According to the video captured by the camera surveillance, when the quake occurred at 8:02 a.m. Saturday, the pandas were slack-jawed for a while, and then some of them climbed onto trees, and some others fled to somewhere else they believed safe, said Heng Yi, a spokesman with the base.

“Those daring ones remained calm, while the timid ones suffered from shock,” he said, adding the pandas needs extra care and even psychological therapy.

Breeders provided abundant food for the pandas to assure them “nothing is wrong,” and for those young cubs who were scared the most, breeders will play with them to ease their tense, said a director surnamed Wang in charge of animal management of the base.

“Breeders’ close-distance communications will help comfort the pandas,” said Wang.

The welfare of wild pandas in the regions’ several nature reserves has yet to be established. Those in the nearby Nine Peaks reserve, near the epicenter of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, face a longer-term challenge, however. According to Greenpeace, phosphate mining has been encroaching on the reserve, forcing the pandas into “an ever smaller and fragmented” habitat. From Luna Lin at chinadialogue:

The central part of Longmen Mountain, where the giant panda lives, is China’s fifth largest area for phosphate production and accounts for more than 10% of the nation’s total annual production.

However, despite its huge mineral reserve, the region is seen by many as unsuitable for mining due to its vulnerability to natural disasters, as shown by the major earthquake in Sichuan province this weekend. Yang Yong, Hengduan Mountain Research Society’s senior geological engineer, said further exploitation by mining groups would increase the threat of geological disasters in this disaster-prone area.

[…] Initially, the popularity of the panda prevented any boundary changes. However, between 2010 and 2012 phosphate prices rose from less than 100 yuan to more than 500 yuan per tonne. And by August 2012, Sichuan’s provincial government had approved the boundary adjustment application, with the 325-hectare Suopengzi area, the hinterland of giant panda’s habitat, transferred outside the reserve.

See more on last weekend’s earthquake and its aftermath on CDT.

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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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At The New York Times, Edward Wong summed up the sensitive social and environmental issues surrounding the mine, from which a leaked propaganda directive issued on Saturday warned domestic media away:

Ethnic tensions have played into the outrage over mining. Most of the mines in Tibet belong to large state-owned enterprises based in eastern China, and they mostly bring in ethnic Han managers and workers, shutting Tibetans out. Of the 83 miners buried by the Gyama avalanche last week, only two were Tibetan, according to official news reports.

Environmental concerns, though, have dominated. Scientists have documented significant problems brought by the ravages of the Gyama mine, which belongs to China Gold International Resources Corporation, a company based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that is a unit of the state-owned China National Gold Group.

A paper published in 2010 by Science of the Total Environment, a journal, discussed the impact of mining activities on the surface water in the valley, including on streams that feed the Lhasa River. The researchers found elevated concentrations of six metals in the surface water and streambeds in the middle and upper reaches of the valley. These “pose a considerably high risk to the local environment,” according to a summary; meanwhile, pools of heavy metals were “a great potential threat to downstream water users.”

Establishing the mine at Gyama resulted in the relocation of nomads who had roamed the valley and grazed their animals there. The forced settlement of nomads is a policy that Communist Party officials have been pushing for years in many parts of Tibet, despite the widespread resentment it causes.

chinadialogue, meanwhile, highlighted its own article from 2011 reporting local Tibetans’ protests at the mine’s environmental impact, and warning of the area’s seismic instability.

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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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A similar bill had been promoted by the union for the past five years, and was defeated each time. When Guizhou Guochuang Energy Holding Ltd. said it was raising funds to invest in a Tennessean mining company last May, the union found new ammunition to use in its battle against mountaintop mining. The Wall Street Journal Reports:

The Tennessee group, founded in 1977, has long opposed surface mining because it says the practice affects the property rights of hunters and fisherman, and can hurt the state’s tourism industry by damaging mountain scenery that draw in tourists, according to chairman Lloyd Daugherty. This is the first time the group—which supports limited government and has opposed a push for a state income tax—has raised the issue of foreign investment.

“It’s not right for the red Chinese to come in and take part of our heritage,” Mr. Daugherty said.

A bill, which would prohibit surface-mining operations from disturbing the ridge line at elevations of 2,000 feet or more, is scheduled for a vote by state lawmakers Wednesday. Similar efforts have failed in the past, but the new bill’s sponsor, Democratic state Rep. Gloria Johnson, said the ads and Chinese investment will have an impact.

