the mine’s workers lay buried under a colossal landslide. Its cause is not yet certain, but critics of Tibet’s mining frenzy feel vindicated.

[…] Foreign reporters are rarely allowed into Tibet, least of all to cover sensitive incidents. The official media have avoided speculation about any possible link between the landslide and mining activities in the area. They say the landslide covered a large area with 2m cubic metres of rubble. By the time The Economist went to press, 66 bodies had been pulled out by teams of rescuers with sniffer dogs. The high altitude and lack of oxygen made rescue work hard.

A deputy minister of land and resources, Xu Deming, said preliminary investigations had shown that the landslide was caused by a “natural geological disaster”. Fragments of rock left behind by receding glaciers are being blamed, though officials do not explain why the workers’ camp was set up so close to such an apparent hazard.

The Dharamsala-based Central Tibetan Administration has suggested that the disaster “could be a result of the aggressive expansion and large-scale exploitation of mineral in the Gyama Valley—a man-made phenomenon rather than just a ‘natural disaster’.” State media reports on Friday, on the other hand, reiterated the initial conclusion that it was an act of nature. At chinadialogue, Gabriel Lafitte was dismissive of this official explanation:

With indecent haste, the subsidiary of state-owned China Gold International that operates the Gyama mine announced that the landslide was natural. This rush to excuse themselves of culpability is not backed by any scientific monitoring of earthquake activity.

The fact is that this huge mine, despite extremely steep mountainous terrain, is open cut, avoiding the expense of tunnelling. The walls of an open pit mine are prone to collapse, especially in a young and unstable land such as Tibet which is still rising.

The mining company took a calculated cost-cutting risk, and the mine workers paid the price. Open pits mean much blasting to loosen rock, a risky strategy. Now the mine, if it is to operate as planned for the coming seven decades, will have to go underground.

[…] CGI and its parent China Gold Group are in a tight spot. If the landslide is to be passed off as natural, it makes highly questionable the capacity of mine waste tailings dams to withstand earthquakes and debris flows, and the many extremes of climate at an altitude close to 5,000 metres. If, on the other hand, the landslide was not natural, but due to cost cutting, cavalier blasting, and a desire for quick profits, CGI’s corporate strategy is in tatters.

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Rescue work was later suspended after geological experts found four cracks with lengths of more than 600 meters on the mountain top, posing risks of a subsequent landslide.

Rescuers were asked to retreat to the safe zone and wait for monitoring and evaluation from relevant departments.

More than 4,500 rescuers and 200 machines were working at the site to find the buried miners, said a spokesman with the rescue headquarters.Intermittent snow at the site, however, was hampering rescue efforts,

Another Xinhua report focused on the mine’s sole survivor, Zhao Linjiang, who was in Lhasa City when the landslide struck.

On Friday, he received a confusing call from his boss, who asked him to return immediately. On his way back to work, Zhao tried to call his relatives who also worked at the mine, but nobody answered.

When he got back to the mine, he found that it was no longer there. Instead, there was a mile-long pile of rocks in the place of the workers’ camp, and 83 workers, including his 23-year-old brother Zhao Malin and six other relatives, were nowhere to be found.

[…] Zhao said his phone rings about 40 to 50 times a day, mostly calls from the families of his co-worker relatives, who had once dreamt about bringing wealth to their families in the impoverished villages of Guizhou’s Xishui County.

Though life could be tough on the 4,600-meter-high plateau, the workers earned 8,000 yuan (1,288 U.S. dollars) to 9,000 yuan a month, roughly half the average annual income of people in their hometown, a victim’s family member from Guizhou told Xinhua.

The Hindu’s Ananth Krishnan surveyed online responses to the disaster:

While environmental groups and Tibetan exiled groups have long highlighted the adverse impact of mining project on the plateau’s ecosystem, Friday’s landslip also brought unusual — and unprecedented — criticism from Chinese bloggers, filmmakers and even singers. Television director Zhang Ronggui said he was “strongly opposed to the development of heavy industry and mineral resources in Tibet” in a widely forwarded post on Sunday on the Chinese Twitter equivalent Sina Weibo.

“It is the world’s highest and purest holy land, and I hope the government can leave a blue sky, clean water and white clouds for the next generation,” he wrote. His post, as of Sunday night, had been forwarded by more than 8,000 people.

Well-known singer, Zhang Yihe, in a message to her 339,000 fans, said: “I don’t understand why we have to dig up gold in areas that are above 4,000 metres. Why must we also build dams on rivers, including the Yarlung Zangbo? Why don’t we leave something for the next generation?” Other writers have also said the close relationships between local Communist Party officials and influential state-run companies have often resulted in environmental concerns and livelihood issues of local communities being ignored in mining projects, not only in Tibet but elsewhere in China.

