The news from China is, as ever, a grimly predictable affair. A coal mine disaster, the kind that has become as routine as the sunrise in the Middle Kingdom, has claimed lives. But this time, the details are almost too perfectly grotesque: secret tunnels, unregistered workers, and a death toll that the authorities are, predictably, struggling to quantify.
The United Kingdom, in a fit of moral clarity, has called for an independent probe. Good luck with that. One might as well ask the Emperor to commission a report on the state of his own new clothes.
The Chinese state, you see, is built on a foundation of quiet obfuscation and grand denial. It is a system that treats safety regulations as a suggestion, workers as expendable cogs, and international scrutiny as an insult to its sovereign dignity. The parallels to the late Roman Empire, with its reliance on slave labour and its eventual blindness to internal decay, are almost too obvious to draw.
But I draw them anyway. The Romans, too, had their mines, their aqueducts, their grand constructions built on the backs of the forgotten. And when the barbarians came, they found a state that had long since stopped listening to the screams from below.
The UK's demand for a probe is noble, but it is also naive. China will launch its own investigation, produce a report blaming rogue managers, and move on. The tunnels will be sealed, the unregistered workers will be forgotten, and the world will shrug.
Because we always do. We sigh, we tweet, we write op-eds, and then we return to our comfortable lives, secure in the knowledge that the tragedy happened somewhere else, to someone else. But the real tragedy is not the deaths, tragic as they are.
It is the acceptance that this is how the world works. That labour is cheap, safety is optional, and the truth is a malleable thing. So go ahead, UK, call for your probe.
But do not expect transparency. Expect instead the same old story: a state that knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
