“How many lives do we have to lose before they learn their lesson?” State Administration of Work Safety director Li Yizhong told a teleconference in which he blasted mine owners and local officials for “utter disregard for workers’ lives”

China needs coal and for many years it has been happy to extract that coal at whatever cost, making the country the world’s biggest coal producer.

However, the past few years have seen mining disasters topping the evening news, stories complete with distraught relatives and workers angry at poor safety standards and there is a growing awareness that something needs to be done.

On average, 12 miners die every day in Chinese coal mines. These kinds of figures generate popular anger and this is something the ruling Communist Party wants to control.

Nearly 6000 coal miners died in about 3300 floods, explosions and other accidents last year, and the death toll for the first 10 months of 2006 stood at 3726. Officials tend to blame small, privately run coal mines that cheat on safety standards account for most of the casualties, but large state-owned mines report the higher death tolls.

Fatal accidents are an almost daily occurrence in the Chinese mining industry, as mine owners ignore safety regulations to keep output high.

A court jailed two managers of a state-owned coal mine for negligence two years after a gas explosion at Tongchuan killed 166 miners, one of the worst blasts in China in decades.

The explosion hit the Chenjiashan coal mine just days after the pit caught fire.

Within the past few days, a gas blast killed 24 coal miners in the northern province of Shanxi – a major coal-producing area and accident blackspot – just a day after 55 people died in two separate mining accidents.

Shanxi provides around one third of the country’s total coal output and authorities there have said they will close 900 more coal mines by June 2008 amid concerns over safety, part of a plan to cut the number of coal mines in the province to 2500 by 2010.

Currently the province has 3500 coal mines and 1156 have been closed since July last year.

One case was particularly annoying for safety czar Li. A gas explosion at Changyuan mine in Fuyuan county in the southwestern province of Yunnan killed 32 people. The safety administration had ordered the mine’s closure but local authorities allowed it to continue operating, and closed another small mine that they claimed was Changyuan.

“It is like a story in the ‘Arabian Nights’. It is like replacing a person on the death list with another,” Li said.

China’s coal output continues to grow – the country produced 187 million tonnes of coal in October, up 14.6% on year, according to the latest data released by the National Bureau of Statistics, and it is using more of its own coal – coal exports for the January-to-October period fell 13.6% on year to 52.44Mt.

And coal imports are also still rising, up 49% at 3.23Mt in October. In the 10 months to October 2006, imports rose 42% from a year ago to 29.39Mt.

In November, the government introduced restrictions on the numbers of miners working underground at any one time.

State Administration of Coal Mine Safety director Zhao Tiechui said no more than 100 people are allowed to work underground per shift in state-owned coal mines. This applies to all 176 mines owned by 13 state-owned enterprises.

The State Administration of Work Safety has issued guidelines saying over-production must be prevented to avoid major mining accidents.