“I don’t think most Tennesseeans are going to like the idea that we’re going to give our mountains over to a Chinese company,” she said.

The Chattanooga Times Free Press has more from the TCU spokesman, further displaying the use of red-scare tactics to promote the union’s cause:

TCU Chairman Lloyd Daugherty said, “Every Tennessean, regardless of political affiliation, should be appalled by the idea of allowing the red Chinese to destroy the very mountains crossed by Daniel Boone.”

While Tennessee is “a proud red [Republican] state … the Tennessee Conservative Union is not willing to go that red,” Daugherty said.

[...]Daugherty said TCU’s position is different from what he calls “radical environmentalists” because the group does support coal mining — just not “blowing the tops off mountains.”

TCU’s position drew applause from Appalachian Voices, an environmental group, but environmentalists are playing down “save Tennessee mountains from communist China” issue.

“It doesn’t matter if somebody is from Beijing or Bristol, we don’t think they should be blowing up mountains,” Appalachian Voices said in a posting on its website.

Knoxnews.com reports that, despite the political ad, the bill was killed yesterday after an “impassioned exchange in a House committee.”

For another case of anti-Chinese sentiment being used in American political advertisement, see “‘Racist’ Superbowl Political Ad Under Fire,” via CDT. For more coverage of U.S.-bound Chinese FDI and politics, see “Chinese FDI in the U.S.: Separating Politics from Reality,” a Caixin podcast.

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The Siumut party in Greenland, led by Aleqa Hammond, has just won 42% of the vote, allowing it to form a coalition government in place of the current ruling party led by Kleist.

[…] Hammond, 47, who was educated in Canada and brought up with traditional skills such as curing seal skins, said she would take a more critical look at Chinese mining investments in Greenland. She also pledged to increase royalties on miners and ensure they talked through staffing plans with trade unions.

“We are welcoming companies and countries that are interested in investing in Greenland,” she said in her first interview since the election. “At the same time we have to be aware of the consequences as a people. Greenland should work with countries that have the same values as we have, on how human rights should be respected. We are not giving up our values for investors’ sake.”

The election result may be a short-term setback in a long-term game, however. From Reuters:

When asked about how much Greenland could make in revenues from oil, Greenland’s [now ousted] mining and petroleum minister Ove Karl Berthelsen replied, “Oil? We have to find it first.”

“People say mining has almost started,” Finance Minister Maliina Abelsen told Reuters. “It is a lot more difficult than that. This is not the best investment climate for finance. I worry expectations may be too high.”

[…] That said, Greenland’s long-term promise remains alluring.

[…] Damien Degeorges, founder of the Arctic Policy and Economic Forum, say few countries could afford to be complacent.

“Greenland is a long-term strategy,” Degeorges said. “Like the Arctic, it will not be some 10-year fashion that will go away. You cannot take the risk of not being there.”

Another sign of China’s growing Arctic presence came this week with the news that the country’s first commercial voyage through the northeast passage over Eurasia is expected later in the year. This will follow in the wake of the Chinese icebreaker Xuelong (Snow Dragon) and 45 other vessels which made the trip in 2012. From Alister Doyle at Reuters:

For China, the world’s No. 2 economy after the United States, the route would save time and money. The distance from Shanghai to Hamburg is 2,800 nautical miles (5,185 kms) shorter via the Arctic than via the Suez Canal, Yang said.

[…] Yang showed delegates at a conference about the Arctic in Oslo organised by The Economist magazine longer-term scenarios under which between five and 15 percent of China’s international trade, mostly container traffic, would use the route by 2020.

[…] “We see a potential there but it will not be the new Suez Canal,” said Christian Bonfils, managing director of Denmark-based Nordic Bulk Carriers which sent 10 ships through the route in 2012 carrying products such as iron ore.

“You will not see a boom in the construction of ice-class vessels – the season is too short,” he said of a shipping season that lasts from about July to November, referring to ships needing specially hardened hulls.

See more on prospects for Arctic shipping at chinadialogue and Foreign Policy.

Greenland’s voters are not the only ones perturbed by the possible side-effects of a gold rush in the warming Arctic. At The New York Times this week, the University of California’s Paul Arthur Berkman expressed concern that competition over newly accessible resources might get out of hand:

Several countries, along with corporations like ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, are preparing to exploit the region’s enormous oil and natural gas reserves. New shipping routes will compete with the Panama and Suez Canals. Vast fisheries are being opened to commercial harvesting, without regulation. Coastal areas that are home to indigenous communities are eroding into the sea. China and the European Union are among non-Arctic governments rushing to assert their interests in the region. Some states have increased military personnel and equipment there.

