Secret tunnels and unregistered workers: China's coal mine disaster is a reminder of darker days

In Shanxi, the province that sits at the heart of China's coal-mining industry, there's long been a saying: "Only go down a coal pit when you have no other way out."

For decades, life in these pits was intertwined with tragedy.

It became so common that it gave rise to other sayings: about how miners were "exchanging their lives for money" or "staking their lives for tomorrow" when they ventured into underground tunnels where they died from gas explosions, flooding and shaft collapses.

Over the past decade, safety reforms steadily erased the industry's deadly reputation, and those days were thought to be behind China - until 22 May, when a blast at the Liushenyu coal mine in Shanxi killed 82 people and injured more than 120 others.

China's worst coal mining disaster in more than 15 years happened as the country continues its ambitious pivot towards green energy - a reminder that it is still struggling to shake off its dependency on an industry that has proven dangerous so many times in the past.

"Everyone knew this was a high-methane mine," says Chen, a miner who previously worked at the Liushenyu coal mine for two years.

"My feeling is there must still be miners inside. The tunnels underground are complicated and criss-crossed. There are hidden mine faces."

With a mine like this, Chen says, "it was only a matter of time" until disaster struck.

'This accident should not have happened'

Hopes of finding survivors have been all but extinguished at the Liushenyu coal mine.

"The explosion swept to the entrance and knocked all of us down. We could not see anyone; the dust was incredibly thick," a survivor later told China's state-run news outlet CCTV. "After running for more than 10 minutes, my consciousness blurred. I was terrified."

Authorities are yet to confirm the cause of the blast, but experts tell the BBC that such explosions typically happen when a build-up of methane gas or coal dust comes into contact with an ignition source.

And that even in inherently risky mine environments, human error most often proves to be the fatal factor: management failure, flawed safety systems and flouted protocols.

A properly designed coal mine is "fully capable of preventing an explosion through systematic safeguards," explains Hong Chen, a professor at Jiangnan University's Institute for National Security and Green Development.

"Based on the coal mine safety management and technical systems we have in place today, let me be very clear about this: this accident should not have happened."

Initial findings show Tongzhou Group, the company operating the privately owned coal mine, had committed "serious illegal violations", authorities said, without specifying what they discovered. The company has not responded to the allegations and the BBC's previous attempts to reach them were unsuccessful.

State media reports have painted a picture of rampant safety violations at the mine: a notice board at the site that suggested only half of the workers underground on the day of the disaster were officially registered; the discovery that many workers in the mine did not carry mandatory tracking devices; and secret tunnels, along with an inaccurate blueprint, which complicated rescue efforts.

A worker at the Liushenyu coal mine told Chinese outlet Lengshan Record that the company did not allow workers to enter the mine with tracking devices because they were illegally mining coal seams that had not been approved. "Wearing trackers would expose it," he said.

It has also emerged that Liushenyu mine had been flagged for safety violations before, appearing on a 2024 list by the Chinese National Mine Safety Administration of coal mines with "severe hazards". The following year, Tongzhou Group were penalised twice for safety violations, state media reported.

Authorities investigating the blast have put the people running Tongzhou Group under "control measures" and halted operations at the company's other mines.

Fatality rates in China's coal mining industry have fallen more than 90% since 1990, thanks to a package of safety reforms. But according to Prof Chen, the recent tragedy shows that "just because we've made progress overall, doesn't mean we can afford to let our guard down".

The changing role of coal

The tragedy at Liushenyu has cast renewed attention on the troubled history of one of China's most critical yet dangerous industries.

When China's economy opened up in the 1980s, coal production surged, becoming the cornerstone of its industrial ambition.

At the heart of the boom was Shanxi province, home to vast coalfields rich in coking coal - one of the most prized grades of the fuel - and a developed industrial base stretching back to the early 20th Century. Today, the province accounts for nearly 30% of China's national coal output.