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At about 6 a.m. on Friday, the disaster struck a workers’ camp of the Jiama Copper Polymetallic Mine in Maizhokunggar County, about 68 km from Lhasa, the regional capital.

By 8 p.m. Saturday, 3,500 rescuers and 300 large-scale machineries are working on the site, according to local authorities.

“The rescuers are conducting inch-by-inch search but they still cannot locate the missing miners,” said Wu Yingjie, deputy secretary of Tibet Autonomous Regional Committee of the Communist Party of China.

[…] Wu added that a one-meter-wide and 15-meter-long crack was formed at the mountain top, which indicated a possibility of subsequent disasters.

From the Associated Press:

Smaller landslides have already hampered rescue efforts, according to Xinhua, while damage to nearby roads slowed the delivery of heavy equipment. Many workers have reportedly been digging with bare hands while suffering from altitude sickness. Snow began to fall on Saturday afternoon, and temperatures of -3°C have interfered with sniffer dogs’ sense of smell.

A media directive from the Central Propaganda Department described the landslide as “natural”, but warned news organizations “without exception” not to “report or speculate on related sensitive issues.” Likely among these is the question of whether mining activity may have triggered the disaster. After a landslide killed 46 people in Yunnan in January, local suspicions fell heavily on a nearby coal mine despite an initial investigation which claimed that mining was not to blame for the disaster. 72 surviving villagers subsequently wrote to the State Council requesting that this conclusion be reexamined.

Another sensitive point is the ethnicity of the buried miners, only two of whom are local Tibetans. The rest are Han, mainly from nearby Yunnan, Guizhou and Sichuan provinces. Beijing has invested heavily in boosting Tibet’s economy, but the benefits have tended to flow to state-owned enterprises, and the jobs to incoming migrants, rather than to the local population.

Updated at 2:35 PST, March 31st: South China Morning Post reports the discovery of a second body, while the Associated Press provides more details on the mine operator:

The miners worked for Huatailong Mining Development. The company is a subsidiary of the Vancouver-based China Gold International Resources Corp. Ltd (TSX: CGG), whose controlling shareholder is the China National Gold Group Corp., a state-owned enterprise and China’s largest gold producer.

The disaster has spotlighted the extensive mining activities on the Tibetan plateau and sparked questions about whether mining activities have been excessive and destroyed the region’s fragile ecosystem. Criticisms, however, only flashed through China’s social media Saturday before they were scrubbed off or blocked from public view by censors.

[…] Btan Tundop, a Tibetan resident, noted the mining company’s dominance in the area in a short-lived microblog: “The entire Maizhokunggar has been taken over by China National Gold Group. Local Tibetans say the county and the village might as well be called Huatailong.”

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Crowds of survivors protested outside the local disaster relief headquarters on Sunday night, after it emerged that victims had been cremated without their families’ approval. Local authorities apologized, but explained that they were not equipped to deal with so many dead bodies at once. From Xinhua:

“Why can’t I see my child for the last time?” Luo Yuanju, a migrant worker who hurried home after she got the tragic news that she had lost 29 relatives in the landslide, told the Beijing News. “This cremation was done without our approval. Why couldn’t the authorities wait for one or two days?”

[…] Government authorities had cremated all the bodies by Sunday, triggering anger from the victims’ families. According to the tradition of the village, where dwellers are mostly members of the Yi ethnic minority, the bodies of the dead are usually buried instead of cremated.

Lei Chuying, deputy head of Zhenxiong county, said cremation orders were given due to consideration of epidemic prevention and people’s feelings.

“Many parts of the bodies were missing while the buried were dug out,” Lei said, “The painful scene might cause trauma among relatives.”

An official investigation quickly concluded that the landslide was an entirely natural disaster, but local authorities have still faced criticism over their lack of preparedness. From Global Times:

Jiang Xingwu, a geological expert in Yunnan, told a press conference on Saturday afternoon that the area’s steep incline of 35 to 50 degrees and the composition of the soil made it prone to landslides.

Jiang said that the earthquakes with magnitudes of 5.7 and 5.6 which hit neighboring Yiliang county in September 2012 were also a cause, and the continued rainy and snowy weather over the past month led to the saturation of the slope, with gravity eventually causing the landslide.

The People’s Daily, a flagship newspaper of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, Sunday questioned why there wasn’t any early warning given the prolonged rainy and snowy weather over the past month.