The most fundamental challenge for the Arctic states is to promote cooperation and prevent conflict. Both are essential, but a forum for achieving those goals does not yet exist.

The closest such forum to date is the Arctic Council, comprising Canada, Denmark (representing Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States. But the council concerns itself with economic and environmental issues, not security. China, like the E.U., South Korea and Japan, is now pursuing a seat at the table as a permanent observer to cement its status as a “near-Arctic nation”. From Einar Benediktsson and Thomas R. Pickering at The New York Times:

Although China has not stated an official policy on the Arctic, it is not likely to support the unilateral decisions of the Arctic Council. The polar sea route is of major importance to the world’s leader in manufacturing. And China has made a major effort in recent years to acquire access to mineral and energy resources in many parts of the world. Chinese public institutes and scholars have maintained that Arctic maritime routes and seabed riches should be for the use of all mankind.

China has also begun to court Iceland to help get access to the Arctic Council. Last year, Iceland was the first stop on an official European tour by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and a large Chinese delegation. And when the Chinese icebreaker Xuelong paid a call on Iceland, the crew was received by President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson at his residence. The colossus China and tiny Iceland, half a world apart, are now discussing a bilateral free-trade agreement.

[…] In short, China is reaching out for a position in the Arctic, beginning in Greenland, followed by support facilities in Iceland — which is not a member of the European Union and seemingly has been put out in the cold by the United States — with potential use for naval vessels patrolling the Arctic and the Northeast Polar Passage.

But a report published last November by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute played down China’s Arctic ambitions. Tom Levitt summed up its findings at chinadialogue:

China’s primary interest, with no sovereign rights in the region, is in access to shorter shipping routes for food and resource security, but there is also a secondary objective, namely China’s quest to be seen as a major power, says the SIPRI.

[…] However, in comparison to Antarctica, the Arctic is of limited importance to Chinese officials, with just one-fifth of China’s polar resources devoted to the Arctic, says the report.

What’s more, it points to China’s uneasy relationship with Norway, an Arctic Council member and world leader in deep-sea and cold-climate drilling technology, in recent years. If the Arctic were a priority for China it would not have upheld punitive measures against Norway for more than two years, says the report.

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One of the world’s fastest-growing economies, Mongolia finds itself at odds with the sources of its new-found wealth: the foreign miners and financiers dazzled by the unfathomable bounty under its vast terrain. Some foreigners fear that populist politicians, pandering to a belief that the nation is selling its birthright too cheaply, may kill the goose before it has laid any golden eggs. Almost certainly not; but “resource nationalism” will surely make life uncomfortable for geese.

[…] During the campaign [ahead of parliamentary elections last June], a scandal blew up when the foreign-controlled owner of Ovoot Tolgoi, a Mongolian coal mine, wanted to sell it to a Chinese state-owned enterprise. Acutely conscious of their commercial dependence on China, Mongolians are sensitive to any hint of its gaining control over them. A “strategic entities foreign-investment law” was pushed through, tightening approval procedures. Mongolia is far from unique in having such a law, but it was taken as a sign of an incipient backlash.

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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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Hao, who asked that he be identified only by his surname, is a coal miner in Hegang, a mining town in northeastern Heilongjiang province. Like many of the miners in Hegang, Hao is employed at small bituminous coal mine by one of the dozens of private mining companies that operate the area’s hundred or so mines. His mine employs a few hundred people, most of whom — like Mr. Hao — work below the surface.

[...S]tudies have shown bituminous coal dust to be remarkably carcinogenic. A 2012 study of homes in Xuanwei, China, found that people whose households cooked with bituminous coal are far more likely to develop lung cancer (18-20% likely) than those who did not (0.5% likely). Men are 36 times more likely to die of lung cancer if they lived in homes that cooked with bituminous coal; women are 99 times more likely. Unsurprisingly, these results are also apparent in miners; a 2011 study of coal miners in Xuanwei found that coal miners also are at increased risk of lung cancer, and that the younger a miner starts and the longer he stays in the mines, the more likely he is to develop cancer. Specific rates varied based on subjects’ family histories and exposure to carcinogens outside of work, but in general, coal miners were found to be at least twice as likely to develop lung cancer as regular citizens, and in some instances the increase in risk for miners was even higher.

