Welcome to Foreign PolicyOverview of China.
Highlights this week: China has been rocked by two fatal mining accidentsup Chinese cartographer is placed under investigation, by the tech giant Tencent is preparing to launch a WeChat spy agency.
Welcome to Foreign PolicyOverview of China.
Highlights this week: China has been rocked by two fatal mining accidentsup Chinese cartographer is placed under investigation, by the tech giant Tencent is preparing to launch a WeChat spy agency.
China Rocked by Serious Mining Accidents
An explosion in Liushenyu, a privately-run coal mine in Shanxi province, killed at least 82 people on May 22, marking China’s worst mining accident in more than 15 years. Then, on Sunday, an illegal operation in Yunnan province—possibly mining rare earths—it has collapsedand killed five people.
The official handling of these disasters followed a known structure. Local authorities initially reduced casualties before the central government took over the investigation and published a large death toll. Major accidents stain officers’ records and often lead to prosecutions of low-level employees, creating a strong incentive to suppress information about them.
A flurry of online outrage came days after Liushenyu’s incident, but the debate is now being moderated. Chinese state media will not be able to publish follow-up news unless it closely follows the official line.
Coal mining is a sensitive topic in China because it has long been presented as a success story of state-led security reforms. After mining deaths every year ranked more than 7,000 In the late 1990s, Beijing launched a program in 2005 that pushed for increased safety regulations, tougher prosecutions of negligent managers, and a crackdown on illegal mining.
Officially, the reforms were successful. Annual mining fatalities declined sharply, falling in the low hundreds by the late 2010s. The number of known illegal mines also decreased significantly after 2014, when small mines began to be phased out and consolidated under large state-owned companies.
Beneath the rosy statistics, serious problems remain. Safety reforms undoubtedly saved lives, but the decline in deaths was due in part manipulation of statistics. Unregistered workers were often not included in official counts, local governments systematically underreported deaths, and some deaths were reclassified as due to natural disasters rather than security failures.
Today, illegal mining is less common than illegal production within legal activities. Most mines maintain what is known black faces– area where output is not recorded to avoid preferential treatment and taxes. Large mines are full of honey and uncharted tunnels by unregistered workers.
For Liushenyu, only 124 of the 247 miners present at the time of the explosion were legally employed.
Those who work in illegal activities are usually elderly, unqualified and lack basic safety equipment, such as the tagged security cards that enable rescuers to find people in an emergency. Desperate to earn an income, they work 12- to 16-hour shifts for wages below the legal minimum. As elsewhere in China, free association is illegal.
For mine owners, however, the incentive is high. Depending on undocumented work regulations and evasion regulations, some operations can generate up to three times their official output and sell the surplus on the illegal market.
Regulatory officials often turn a blind eye to illegal practices and are known to leak inspection schedules to mine owners, who can put on a Potemkin facade. The latest disaster will prompt heightened enforcement, at least until authorities turn their attention elsewhere.
In the long term, China’s green transition could reduce the need for coal. In 2025, coal power generation fell for the first time in more than 50 years. Yet coal still supplies most of China’s electricity, and production continues high records. Strict enforcement will mean a drop in production—and that could be a a hard price to pay amid the global energy crisis.
What we’re after
Shangri-La Talk. For the second year in a row, China’s Defense Minister Dong Jun did not to attend The Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, the region’s main security forum; a major general represented Beijing instead. China began regularly sending its defense minister to the event in 2019, at a time of heightened tensions with the United States.
The decision to reduce its representation in Shangri-La may be motivated by the belief that international forums are working against China. Beijing has long called for conflicts with its neighbors to be dealt with on a bilateral basis.
Dong may also want to avoid being seen by Westerners at a politically sensitive time for the Chinese military, lest it become fodder for accusations of conspiracy or espionage. Although Dong often travels abroad, it is often to ideologically friendly states such as Cambodia or Russia.
Xinjiang atrocities. A new report of Financial Times map of the vast network of prisons and detention centers in Xinjiang, revealing the continued incarceration of the masses of Uyghurs. The efforts of destroy Uyghur culture continue even if the region has been a tourist attraction to Han Chinese.
At the same time, the Uyghurs are facing severe travel restrictions and they are largely unable to move freely within China, except when they are transported to the factories below forced labor program.
Most Read FP This Week
Technology and Business
The map maker has been cleaned up. China’s most successful cartographer, Zhou Chenghu, has been detention and placed under investigation for corruption and “gross breach of duty.” Zhou, 62, built a business empire on spatial data while working as a scientist, including a pioneering role in what is known as China. low economywhich uses drones for the daily transportation of goods.
Cartography in China is both political and commercially lucrative. Sensitive areas have been left out or distorted for security reasons, while disputes over land use are often based on survey data. I would suggest that Zhou went astray by providing false map data to help one side in a legal battle.
WeChat AI agent. Chinese tech giant Tencent saw its shares rise increase after reports that it plans to launch an artificial intelligence agent—an autonomous assistant that can carry out user commands—within WeChat, the country’s ubiquitous app. While Chinese users have embraced AI agents, full integration into the WeChat ecosystem could drive further adoption.
One question is why Chinese consumers seem to be more enthusiastic about AI agents than their Western counterparts, despite agents’ security vulnerabilities and negligence for critical errors. It follows a general pattern of indifference in online financial behavior, the first phase of which culminated in peer-to-peer relationships. lending crisis of 2018.
The crisis shows something else: The Chinese public seems to believe that the government will intervene in the event of serious fraud and is therefore willing to take more risks.