[…] Also of concern was the fact that a 2010 geological disaster prevention plan by the Zhenxiong government showed that the local government had compiled files for 184 hazardous sites including 29 major ones areas, but Gaopo village was not on the list.

In addition, some locals continued to voice suspicions that nearby mining activity was really to blame. From Xinhua:

Some villagers believe the landslide may have been triggered by a gas explosion, and they doubt the experts’ conclusion that the coal mine boundary was 500 meters away from the landslide.

“The mining area is right beneath the landslide,” a coal miner in Gaopo said, as quoted by media on Monday.

Witnesses told Xinhua they saw “earth and rocks sprayed up into the air” when the landslide occurred. At the same time, some other villagers said they had not been to the scene and only heard about the “explosion” from others.

[…] Wang Shijun, another person who lost family in the landslide, said a big crack appeared before the landslide. “Big enough to swallow a bull.”

However, some villagers said the crack was 1 meter wide and some said a half meter wide, while others said there was no crack.

Update: Global Times reports that 72 of the villagers have written to the State Council requesting a second investigation into the cause of the landslide.

Luo Yuanshou, the brother of a victim, initiated the joint letter and sent to the State Council on Wednesday. The villagers believe the Gaopo coal mine, which is 500 meters from the landslide scene, could have played a role in the landslide. Villagers wondered why the hillside remained stable following a 50-day snowstorm in 2008.

Luo told the Global Times that the villagers are demanding the State Council order the State Administration of Coal Mine Safety, the Ministry of Land and Resources and the China University of Geosciences to investigate the landslide. The original investigation “hastily concluded the landslide had nothing to do with the mine without even an on-site investigation of the mine. The hill was not that steep and is covered with vegetation,” said Luo.

Jiang Xingwu, who headed the original investigation, told the Global Times Wednesday that he stands by the results of his investigation, adding he understands that the villagers may want another opinion.

The preference for burial over cremation is not limited to the Yi: see ‘Henan Officials Commit a Grave Error‘ on CDT. Neither is Friday’s landslide the only apparently natural disaster for which human activity has been blamed: see ‘2008 Sichuan Earthquake Likely Man-Made‘.

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“I heard a sound like thunder, firecrackers or trucks dumping rocks at around 8 am. When I woke up and found some neighbors to follow the sound, we saw that the whole village had already been buried under the landslide,” Li Yongju, a villager in neighboring Zengjiazhai village, told the Global Times, adding that it had been snowing for 10 days.

The landslide hit the village around 8:20 am, burying the homes of 14 families. At least 46 people are believed to have been buried, among whom 19 were children.

Two injured people have been sent to a nearby hospital, and their conditions are stable after treatment.

“The landslide, which brought about several hundred thousand cubic meters of watery mud to the village, buried all of the houses there and created great difficulties for rescue efforts amid low temperatures,” said Sun Anfa, the leader of a local rescue team.

Xinhua reported on the rescue efforts, while Beijing Cream shared purported footage of the search for survivors:

Xi, general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, said efforts must be made to resettle affected residents, prevent secondary disasters and successfully complete relief work and reconstruction so as to ensure stability.

[…] Snow continued. As of 11 p.m. Friday, rescuers were still searching for the missing, with the help of lamps and life detectors. They hoped to find any survivors despite bitter wind and low temperatures.

[…] “Many soldiers had even no time for their meals,” said Liu Guanneng, head of the fire fighting squad of Zhaotong City, at the scene.

[…] More than 1,000 soldiers, police, fire fighters and mine rescue workers had joined the search operation, said Feng Xuelan, secretary of the Zhenxiong county committee of the Communist Party of China.

At the South China Morning Post, Keith Zhai reported locals’ suspicions that heavy mining may have contributed to the disaster

The cause of the landslide remains unknown. Wu [Liang, a spokesman for the county government] said they occurred occasionally in the region, which was prone to earthquakes and heavy rains. But local residents said over-exploitation by coal miners caused soil erosion and destabilised hillsides.

[…] “The government should have monitored the geological hazards in the region long ago but they have failed to do so,” one resident said.

He said there was a major coal mine close to the buried village.

[…] County government official Xiong Changkai said the village had not been included in the county’s monitoring system because it had never experienced such landslides.

He also denied any link to over-exploitation by miners. “We have a precaution system for landslides, but this time it really was an accident,” Xiong said.

The affected Zhenxiong county borders Yiliang, the site of earthquakes and a subsequent landslide which killed at least 100 people last autumn.

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Nineteen people, 18 of them children, were buried when the landslide hit the school and two other houses in remote Yunnan province, officials say.