[...] The soot also gets in his lungs, of course, and with thirty years of mining already under his belt, Mr. Hao — who has not been screened — has a high risk of developing lung cancer even if he never sets foot in a coal mine again. He knows coal mining is a deadly profession, and is grateful to have made it this far without any major accidents. But though the number of deadly accidents is dropping, cancer risk rates climb with each successive year a miner works. Many miners who escape being buried alive or killed in explosions will ultimately still fall victim to coal mining’s slowest and quietest danger: lung cancer.

When a miner gets cancer, or even gets injured on the job, results can vary. Mr. Hao tells us smaller mining companies don’t provide mine workers with insurance, or even regular contracts, so if you get sick, whether or not you’ll get financial help with your medical bills from the company is very much up for grabs. In his experience, Hao tells us, the people who get larger compensation settlements tend to be the people capable of making a fuss and causing trouble for the company if their demands aren’t met. If you and your family members can’t raise a stink, he says, you’ll get less money.

See also Black Lungs: Hidden Tolls of Coal Mining, via CDT.

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Post tags: air pollution, black lung, coal, coal industry, coal mining, lung cancer, mining, pollution
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The Xinhua news agency reported that there were 28 workers underground Saturday in the state-owned Xiangshi coal mine in southeastern Guizhou province when the coal and gas explosion hit at about 11 a.m. local time ((0300 UTC). Xinhua said five of those were rescued.

Nearly 2,000 people died in coal mine accidents last year in China, where lax safety standards make the mines among the world’s deadliest. But official statistics show the number of fatalities has been falling, dropping 19 percent between 2010 and 2011.

China’s coal mines continue to be one of the deadliest in the world, due to lax regulations, corruption, and inefficiency. According to Bloomberg, the State Council is tightening the rules for reopening coal mines after recent accidents:

Mines that don’t meet the necessary safety requirements shouldn’t resume operations under any conditions, the council said in yesterday’s statement, citing illegal reopenings as the cause of several deadly accidents recently.

China suspended operations at smaller coal mines earlier this month to boost safety ahead of a once-in-a-decade leadership transition, and policy makers are moving to improve standards after spate of accidents. Eighteen people were killed yesterday at a mine in the southwestern province of Guizhou.

Small mines with little resources and that don’t meet safety standards shouldn’t easily receive permits to reopen, the council said. Larger mines without necessary safety technology should consider merging with bigger companies that do, it said.

Read more about mine safety in China, via CDT.

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Post tags: coal mining, Guizhou, mine safety, mining, mining industry
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Huffman also wrote about the site and his project for Asia Society:

The Buddhists that picked the location of a religious center in Mes Aynak, Afghanistan, some 2,000 years ago did so in part to make ornaments and coins from the copper at the site. Today, a Chinese mining company may destroy what they left behind to extract that same resource.

That is, unless a team of Afghan archaeologists led by Philippe Marquis, director at the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan (DAFA), can put a stop to it. While making a documentary film about the mining project from July 2011 to April 2012, I filmed Marquis and his team frantically searching for artifacts and others attempting rescue preservation with limited equipment like cloth wraps and plastic tarps.

“We have only discovered the tip of the iceberg, a mere 10 percent of the site,” said Marquis, who believes this could easily be a 10-year excavation project.

Efforts to save and preserve the massive site have been drastically scaled back to a project whose best hope is to merely document the site before the China Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) begins copper excavation in 2014. The remaining cultural relics and immense structures, which are both too large and fragile to be moved, will all be destroyed.

Read more about Mes Aynak via CDT and Wikipedia and from Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage. See photos of the site from LiveScience.

This post has been edited to correct the name of the Alliance for the Restoration of Cultural Heritage.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Afghanistan, Buddhism, copper, cultural relics, mes aynak, mining
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Already this summer, the China National Petroleum Corporation, in partnership with a company controlled by relatives of President Karzai, began pumping oil from the Amu Darya field in the north. An investment consortium arranged by JPMorgan Chase is mining gold. Another Chinese company is trying to develop a huge copper mine. Four copper and gold contracts are being tendered, and contracts for rare earth metals could be offered soon.

[…] The Mes Aynak mine, in Logar Province, is another trove of potential Afghan wealth awarded to the Chinese in 2007. It is already behind schedule, and no work has begun on a railroad yet. Mr. Shahrani is adamant mining will start in two years and blames the discovery of Buddhist ruins and artifacts, as well as Soviet-era mines that had to be cleared, for the delay.

