A September 22 Xinhua report disclosed the details of the case of an official from southwest China's Guizhou Province convicted last month for taking millions in bribes to invest in coal mines.

 

Zhao Dawu, 50, former director of the coal bureau in Zunyi County, was sentenced to life imprisonment on September 6. According to the ruling of the Intermediate People's Court of Zunyi City, Zhao's personal property of 2 million yuan, his investment of 2.67 million yuan in Sangshu Colliery, Huairen City and proceeds from it, and a bribe of 500,000 yuan were all seized. The court will continue to recover other bribes totaling 1.18 million yuan.

 

                        Front gate of the coal bureau in Zunyi County.

 

The court found that Zhao took up to 4.35 million yuan in bribes from 2000 to 2004. Taking advantage of his position and power, he helped many collieries that had been ordered to shut down due to accidents or safety concerns to resume production.

 

Guizhou, south China's biggest coal producer, accounts for one-twentieth of the country's coal output, but its death toll from coal mine disasters is one-eighth the national total. From January to August this year the province saw 373 colliery accidents that claimed the lives of 601 miners, year-on-year increases of 12 and 30 respectively.

 

Though the head of a county's coal bureau is not a high position, the coal production situation has made it an extremely powerful and lucrative job in that region.

 

A gas explosion at Guanyan Colliery in Gaoping Township of Zunyi on August 18, 1999 killed nine miners and seriously injured two others. Following the blast the colliery was ordered to stop production to improve working conditions.

 

In March 2000, the colliery's manager Tian Weizhong, eager to resume production, gave a dinner for Zhao. A couple of days later, mediated by Zhao, municipal and county institutions checked the colliery and announced the ban lifted. Zhao received 60,000 yuan from Tian.

 

                                    Bribes taken by Zhao Dawu.

 

Also in 2000, the former Guizhou Provincial Coal Department decided to permanently close Gaoping's Simianshan Colliery as unsafe. Thanks to Zhao, only a year later the mine came back to life and he was rewarded 44,000 yuan by the colliery's manager Han Zhonggui.

 

In 2002, Zhao spent no more than 25,000 yuan to go through the formalities for two Beijing businesspeople to run coal mines in Zunyi, but collected 700,000 yuan from each of them.

 

Zhao used to be a driver on a farm in Zunyi, but was gradually promoted until taking charge of the coal bureau in May 1993, a position he held until being arrested in July 2004.

 

According to Wu Nian, chief procurator of Huichuan District Procuratorate in Zunyi, investigators didn't find anything valuable at Zhao's home, but discovered many criminal law books on which he had made careful annotations.

 

Zhao never spoke rashly during questioning, said the district procuratorate's Li Yuzhong, in charge of his case, and investigators had to go out to collect evidence in the daytime and interrogated him at night, forcing him to admit his guilt little by little.

 

Wu said Zhao never used intermediaries to collect bribes, and sometimes they were made in remote places with no direct meeting. "This made evidence collection extremely difficult."

 

The district procuratorate started investigating Zhao last July, but the target date for its completion was postponed twice, and eventually investigators were not able to verify bribes of some 2 million yuan.

 

           Front gate of the Huichuan District Procuratorate in Zunyi City.

 

Before the investigation, Zunyi County's discipline commission and procuratorate had already received many letters and calls against Zhao, but these were impeded by deep-rooted local connections.

 

Investigators once put a recording pen in the pocket of a briber to tape his conversation with Zhao as evidence, but Zhao was tipped off and, pretending to get drunk, searched the visitor and forcibly took away the recorder.

 

After a desperate but fruitless endeavor to bribe district procuratorate investigators with 100,000 to 200,000 yuan during interrogations, Zhao's connections proved ineffective at last.

 

Xie Jiayong, a Guizhou Provincial Academy of Social Sciences researcher, said it's time for the country to update its antiquated coal policies as well as strengthen government supervision.

 

Under current regulations, acquiring a mining permit for several hundred thousand to 2 million yuan means investors are eligible to tap several million to several ten million tons of coal. After paying a "resource compensatory fee" (less than one yuan per ton), they are then able to pocket the extracted coal as their own.

 

As a result, in a short period of three to five years, coal mining has produced a number of millionaires or even billionaires at the expense of the country's coal resources as well as the lives of miners.

 

(China.org.cn by Shao Da, October 8, 2005)