(China's Coal: Part 6)

On my last reporting day in Shanxi our team has split up. I decide to try my luck at getting into a better-run state coal mine. As the option only came up in the morning, I no longer have a translator with me and head off with just a driver and one of the school's photo instructors who had come up to scope out the area.

On our first drive-by, the situation appears to be a bust. The one man that we had a connection to is already down in the mine for his shift, so I decide to park it for an hour and wait for the shift change. I figure I can get a few photos of miners coming and going. We park by the office where the miners come to change into their work clothes. I ask the first miner I see if I can take his picture. He agrees and my driver chats with him a bit. Within a couple of minutes, word spreads that a Westerner is hanging around and I find myself surrounded by 20 to 30 people, my back to the taxi. Without a translator, I get a bit unnerved.

At a loss, I reach into my bag and pull out the West Virginia mining photos that my family sent me before I left. This peaks everyone’s interest and loosens up the situation. Par for the course in China, an older man offers me a cigarette, and before long he is telling us how to get inside the mine office and down to the tracks for the shift change. The pics had set a few people at ease before, this time they seemed to part the seas. Coming from a family that has worked in mining, I am one of them and my interest is honest.

The miners at the shift change smile and wave. The driver, Susan, and I mill around, walk up to the entrance to the mine shaft and check out the transit system. A group of dusty faces comes off shift and before the next heads in we are run off by a supervisor. We watch the rest of the change from outside a fence.

(China's Coal: Part 5)

Ahh … the joys of a sinus infection, or at least that's what it seems to be. One fellow reporter develops nosebleeds while my sinus clogs and my breathing is punctuated by coughing fits. I start taking some of the industrial strength antibiotics brought from the U.S., but am unsure whether they will do any good.

Part of my daily routine: I note the color of the water that rinses from my body each morning as I shower. A light grey, or would you call that pewter? I try to take note each day, a mental color chip to compare for the next day. How can so much black come from a sky so white? The less said of ears and cotton swabs the better.

(China's Coal: Part 4)

We decide to give the village a break and give ourselves a day to digest what we have seen, so our crew heads out early one morning for Pingyao, an ancient town-turned-tourist trap. We bring our still cameras, but my larger video camera is left tucked in the trunk. A mistake.

Halfway to our vacation retreat, the horizon turns fuzzy. A coking plant -- where coal is baked before being used in smelting iron -- is spewing a sulfur dioxide cloud three stories high that snakes its way a mile downwind. As we cruise closer to the giant cloud, the air cuts through my nostrils like rotten eggs from the wrong side of the river Styx. Speechless, I fire my still camera as quickly as I can while digging out a tiny hand-sized digital video camera. Driving through the cloud, only the occasional “my god” breaks the silence. Born in the early 70s (with SO2 caps already in place in the U.S.), I had never seen pollution being pumped out so blatantly.

This ancient walled town allows us the indulgences of being tourist for a day: American coffee, countless baubles and fake antiques, museums with spiked weapons and statues of calm buddahs, and a few fellow Western faces. I imagine most of these happy tourists never see pollution as blatant as we witnessed that day.

(China's Coal: Part 3)

There is an analogy that creeps around in the back of my mind. Walk through a Chinese market with carcasses hung across the stalls and there is little doubt that the Chinese know the source of their food. The same could be said for their energy—particularly in Shanxi. For many the coal that brings them electricity is mined from directly underneath the villages and towns of the countryside. Homes have piles of coal stacked along their front walls or stacked in courtyards.

One reporting day, a young man and his father prepare a meal of homemade noodles for lunch while I observe. The small brick stove in the kitchen has a tiny metal portal on the top. After placing a crude metal pot atop the stove, the father grabs a small shovel and scoops a chunk of shiny black coal -- larger than a grapefruit -- from a bin under the counter, then crams it through the portal. The fire brightens and lights his face. A storage room off the courtyard holds a pile waist high and some five feet deep. In the bedroom area, a second brick stove abuts a low platform used for the family’s bed. An intricate flue system from the stove runs underneath the platform to fend off the cold Shanxi winters. The coal that keeps them warm and cooks their meals had been several hundred feet below their village streets just a year ago.

Through the house, the lights are compact fluorescent bulbs. Considering that there is no running water, and the electric wiring strung along the walls had the distinct markings of improvisation, I ask whether the lights were provided by a government program. The young man says no. He bought them out of pocket to save on his electric bill. In the U.S. these energy efficient bulbs are the symbol of the ecofriendly consumer, touted as a way to put a dent in our electricity consumption -- on a per capita basis, some 12 times that of the Chinese. (California is even considering banning traditional incandescent bulbs.) But in the Chinese countryside, where saving a buck or two actually means something, the bulbs are simply a good investment.

(China's Coal: Part 2)

Outside of Beijing, the sight of a Westerner arouses interest. I am stared at constantly. Our team has traveled to Taiyuan, the capital of China’s Shanxi Province. I think of Shanxi as the West Virginia of China -- though it certainly does not feel like home. Along the miles from Beijing, factories increasingly dot the landscape, which seems to grow drier by the mile. A distinct twinge of sulfur hits me as I step out of the train and my nose tells me I am in coal country.

Social and business connections appear and evaporate quickly in China. By the afternoon, one person leads to another, then quickly to a third. One connection goes by the Chinese equivalent of “John Doe.” The crevices of his teeth are stained from cigarettes, yet he dresses in a soft pastel sport jacket. He smokes with a caring underhand grip and looks at his cigarette lovingly. I need little more than my half-dozen words of Mandarin to realize two things about our John Doe: he’s very well connected, and he’s not completely trustworthy.

A quick phone call and a couple of hours later I am filming in an illegal coal mine 50 miles out in the countryside. The mine owner, his fingers yellowed from years of filterless smokes, points out the basics of the mine. Despite the rapid-fire concerns of his second in command, the mine owner says that we are friends and I can film all I want to.

Small-scale illegal mines in China are a current government bugaboo. Current edicts say the State is going to close down tens of thousands of them because they are unregulated and the source of thousands of deaths a year. The mine we visit is little more than a bricked hole in the ground. A power generator runs a winch that raises and lowers a bucket down a six-foot wide shaft. Below men pick away at the earth by hand and work a bucket at a time. The technology here lags decades behind mining in the U.S. Take away the generator and it’s more like a century.

Living conditions would make most workers pine for the good ol’ days of the company town and coal baron. The hovels are simple holes cut in the hillside and lined with tarps.

Neither the mine owner nor our connection allowed pictures of them taken. John Doe had planned to speak with us the next day about meeting some other mine bosses, but stopped answering our calls and we never heard from him again.

(China's Coal: Part 1)

This spring, CIR reporter Duane Moles traveled to China to report on the environmental effects of the coal mining industry in Shanxi Province. Moles, a native of West Virginia, is a graduate student at UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism. Moles' reporting journal will appear on The Muckraker Blog through the next two weeks:

After months of talking with my fellow student reporters about the slew of environmental crises in China, I confront the reality of China’s environment before my feet ever touch the country’s soil. Gliding down through what I thought were clouds, the true nature of environmental degradation materializes as suddenly as the appearance of the Beijing Airport landing strip outside my window. I'm surprised when I see gate and ground transit blurring alongside the plane -- because of the "clouds" I thought we were still some 10,000 feet in the air. A fellow reporter who had lived in Beijing for years was shocked at the thickness of the smog. Welcome to China.