On the heels of the Harbin toxic spill incident comes the mining accident nearby in a nearby city that has killed over 100 people:

Anxious relatives demanded access to a coal mine Monday after an explosion killed at least 134 miners and left 15 others missing, adding to a soaring death toll in China’s mines despite a safety crackdown.

The blast in the Dongfeng Coal Mine prompted national leaders to demand stricter enforcement of safety rules in China’s mining industry, by far the world’s deadliest with more than 5,000 fatalities a year in fires, floods and other accidents.

This series of deadly accidents reminds me of growing up during the rapid industrialization of South Korea. The government there pushed for rapid economic growth with extremely lax safety standards, thus inevitably leading to periodically deadly accidents like collapsed buildings and contaminated water (leading one normally wooden Korean news anchor to exclaim uncharacteristically on television “When will we ever be able to drink water safely without worrying?”).

In many ways, the Chinese economic growth has been even more rapid and unbalanced than that which occurred in South Korea in the 70’s and the 80’s. The proximate reason for such accidents obviously is lax enforcement and regulation of safety standards in China, but the real cause is simply the pervasive lack of the rule of law.

In a society like China where industry and government are almost entirely collusive, there is no incentive for companies to adhere strictly to regulations when political clout suffices in squelching murmurs of discontent from the consequences of such accidents.

Sure, the Chinese government can go on executing company leaders for spectacular lapses of safety, making “examples” of such people just as it does for certain cases of corruption, but that will do nothing to reduce such accidents until the industry has to answer to an independent judiciary and the government to the mandate of the people. I guess some people call that democracy.