China safety chief sees long, hard road

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BEIJING, Dec 21 (Reuters) The equivalent of a of people a day are killed at work in China, safety officials said today, adding it could take another two decades before there is a significant improvement.

But they lauded progress so far this year at closing down dangerous and illegal coal mines and pledged to crack down on corruption and recalcitrant companies that refuse to take safety seriously, although they outlined no concrete new measures.

China, home to the world's most deadly mining industry, reports an average of 320 deaths at work daily, said Li Yizhong, head of the State Administration of Work Safety.

Yet with almost 110,000 work deaths this year, that is still a fall of more than a tenth on 2005, Li told a news conference.

''China is such a large country, and a developing one at that, with 1.3 billion people and is in a rapid pace of industrialisation, so accidents happen easily and cannot be avoided,'' he added.

''In the next ten or 20 years, it will be a development opportunity period as well as a time for very obvious contradictions,'' said Li, who admitted he felt a heavy burden in dealing with China's horrendous safety issues.

''The situation is generally stable and improving, but still serious. I have to say both of these sentences,'' he said. ''We will not be successful overnight.'' Fatal accidents occur almost daily in Chinese mines as safety regulations are ignored and production is pushed beyond safe limits in the rush to get rich. Local officials often turn a blind eye in exchange for a cut of the profits.

State media today said that two mine owners in the southern province of Guangdong had been jailed for eleven years and ten years respectively for a colliery flood that killed 121 people in June 2005.

''The background of some accidents is that dereliction of duty, exchanging favours for money, collusion between business and officials and corruption is quite serious,'' said Li, who has been reported to pound his desk in anger at mine disasters.

To deal with them, the government will have closed more than 2,500 small and unsafe coal mines this year and about the same next year, said Zhao Tiechui, head of the coal mine safety administration.

Li added that with coal prices high -- the black mineral powers more than half of China's booming economy -- the danger now was that greed would mean bosses reopened closed mines.

But he sought to assuage worries the crackdown would impact economic development, either nationally or locally, though he said he understood the worries of local officials.

Despite the mine closures, national coal output would still rise more than eight per cent this year, Li said.

''Grassroots officials have a lot of problems and have made them known, like what will we do if supplies get tight after small mines are closed? Will GDP fall? What about jobs? How will people eat?'' he asked.

''You have to help them solve these problems, and tell them how other places have coped. The majority of local officials are well-intentioned, and will increasingly come round to upholding the central government's direction,'' Li said.