The BBC has finally arrived at the scene of China’s worst mining disaster in a decade, their satellite truck spluttering to a halt just as the death toll reached a frankly inconvenient number. This reporter was there, sweating through a third notebook and a second liver. The mine, a gaping maw in the earth’s crust, now resembles a Dantean souvenir shop: constant tremors, weeping widows, and a toxic cloud of ‘we deeply regret to inform you’ hanging in the air.
The Beeb, ever the professional, has set up a broadcasting camp. Their correspondent, a man so clipped he looks recycled, is preparing his ‘solemn but not too solemn’ face. He’ll tell us numbers: 89 dead, 42 rescued, 17 still missing. But numbers are for people who trust arithmetic. I trust the gilded lie that this is an ‘accident’. Every mining disaster is a geological epitaph for corner-cutting and safety manuals used as firelighters.
Meanwhile, the families wait. They wait with the patience of tectonic plates, a patience born from knowing that their loved ones’ lives were worth less than the coal they dug. A woman clutches a photograph of her son, his coal-dusted grin mocking the clean-shaven officials who speak in ‘promises of inquiry’. The officials stand beneath a banner that reads ‘Safety First’, a phrase that in this context has the grim humour of a clown at a funeral.
Local journalists are being kept at a distance, herded like compliant sheep. One man, his press card hanging from a frayed lanyard, tells me he’s been threatened with ‘relocation to a more scenic region’. That’s China-speak for ‘disappeared’. I offer him my flask. He declines. His loss.
I have filed my own report: a messy, gin-stained document that calls the disaster a ‘preventable massacre of the working class’. They won’t print it. They never do. But the truth has a way of seeping through the bureaucratic concrete, just like the toxic water seeping through the mine’s collapsed shaft.
As dusk falls, the BBC lights up the site like a film set. They’ll broadcast the tragedy into a million living rooms, where it will be consumed with dinner and forgotten by tea. I, meanwhile, will be scribbling in the dark, my pen a blunt instrument against the crushing weight of official silence. And I will drink to the dead: a toast of cheap gin, because it’s all they deserve from a world that priced them so low.
