The families of dead miners face a hefty burden in dealing with colliery owners, a high-ranking official in charge of coal mine production in the southwestern Guizhou Province said in an exclusive Xinhua interview.

Zhang Qunshan, Guizhou's deputy governor, has been a frequent visitor to grim coal mine accident sites in his province. He said the number of miners killed in recent years has created huge pressure for local administrators.

Last year, 894 miners alone died in colliery accidents in Guizhou. While the figure was down 8.02 percent year-on-year, it was still No. 1 among China's provincial areas, said Zhang.

"I am always in a mixed mood when I see family members grieving over miners' bodies with a certain amount of compensation in pockets," said Zhang, admitting the existence of mechanism loopholes in the supervision of coal mine production safety.

Zhang and his team have been trying to make coal mine production safer for years. Special efforts were made last year to crack down on unauthorized collieries, largely reducing the casualties that had occurred there. The province also planned to drastically increase compensations in coal mine accidents to above 200,000 yuan (about US$25,000) per victim this year.

"Unfortunately, these measures can not completely root out the accidents," said the official. "Only when production capacity reaches a certain level can colliery managers afford or care to deliberate investing more in upgrading technologies to ensure safety."

Zhang noted 80 percent of the province's coal mines are small operations with an average annual output of 40,000 tons each.

Nationwide, large coal mines account for 15 percent of the country's colliery total, lagging far behind the 60 percent level in the United States, according to Zhang.

As one of China's major coal producers, Guizhou is planning to build a number of heavyweight, state-owned coal mining groups. It will input 30 million yuan to ensure colliery security in 2005. This would be an increase of 50 percent on a yearly basis, echoing Premier Wen Jiabao's call for "truly making coal mining safer" in his government work report delivered last Saturday.

While addressing the NPC annual full session on Saturday, Wen said the government will spend 3 billion yuan this year on "safety technologies upgrading" at state-owned coal mines to "truly make coal mining safer," a rare, concrete move to weed out safety concerns.

In recent years, a severe energy strain caused by China's rapid economic growth has prompted coal mines across the country to produce beyond their capacity. This has largely put lives at risk through slack safety supervision.

Statistics from the State General Administration of Work Safety showed that throughout 2004, 6,027 people were killed in 3,639 coal mine accidents.

(Xinhua News Agency March 13, 2005)