It was worse than that, according to the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin. The group, an advocate for workers’ rights, uses news reports to compile a map of industrial accidents that cause fatalities or injuries. Its figures say 55 coal miners died in a dozen accidents in the same period.

Several hundred coal miners die in accidents in China each year, although that is far less than the thousands killed in deathtrap mines in the early 2000s. Official statistics on mining accidents and deaths in 2019 will not be available until early in 2020, but the figures that are available suggest accidents increased in the latter part of this year.

‘Reckless greed’ blamed for fatal Chinese coal mine blast

China Labour Bulletin’s accident map, which it has been compiling since 2015, points to 90 coal mining accidents so far in 2019 that killed 219 people. That compares with 79 accidents and 160 fatalities recorded by the group in the prior year, Geoffrey Crothall, its communications director, said.

“We’ll have to wait to see the official figures, but I wouldn’t be surprised if those show a slight increase – although with official statistics you can never be sure,” he said.

In 2018, coal accounted for 59 per cent of China’s energy needs. Despite investments to modernise production, officials at China’s coal mine safety authority in Beijing have struggled for years to ensure basic compliance from mine operators in the provinces.

Following the recent spike in accidents, authorities said operators were putting financial gain ahead of worker safety. The operator of the Guanglong coal mine where the Guizhou blast took place failed to report the accident in the required time, the safety authorities said.

The Ministry of Emergency Management, responsible for worker safety, said that for the second year in a row Guizhou was the leading province for coal mine deaths, with 56 so far in 2019 compared with 43 the year before.

Coal bites back in China amid worries over supply

Major cuts were made in coal production capacity under China’s industrial reforms in 2015, according to Wang Dan, China analyst for The Economist Intelligence Unit in Beijing. Coal output dropped from an all-time high of 3.97 billion tonnes in 2013 to 3.41 billion in 2016.

But shutting down firms – mostly private companies with low environmental and safety standards – led to shortages, causing production to start picking up again in 2017.

By 2018, production climbed back to 3.68 billion tonnes, and it rose 4.5 per cent in the first 11 months of 2019, according to the national statistics bureau.

In the first half of the year, the authorities approved five times as much new coal mining capacity as they had in all of 2018, according to a Reuters report quoting National Energy Administration documents.

However, Wang, at the Economist unit, said demand was expected to weaken in 2020, which would probably reduce output. “Coal prices are already falling,” she said. “An economic slowdown in 2020 may drive demand back down.”

China caps capacity at coal mines at risk from ‘bumps’

Beyond the human cost of coal in accidents, fatalities and injuries, it is also blamed for the carbon emissions behind global warming. Beijing has pledged to transition its economy towards greener and safer energy solutions, but its increased use of coal was criticised at the United Nations’ 2019 climate change conference in Spain in December.

In response, China and other developing economies such as Brazil, South Africa and India said the developed world needed to provide more funds to help developing countries move to cleaner energy sources.

While that argument continues, Crothall, at China Labour Bulletin, said the sharp increase in coal production in China made accidents more likely.

“That is largely because mines that had been inactive or underutilised for months or years were suddenly reopened, which is a very dangerous period,” Crothall said. “Many mine operators ignore the dangers and just push ahead in the search for profit.”

Cheng Wuyi, a professor in safety engineering at the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, said: “Some coal companies – not national state enterprises but state-run operators in provinces – increased capacity but their technology has lagged behind, so that has led to more accidents.”

Nie Huihua, an economics professor at Renmin University, said the coal industry also used different measures to assess safety records.

In 2018, China for the first time recorded fewer than 0.1 deaths per million tonnes of coal produced – the international threshold for safe coal production.

“That rate is very low for China,” said Nie, although he added that tracking the number of coal mining accidents was also problematic, because of incomplete official records.

“China’s official data comprises the total number of coal mining accidents, not how big each accident is, what kind of companies or how many died in each incident,” he said. “So it’s difficult to pinpoint their real causes.”