A Look At China’s Largest Coal Mine & China’s Coal Lie (VIDEO)
ADVChina, a YouTube channel that focuses on the adventure lifestyle and exploring China, recently shared an in-depth look at one of China’s largest open-pit coal mines. The hosts of the channel, Winston (SerpentZA) and C-Milk, held a discussion about China’s obsession with coal. The video is very informative and I’m going to share a few interesting points from it.
The first thing Winston and C-Milk point out is that they are able to tell that the town they are biking into is a typical coal town. The city, Fushun City in Liaoning Province, is incredibly filthy, and in the video, you can see the ash over the streets, sidewalk, and cars.
The problem, the two men explained, is that the Chinese government is telling the world one thing, but in reality, it’s doing something completely different. In the video, the guys are riding through the coal town and they are told that this is the largest coal pit mine in the world. After researching it, they found that it’s no longer the largest in the world because they’ve exhausted all the coal there.
Some of the things discussed in the video are:
- How much coal China is using.
- Why China is using so much coal.
- Why China is lying to the world about how much coal it is using. “You can smell the coal in the air.”
As they drove through the town, they could smell the coal, saw trains carrying coal, and saw huge smokestacks towering over the city. The air pollution, they noted, wasn’t as bad as they expected it to be, but it would be much worse during the winter.
Once they found their way to the entrance of the pit mine, they went to an area that was designated for the public. There’s a statue of Mao Zedong, also known as Chairman Mao, who was the former president of the People’s Republic of China. The statue of Zedong was looking at a piece of coal and smoking a cigarette while having a bird on his head.
The coal mine is 500 meters deep and the entire area that has been dug out so far is 11 square kilometers. According to one of the signs, there were 780 million tons of combustible shale and 200 million tons of coal pulled from the mine from 1949–2013. They stopped documenting after 2013.
Another interesting fact that the guys pointed out is that the state provided all of the housing for the coal miners and the entire town is based on the state enterprise jobs.
But that’s largely about the past. What about the present?
Coal Lies Lead To Power Failures
There’s a big issue with China’s pledges to reduce its carbon footprint and stop producing coal. The issue is that it keeps talking about this, but it isn’t doing it.
“They just keep building more and more coal power plants. Now there’s this very funny situation that’s happened recently. China’s having a power shortage, a problem. They have a coal shortage which they obviously weren’t expecting, and this happens, of course, the way the government works there.”
The way it works, they explained, is that a leader will ask someone if they have enough coal. That person will ask someone else who should basically say no, but since they can’t tell their superiors that there’s not enough coal, they lie.
“They got caught with their pants down. They’ve been having these power shortages around China and the main reason why they suddenly have this shortage of coal is that they put this kind of unofficial ban on importing Australian coal.
“They’ve been getting a lot of coal from Australia. It’s been basically keeping them going. And then they had a little spat — a diplomatic spat where the prime minister of Australia said we need to look into the origins of Covid properly.”
China basically put that ban in place against Australian coal, wine, and other imports as retaliation to Australia wanting to look into the origins of COVID-19. They added that there is a lot of speculation as to whether or not the ban is real or is just a rumor.
China’s Two-Faced Hypocrisy On Coal
The duo explained that the official reason for the power outages was country leadership wanting to improve the environment. China is telling its people that the reason it’s having power outages is that it’s trying to reduce its carbon footprint, but this excuse is expected to be an outright lie.
“They’re actually doubling down. And what they’ve told the coal miners just recently the other day, actually, was to mine as much coal as possible. So here we have Xi Jinping on one side — literally, there’s two quotes from him. He’s been saying that they’re not going to increase the amount of coal fired in other countries. They’re doing it in Africa! This is his quote: he said he expects to accelerate the global shift way from fossil fuels.
“And then he also says, ‘don’t worry about these power shortages too much because what we’re doing is really nipping this in the bud.’ We need to get these CO2 emissions down on the global stage so people can look up to China as an environmentally green friendly country.”
The guys noted that people just buy the lie. In the same breath, Xi Jipeng says to mine as much coal as possible. “So, what they’re doing is they’re building more coal-fired power plants in China, they’re increasing it hand over fist, and like you said, telling all of their coal miners ‘Double down. Mine as much coal as possible.'”
The guys thoroughly explained the hypocrisy of China, as it’s saying one thing and actually doing the complete opposite. China, they explained, has a big problem with this bad habit. Citing some of their other videos, the two hosts noted that China will put up a bunch of windmills and an ecological expert will watch the video and point out that those windmills shouldn’t be on that hill because they won’t even be functional.
“That’s the way China works. They’ll do all this green tech stuff completely haphazardly, very, very half-assed.”
“‘Let’s build the biggest solar farm in the world!’ And they’ll do that but it’s going to be done poorly.”
You can watch the full episode here.
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