The former Party boss of Shizong county in the south western province of Yunnan is being investigated for alleged corruption following the death of 43 miners in a massive gas explosion on 10 November 2011, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

An accident at a chemical plant in eastern China that killed more than a dozen workers was nothing out of the ordinary in a country infamous for its lack of workplace safety.

Miner He Quangui is ready to die. Often hit by coughing fits and breathlessness, he is one of hundreds of thousands in China who have contracted silicosis from working in the country's gold, coal or silver mines. And there is no safe cure.

Eight coalminers have died and several others remain missing after an explosion underground in China, state media has reported.

Copper-rich Zambia's new president should back up his anti-Chinese rhetoric with steps to ensure workers at Chinese-owned mines in this southern African country are safe and adequately paid, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.

A former miner with third-stage pneumoconiosis tells Han Dongfang about the terrible cost of working in the lead and zinc mines of Sichuan for two decades with no protection from the clouds of deadly mineral dust enveloping him.

After her brother’s death at a coal mine in Xinjiang was covered up, a young migrant worker, Wang Huiping, embarked on a decade-long quest for justice, which eventually resulted in a court awarding her family 150,000 yuan in compensation.

In a bid to gain compensation and highlight the workplace health and safety obligations of local governments, a group of 75 former miners and their families from remote villages in Sichuan have filed an administrative lawsuit against a local county health department for dereliction of duty.

In a potentially significant development in the fight against the occupational disease epidemic that is sweeping China, the State Administration of Work Safety (SAWS) is requiring employers to keep health records of all their employees who are exposed to health hazards.

Yu Zudong rides an orange truck rattling down Xiaoqinling mountain in central China, past a landscape pockmarked with gold caves and the garbage-strewn tent homes of workers. “Everybody here wants to earn a fortune,” says Yu, a migrant miner who is taking a 24-ton load of gray rocks to a grinder in the foothill town of Yuling. Nearby, sitting in one of the shanties, miner Li Shanchi waits for his next payday. He hasn’t worked for two months since officials closed some mines after a fire killed nine workers on the mountain, 800 kilometers (500 miles) southwest of Beijing. His lungs are filled with dust he inhaled during a decade of mining, he says, leaving him with silicosis, an incurable lung disease.