Chapter 59 Five questions: "Treating coal", do you have to let the life of miners "return to zero"?

August 22, 1993 happened to be the fifth day of the seventh month of the lunar calendar. According to the calculation of the local Fengshui master, this day happened to be a good day for "breaking ground" and "moving" in the countryside. Wang Fulai, an old man who lives in the south of Yaojiazhuang Village, got up early in the morning and was very busy. Under his command, his two sons and his wife loaded up two donkey carts with their belongings, left the plain slope of the mountain, and headed towards the village at the foot of the mountain. Go to the old house. There were five other villagers who moved with them that day.

It is understood that these villagers moved back to the old houses from the plateau with better living conditions, mainly because the relevant government departments implemented a comprehensive "ban coal" after the accident in the coal mine behind the village. Coal is produced in Shanxi, and the people of Shanxi have been digging coal for a living for generations.In other words, mining coal is their only means of earning a living. Yaojiazhuang is located in the center of the southern Shanxi coal belt. Because the coal seams in this area are buried shallowly, the local people can easily dig out coal in the "front and back of the house" and "the bottom of the stove".

At first, the local farmers dug a little by themselves, and later they used motorized tricycles to pull and sell them. Gradually, a "folk characteristic industry" of "farming in busy farming and coal digging in slack" was formed. A villager said that Yaojiazhuang people set off an "upsurge" to build new houses on the land behind the village, which mainly started a year ago.At that time, the international coal market continued to be hot, and the income of the villagers of Yaojiazhuang, who had been working as a worker in the mine, also "increased all boats", taking advantage of the situation.

With money, people have higher requirements for life. On the top of the mountain behind the village, there is a plain with a radius of tens of kilometers. The local people call it Yuan.In the eyes of local farmers, it is "easy to build roads", "easy to walk" and "convenient transportation". As a result, the wealthy Yaojiazhuang residents settled down in Yuanshang in just two years, and they didn't mind the high water and electricity bills and other daily expenses. In addition, people building houses and roads on the plateau will occupy a large area of ​​crops and farmland, which means that the reduction in food production will "divide" their lives.But that doesn't matter to them, because they can make far more money digging coal than they lose.

However, the good times did not last long, and the people of Yaojiazhuang a few years later paid a heavy price for the original choice: In the twelfth lunar month of 2006, a landslide accident occurred in the "Yantiezhang Coal Mine" in the north of the village, and 170 people died. "At that time, the leaders of the county and the township took turns running to the village. Cars, jeeps, and police cars were parked halfway, and the intersections entering and leaving the village on nearby hills were guarded by people in uniform," said a villager watching the excitement.

Subsequently, news about the mine accident in Shanxi spread overwhelmingly. Later, a "comprehensive ban on coal" campaign was launched across the province, and the coal mines near Yaojiazhuang were not spared. The coal mine stopped, and the "good times" of the villagers came to an end. Some families who relied on the income from the coal mines suddenly fell into trouble. Old man Wang's dream of building a new house and then marrying a wife after his two sons went to the coal mines to earn money has come to naught. Three months later, Wang Fulai and his family decided to move back to the old house at the foot of the mountain. This was mainly because the living expenses there were low, and there was a sweet water well less than one mile away from the village. The woods are an inexhaustible "treasure house" of firewood for villagers. Of course, lighting issues must also be considered, but this is not a problem for them, they can light kerosene lamps!

There is a saying, "A fire at the gate of the city will bring disaster to the fish in the pond." The core of the local development plan is the grassroots and people's livelihood. Is this not the original intention of the government to control coal?