[…] At the Amu Darya oil field in June, President Karzai’s government accused a rival, the warlord Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, of putting pressure on the Chinese oil company to make illegal payoffs. General Dostum’s party said he wanted the Chinese only to hire more local labor. And at Mes Aynak, where the government says nine villages were displaced, the mining project has caused tensions among locals contending for compensation for their land.

A collection of striking photographs accompanies the article.

See more coverage of China’s quest for resources from Australia to Zambia via Canada, Mongolia, Myanmar and Peru, as well as past posts on the threat to Buddhist ruins at Mes Aynak, on CDT.

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Post tags: Afghanistan, archaeology, Buddhism, CNPC, copper, gold, mes aynak, mining, mining industry, natural resources, oil, rare earth elements, Soviet Union
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When Mr Hu took up his post in 2009, it might have seemed a cushy assignment. Inner Mongolia’s backward economy was booming thanks to demand for its minerals, ranging from copper to rare earths, but especially its coal. Its ethnic Mongols were far less rebellious than the unruly Tibetans upon whom Hu Jintao imposed martial law in 1989 when he was Tibet’s party chief (Hu Chunhua, who is described in official hagiographies as a fluent Tibetan speaker, was there at the time, too, as a junior official). Inner Mongolia has long been a majority ethnic-Han province, with Mongols making up less than 20% of its 24.7m people (several hundred thousand of them are herders). In May 2011, however, Mongols in Xilin Gol, a sparsely populated prefecture about the size of Britain, rattled Mr Hu by staging the region’s biggest protests in 20 years.

[…] To the herders, mining brings few obvious benefits. Over the past decade, thanks largely to the rush for resources, Inner Mongolia has recorded the fastest GDP growth of any Chinese province (17% annually on average between 2001 and 2011—see chart). But mine workers are mostly hired from elsewhere, says Sun Xueli of the Inner Mongolia Academy of Social Sciences. Herders also find it hard to find jobs in Inner Mongolia’s prospering cities. Their mother tongue, Mongolian, is unintelligible to most Hans. Some hotels in Hohhot forbid staff from using it, says a Mongol academic.

Government efforts to protect the grasslands from over-grazing are not making the herders’ lives any easier. Even as money-spinning mines have proliferated, restrictions have been imposed on grazing. Over the past decade the government has moved more than a quarter of Xilin Gol’s herders off poor-quality grassland into agricultural or urban jobs. But the policy is resented by some Mongols as an attempt to eliminate herding, which they say the government regards as backward.

Efforts to settle nomadic herders in the name of grassland protection are euphemistically described as “ecological migration”. But a Mongolian rapper sang last year, “Overgrazing is a myth and a lie/ We have grazed animals here thousands of years/ Why has the desertification started since only a few decades ago?” Traditional grazing had become part of the grassland ecosystem, and preventing it has promoted not natural restoration but further degradation. At Human Rights in China, Tenzin Norbu of the Central Tibetan Administration (or “Government in Exile”) argues that both the social and ecological effects of the similar policies enacted in Tibet have been devastating, and that their real purpose is to clear the way for further mining.

In 2003, a grassland rehabilitation policy was implemented throughout China’s grasslands and in pastoral areas. In Chinese, the Restore Grassland Policy is called tuimu huanco（退牧还草）, which means “closing pastures to restore grasslands.” The key measure of this policy is the relocation of herders from the grasslands to state-built housing, a measure that has been intensified in recent years. The land lease certificates guaranteeing nomads long term land tenure have been nullified. Instantly, all of the herders’ skills, risk management strategies, environmental services, traditional knowledge, and biodiversity conservation practices were made superfluous. The harshest measures have been enforced in Golok and Yushu prefectures, in the area China considers to be the source of its great rivers. There, in Chinese view, the downstream water supply is threatened by rangeland degradation caused by destructive nomads. In this large area, nomads are frequently “villagized” in new concrete settlements called “line villages” that are far from their customary grazing land, and they are required to sell their livestock.

