From The China Blog – TIME:
A picture in the South China Morning Post shows this slogan on a banner hanging over the mine in northeastern Shandong province where 172 miners were trapped by a flood last Friday. As the accompanying story points out, some of the hundreds of relatives of the miners waiting outside the gates of the mine while the excruciatingly slow rescue attempt continues have been infuriated by the message of the slogan: “Heaven is merciless. But people can love each other. And the Communist Party has the greatest love of all.” [Full Text]
See also a Washington Post report which interviews family members and colleagues of the trapped miners, who aren’t buying the official explanation that the recent accident was a “natural” disaster:
With each disaster here, an anger has flared among miners and their families, flowing from a sentiment that they have been left to cope for themselves — to endure their 14-hour days underground, to get by on paltry salaries and, from time to time, to lose their loved ones in accidents that everyone laments but no one seems to stop.
The disaster that has consumed this coal town about 300 miles southeast of Beijing has taken its place as one of the worst in recent history, surpassed only by an underground gas explosion two years ago that killed 214 people. As the pumps churn on here at the Zhangzhuang mine — trying to empty the 12 million cubic meters of water and 300,000 cubic meters of mud and coal that rushed in — families have begun to ask why China’s toll cannot be reduced. [Full text]