Search teams are still looking for survivors at the site. The landslide hit at 08:00 local time (00:00 GMT).

A series of earthquakes, including one of 5.8 magnitude, hit the province on 8 September, killing dozens of people.

Li Zhong, head of Yiliang’s education bureau, said that the students were at school during the national holiday to make up for classes suspended after the September earthquake, reports the China News Service.

According to the Associated Press, the landslide killed at least 5 of the buried school children:

A landslide toppled an elementary school building in a mountainous southwest China county on Thursday, burying 18 pupils and killing at least five of them, a state news agency said.

About 2,000 local cadres, medics, police and military personnel were trying to rescue the victims, the Yiliang county government said on its website.

The landslide smothered the Tiantou Elementary School and hit two farmhouses in Zhenhe village around 8 a.m., it said. More than 800 people were relocated.

While some of the bodies have been found, the search continues for nine missing people, CNN reports:

Hopes are fading that the nine people who remain missing will be found alive, CCTV said.

The landslide followed several days of rain, Yang Jianping, squadron leader of Yiliang County Armed Police, said in an interview with CCTV. A military rescue team of 50 soldiers has been dispatched to the area, he said.

“When we arrived, we saw one side of the mountain had collapsed and covered the primary school,” he said. “We can’t recognize the school at all.”

A woman who answered the phone at the county education commission’s office did not provide CNN with any details. She said officials authorized to talk to the media are out helping with rescue efforts. Calls to the local information office were not answered.

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Landslides in Huangtupo had been exacerbated by changes in water levels in the reservoir, said Fan Xiao, a geologist for a government-linked institute in southwestern Sichuan province, who studied conditions there in 2006.

Dam officials lower water levels by as much as 30 meters during the summer in anticipation of floods, and raise them in winter. The change softens the slopes along its banks, Fan said.

“It’s like a person who’s standing in place, if you push and pull him, he’ll definitely not be as stable as before,” he said.

[…] A shop owner, surnamed Qing, has been told she has to move in the second half of the year. She relocated the first time in 2000 when water from the reservoir flooded her home.

Asked if she thought the government would compensate her this time, she scoffed.

“The more we move, the poorer we get,” she said.

Despite this, officials claim that the dam has been a major boost for the local economy, accelerating development by as much as a century. Flood prevention, another of the dam’s major selling points, has also become a source of some scepticism according to Deng Quanlun at chinadialogue:

Since the Three Gorges reservoir was filled, there have been no repetitions of the severe flooding of 1998, which killed more than 3,700 people and left 15 million homeless. [… But] Informed sources say that local governments downstream of the dam have all asked the operators to release less water in order to reduce flood risks, meaning the dam is under pressure from both sides.

The dam has long faced such difficulties. Upstream, the city of Chongqing complains that the dam makes flood prevention more difficult – that “Chongqing drowns to save Wuhan”. Downstream, there are complaints that it continues to release water even when there are flood risks. Cai Qihua, head of the Yangtze River Commission, said this is a misunderstanding: when the dam holds back floodwaters, the reservoir level does rise, but this has little or no impact on Chongqing upstream. The rising waters in Chongqing are due to water coming from the Jin, Min and Jialing rivers, and water backing up at the Tongluo Gorge, downstream of Chongqing, Cai said.

The dam’s role in flood prevention is to control water coming from the upper reaches of the Yangtze. When it comes to regional flooding downstream, it can only play an indirect role. Weng Lida, formerly head of the Yangtze River Commission’s Water Resources Protection Bureau, explained that the dam can retain water from upstream, but if there is heavy rain downstream, there is nothing it can do. Nor can the dam store all of the floodwaters – it can only hold back those which cannot be safely released into the rivers downstream. “The flood prevention ability of the dam is limited – it can’t do everything,” said Weng.

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The official Xinhua news agency also said another 18 people were still missing following the storms on Thursday in Gansu province.

The agency said more than 350,000 people had been affected by the storms – with 30,000 of them forced to evacuate homes.

Relief teams are said to have reached the affected area in Minxian county.

County officials said many roads had been blocked, homes destroyed and farmland ruined by the rainstorms.

The downpours were said to have lasted only about an hour but brought up to 70mm of rain in some parts.

According to Xinhua, the rains and cold have made it difficult for rescue teams to reach the victims:

Roads were blocked, houses collapsed, farmland destroyed and power supplies and telecommunications services disrupted by the extreme weather, Xu Guangyao, director of the county’s civil affairs bureau, said after the disaster.

Some roads were still blocked Sunday, making it difficult for relief vehicles to pass through.

Workers in bulldozers and excavators were trying to clean up the road, but rains hindered their efforts.