[…] Joblessness and alcoholism amongst the youth are prevalent in the new settlements—where the elders are often seen reminiscing their past lives and reliving them in their memories, and the younger ones are scavenging to earn a little extra money. From our recent interactions with drogpas and herders who fled into exile in India, and from research conducted inside Tibet, we came to know that the current policy of forced “villagization” is in fact a very strategic move on the part of the state to keep all the mobile pastoral wanderers on a tight leash and to have open access to pastures for extractive industries without facing any resentment. The policy also enables the central government to boast that it has made sizable investments in elevating the lifestyles of local residents. But, as many anthropologist and scholars recognize, development has less to do with external materialistic life than with the freedom to choose and to lead the life that one values and respects. Given the choice of livelihood, we believe that almost all the residents of these newly constructed concrete settlements would prefer to go back to their previous lifestyle without a second thought, even it if meant leaving a two-bedroom house.

In addition to “ecological migration” policies and the encroachment of thirsty mining operations, Inner Mongolian herders face a modern industrial farming system which does not accommodate traditional practices. From Shu Ni at chinadialogue:

Dairy production is split: on one side, the milk of pasture-grazed cattle does not reach industrialised supply chains, but is processed into traditional foods by herders. On the other side, large-scale dairy farms on the edges of cities and on main roads, their cattle fed on fodder and milked robotically, sell milk to big companies.

[…] Despite years of visits to Inner Mongolia, I have never heard of dairy giants purchasing milk from naturally grazed cattle. Some milk does originate in Inner Mongolia, but it comes from cows in dairy farms around the cities, raised on fodder, not grass. Milk from grazing cattle does not reach the industrialised supply chain. The herders continue to go bust and the number of farmers and cows is dwindling. But for the dairy companies, sales are increasing. There is more to this than meets the eye.

Many of Inner Mongolia’s problems are mirrored across the border in the independent Mongolian republic, an independent post-Soviet democracy whose 600,000 square miles contain a population of only 2.7 million. (Inner Mongolia accommodates almost 4 million Mongolians and nearly 21 million others on an area three-quarters the size). Its GDP growth is now the world’s highest, driven mainly by China’s appetite for raw materials. From Dan Levin at The New York Times:

First-world profits are colliding with third-world problems. A series of flock-devastating winters and the lure of mining riches have attracted thousands of herders from the grasslands. They live on the city’s outskirts in crowded yurt slums some locals refer to as Mongolia’s favelas. Unemployment is rampant there; electricity and drinkable water are not. The less fortunate take shelter in the sewers, where they huddle beside hot-water pipes when the temperature plunges to 40 below.

“At the moment people are waiting for the mining wealth to somehow spill over to them,” said Sumati Luvsandendev, director of the Sant Maral Foundation, a nonprofit organization. According to the foundation’s recent polls, 96 percent of Mongolians think corruption is widespread and 80 percent say they believe their country’s oligarchs have too much power.

[…] “Mongolia is at a crossroad,” said Saurabh Sinha, an economist with the United Nations Development Program in Ulan Bator. “Will the government use the mining wealth sustainably and equitably for improving the lives of all its people? Or will it become a Nigeria?”

Attitudes towards ethnic politics are one apparent difference between the two Mongolias. The Economist notes that unrest in Inner Mongolia, at least compared with Tibet or Xinjiang, has remained relatively free from anti-Han and “separatist” overtones. But according to Aubrey Belford at The Global Mail in February (via Max Fisher), the same issues have given rise to a heavily racialised nationalism in the Mongolian republic. Illustrating this is another rapper, Gee:

He begins, in the guttural rolls and pops of the Mongolian language:

“Way better than a chink who perceives the world with his stomach / I’m a Mongol / That’s why you have to bow to me.”

As the crowd sings along, he paints a picture often depicted here – adorned with unvarnished racism – of the proud land of Genghis Khan being gobbled up by voracious Chinese. All around, money is flowing in, but greed, division and miscegenation reign. Until, that is, Mongols unite to throw out the interlopers.

[…] “The whores you bought, the ministers you bought / They’re not Mongols – they’re half-breeds / Mongolia is growing and will not be tricked by the Chinese / The Mongolian era is coming to wipe everything old out of its way”

Everywhere the rise of China is disrupting the old order of things, realigning economies and shaking up politics. But perhaps no country is finding itself as dramatically sucked in by China’s economic magnetism, or as utterly terrified by its growing geopolitical clout.

Wendy Qian contributed to this post.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: coal mining, dairy industry, farmers, grassland, Hu Chunhua, Hu Jintao, human rights conditions, Inner Mongolia, Inner Mongolia protests, leadership transition, mining, mining industry, nationalism, overdevelopment, Tibet, Tibet environment, Xinjiang
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