By the turn of the century, Shanxi's coal industry was making enormous profits because demand was soaring - but there was a human cost. A report from the state-run outlet Xinhua at the time bluntly described the development as "GDP stained with blood."

In their pursuit of productivity and revenue, local mine owners would bribe officials to turn a blind eye towards unsafe work practices, wrote Nie Huihua, an economics professor at China's Renmin University, in a 2020 paper.

"When economic growth was more important than social stability, the central government relaxed its guard against this kind of 'collusion'. At such times, coal mine output increased, and coal mine accidents also rose."

The horror of mining disasters often played out in front of a national audience. In 2010, people across the country watched as rescuers raced to free more than 150 workers trapped in the Wangjialing coal mine in Shanxi after it was flooded underground.

"My husband is dead, I don't need them to tell me that," a family member told state-owned newspaper China Daily then.

In what has since been described as a miracle, rescuers managed to save 115 workers.

Many others haven't been so lucky.

Between 1980 and 2010, an average of 5,853 people died in China annually from coal mining disasters, according to a tally by Nie.

By 2018, however, that number had shrunk to 333, although coal output more than doubled.

The dramatic turnaround came after authorities tightened regulations and introduced better gas monitoring systems and clearer accountability mechanisms. They also shut down thousands of small, private mines operating outside regulatory oversight.

Technology was part of the safety campaign, as traditionally labour-heavy workflows welcomed mechanisation and automation.

The ideal state of coal mine safety in China can be summed up like this: 'Fewer people, more safety; no people, absolute safety,'" says Prof Chen.

"The green transition is exactly what's pushing the industry to move away from the old model of scaling up output and towards a new paradigm."

Green energy, black gold

Ramping up the production of renewable energy is a top policy priority for China as detailed in its latest Five-Year Plan. The country has set an ambitious target of doubling its clean energy supply by 2035, and achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2060.

The solar panels and wind turbines that have popped up over swathes of sun-soaked land, from the Tibetan Plateau to Xinjiang's deserts, are part of this vision. The plan is for power lines to funnel this green energy to the megacities of Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Chongqing.

Yet there is a stark contrast between China's world-leading renewables ambitions and its enduring reliance on coal.

Coal's prominence is gradually shrinking. The country's coal-fired power generation declined last year for the first time in a decade. Last year, profits in the coal mining and washing sector fell by 41.8%, according to official data.

But China remains the largest coal producer in the world, accounting for just over half of global output in 2024, when it produced 4.8 million tonnes.

The government has often referred to coal as the "ballast stone" for China's energy security: a reliable anchor in an often unreliable global energy market.

That logic rang true after the Iran war choked off the Strait of Hormuz. While other countries across Asia were reeling from the oil crisis, China's supply of coal helped to insulate its economy from the worst impacts.

"China's green energy push has not made coal disappear; it has changed coal's role," says Roc Shi, professor of energy and environmental economics at the University of Technology Sydney. "Coal is moving from being the engine of growth toward being a backstop for energy security and power system reliability."

Coal has long been black gold for China's economy, and remains indispensable to keeping the lights on for its population of 1.4 billion people.

In Shanxi, it's also a lifeline for those with few other options.

"I'll keep doing this job, because in our county, apart from work at the mines, it's hard to find anything else. Otherwise you have to leave home and go somewhere else," one coal miner tells the BBC.

He is an electrician and works above ground, which makes his job less risky than those who venture into the mines. When he heard about the disaster at Liushenyu, he says his "mind just went blank".

Another worker says his only thought after the tragedy was: "Ordinary people's lives are wretched."

Yet even for an industry so fraught with perils and pitfalls, Chen, the miner who previously worked at Liushenyu, suggests there will always be desperate people willing to take their chances in the mines. As he points out, "miners all work voluntarily" to "feed their families".

The Chinese government has vowed to hold those responsible for the Liushenyu incident to account. But for miners like Chen, it is "all too late".

"The state attaches great importance to it. But can the miners who died come back to life?"