Although nearly 1,000 tents, 1,270 beds and other relief supplies had been sent to the disaster-hit area, local residents were still in need of more relief supplies, such as heavy coats and stoves, because of the freezing weather.

This is not the first incident of weather related accidents in the region. AFP added that different counties have been struck by mudslides and hailstorms:

Min county is 150 kilometres (90 miles) from Zhouqu county, where a rain-triggered mudslide killed about 1,500 people in August 2010.

Hailstorms in the central province of Hunan have also killed six people and left one missing, according to statistics released by the Ministry of Civil Affairs on Sunday, Xinhua reported.

Since May 8 hailstorms have struck across the province, affecting 3.42 million people, the ministry said. About 64,000 people have been relocated to safer areas and 7,600 houses have collapsed.

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The past several months in China have brought devastating floods, a mysterious North Korean jet crash, the Mid-Autumn festival, crackdowns on gambling and much more. A country with nearly the same land area as the United States, China is home to over a billion more people than the U.S. (1.3 billion to be more precise), and as it grows economically, it is grappling with environmental, social and political issues that affect people and places around the world. Collected here, from the past several months, are photographs from around China, the land and the people – their daily lives, challenges, work and play.

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Rescue crews searched Friday for scores of people left missing and feared dead in southwestern China after torrential rains triggered massive mudslides during a summer plagued by deadly rains and flooding.

Rainfall hampered efforts to find 80 people missing in Puladi township, a remote mountain community in Yunnan province. Hillsides loosened by rain crashed down on the riverside township early Wednesday, covering all but the tallest buildings with a layer of mud and rock several feet (meters) thick. Twelve people were killed, the official Xinhua New Agency said Friday.

It was just the latest landslide to strike China. The worst carnage came Aug. 8 in the town of Zhouqu in the northwestern province of Gansu, where 1,407 people were killed and 358 are still missing. More than 40 people were also killed by floods in two nearby cities.

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At least 67 people have been reported missing after new mudslides hit a town in southwest China, adding to the thousands already killed or missing in floods and landslides this year.

Roads, power and telecommunications were cut off on Wednesday after torrential rains slammed Gongshan County town in a mountainous corner of Yunnan province bordering Myanmar.

“The number of casualties is unknown at the moment,” the official Xinhua news agency reported on Wednesday.

However, it said at least 25 people had been hurt in the landslides, of which nine were seriously injured.

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Flags across the country flew at half mast, all public forms of entertainment have been suspended and front pages of the country’s main websites removed all color from their pages.

The day began with thousands of people gathering in Beijing’s central Tiananmen Square, with the somber atmosphere punctuated by shouts of “Come on Zhouqu! Come on China!,” in images shown on state television.

Zhouqu in the northwestern province of Gansu was devastated when an avalanche of mud roared down the slopes of a mountain last weekend after unusually strong rain. The death toll has now risen to 1,239, with another 505 missing.

Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily said such a large public expression of grief would show the country’s determination to get over the disaster.

Officials had warned for years that heavy tree-felling and rapid hydro development were making the mountain area struck by the mudslide vulnerable to flooding and land slips.

Update: China Media Project reproduces black and white covers of China’s newspapers published today.

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The landslides happened early in the morning in the province’s Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

The local government confirmed the death toll and said information was still coming in on missing people.

The worst-hit part of Gannan was Zhouqu county, with the China News Service reporting that half the county was under water. Many houses had collapsed and streets were covered in one yard (meter) of mud and water.

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A landslide caused by rains in southern China left 21 people missing Tuesday, adding to a growing death toll from China’s worst flood season in a decade, which is expected to worsen with heavy rains forecast across the country.

Rescuers searched for 21 people missing after a landslide in Hanyuan County in China’s southern province of Sichuan on Tuesday morning, the official Xinhua News Agency reported. Rocks and mud buried 58 homes and about 4,000 villagers were evacuated from their homes.

Floods this year have already killed at least 823 people, left 437 missing and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage, the State Flood Control and Drought Prevention reported.

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More than 100 people were buried or trapped in a landslide triggered by heavy rain in southwest China on Monday, a local official said, in the latest weather-related disaster to hit the nation.

State television showed rescuers searching through a huge mudslide and what appeared to be concrete rubble in the village of Dazhai in Guizhou province, and a reporter said workers had still not found any signs of life.

“One hundred and seven people from 37 families were trapped or buried,” an official in Guanling county emergencies office told AFP, adding that the number of casualties was not yet known.

“It’s raining hard, making the rescue work difficult,” said the official, surnamed Wang.

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