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...from the ground. It could have been a harvest blaze or the remnants of a cooking fire. But as she stood in the cornfields of this hardscrabble corner of southwest China, Zhang knew better. Like a fisherman's wife who scans the seas when the weather turns turbulent, a coal miner's spouse recognizes the fatal signs: a thread of smoke, a muffled boom and then a rush of blackness flowing from the charred earth. "I knew he had died the moment I saw the smoke," says 36-year-old Zhang of the gas explosion that claimed her husband...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: What Dies Beneath | 9/3/2001 | See Source »

...More people die in the sunless depths of China's coal pits than in any other country's mines. Last year, 5,300 people perished, according to government statistics, and independent analysts say that figure represents only a fraction of all deaths. Embarrassed by its appalling safety record, China's Cabinet finally took action in mid-June, ordering all small state-owned mines to halt production for safety checks and calling for intensified raids against illegal mines, such as the one in Guizhou province that claimed Zhang's husband. Last week, Premier Zhu Rongji visited that desperately poor province...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: What Dies Beneath | 9/3/2001 | See Source »

...Guizhou's sunbaked earth yields little above ground. But just a few meters down, the earth turns black and hard. The coal is tantalizingly easy to reach; so are the lethal pockets of gas that cause explosions or asphyxiate workers. Zhang's husband, Li Zhenhua, had worked for a decade in a cluster of small, illegal mines near his Duck Pond village. Whenever an accident claimed lives, the pit would be ordered to close?but another would invariably open not far away. Much of the illegal mining is done at night to avoid government monitors. In any case, the inspectors...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: What Dies Beneath | 9/3/2001 | See Source »

...unlicensed, unnamed mine near the village of Zhongzai, a bedraggled corps of 25 workers doesn't wait for the cover of night: even though the mine is illegal, no one has bothered to come check this remote corner of Bijie township. Blackened, sinewy men pull massive lumps of coal from a slimy tunnel. The miners disappear for up to five hours at a time into the cramped, disorienting dark, crouching low to heave their pickaxes into the crumbling blackness. To pass the time, some light cigarettes, risking a deadly explosion. The pay for a day's work...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: What Dies Beneath | 9/3/2001 | See Source »

...life? A stove? For those uninitiated in the Aga experience, the temptation is to say, "Puh-leeze." But as Mamet's description implies, the Aga is more than just a stove. For one thing, it is never turned off. Fueled by wood or coal in the past, but now powered by oil, gas or electricity, the 500-kg Aga remains permanently hot, ready to roast a turkey, boil a kettle or bake a cake, day or night. Its brightly colored enamel surface also emanates a constant gentle warmth which, like any hearth, tends to draw people to it. Some owners...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Aga Keeps On Cookin' | 8/20/2001 | See Source »

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