By Nana Karikari, Senior Global Affairs Correspondent
A catastrophic gas explosion at a coal mine in northern China has killed at least 90 people, state media reported, marking the country’s deadliest mining disaster in more than a decade.
The blast ripped through the Liushenyu Coal Mine in Qinyuan county, located within the prominent coal-industry hub of Changzhi city in Shanxi province. State media reported that 247 workers were on duty underground when the incident occurred at 19:29 local time on Friday (11:29 GMT).
Emergency crews continue to search for survivors on Saturday, pulling stretchers from ambulances alongside miners pushing carts through the debris. Twenty-seven people remain hospitalized, with one person reported in critical condition. The vast majority of those receiving treatment sustained minor injuries or suffered from poisonous gas inhalation.
Survival amid the fumes
The sudden nature of the disaster caught underground workers by surprise. Survivors described a rapid onslaught of toxic gas rather than a massive concussive blast.
Wang Yong, an injured miner recovering in the hospital, provided a vivid account to state media regarding the moments immediately following the detonation.
“I smelled sulphur, the same smell you get from blasting. I shouted at people to run. As we were running I could see people collapsing from the fumes. Then I blacked out too,” Wang said. “I lay there for about an hour or so before I came round on my own. I woke up the person next to me and we got out together.”
The emergency response
The explosion triggered a massive mobilization of emergency personnel to the facility, where a red sign on the exterior reads “safety is sky high.” Video footage posted online
from the scene showed a heavy presence of ambulances gathered near the mine entrance.
China’s Ministry of Emergency Management initially deployed 345 personnel from six specialized rescue teams to reinforce local operations. This deployment rapidly scaled up as Shanxi provincial authorities dispatched a total of seven comprehensive rescue and medical teams, totaling 755 personnel to the site, according to the emergency management bureau at Qinyuan.
On Saturday, Chinese President Xi Jinping personally issued an unusually swift public statement—a highly significant move given Beijing’s historical tendency to withhold details while gathering information. Immediately following his address, the official death toll surged drastically from an initial report of just eight fatalities to at least 90, with updated tallies being released every few minutes as search operations intensified.
The political leadership has demanded deep systemic accountability, reaching the highest echelons of the State Council. Chinese Premier Li Qiang issued concurrent instructions explicitly calling for the timely and accurate release of information alongside rigorous operational accountability.
“All regions and departments must learn from the lessons of the accident, remain vigilant regarding workplace safety, thoroughly investigate, rectify all types of risks and hidden dangers, and resolutely prevent and curb the occurrence of major and serious accidents,” President Xi Jinping said in the statement broadcast by state media. He further directed authorities to “spare no effort” in treating the injured and conducting search and rescue operations, while ordering a thorough investigation into the cause of the accident and strict accountability in accordance with the law.
Regulatory failures and arrests
Authorities moved quickly against the mine management as preliminary data surfaced. According to state-run broadcaster CGTN, the person responsible for overseeing the mine has been arrested, and other officials running the coal mine have been detained.
According to the corporate database Qichacha, the site is operated by Shanxi Tongzhou Group Liushenyu Coal Industry. The subsidiary was established in 2010 and is directly controlled by the larger Shanxi Tongzhou Coal Coking Group.
While the official cause of the gas explosion has not yet been revealed, state media reported that the levels of carbon monoxide—a highly toxic, odourless gas—in the mine were found to have “exceeded limits.” The blast occurred shortly after an official carbon monoxide alert was issued, raising immediate questions regarding why underground operations were not halted before the gas levels crossed fatal thresholds.
The disaster has cast a harsh light on the facility’s prior compliance record. In 2024, the Liushenyu mine was listed as one of the “severe safety hazards” by the Chinese National Mine Safety Administration, which explicitly cited the facility for dangerously high gas levels. Additionally, the Tongzhou Group has reportedly received two administrative penalties in 2025 for safety issues.
The economic context
Shanxi province serves as the heart of China’s domestic energy production. The region extracts more than one billion tonnes of coal annually, representing more than a quarter—and by some metrics nearly a third—of the country’s total coal output.
China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of coal, accounting for more than half of global consumption. This reliance on heavy industry shapes both its economic policy and its environmental profile. The country stands as the world’s largest annual greenhouse gas emitter, even as it simultaneously installs renewable energy capacity and produces green technology at record speed.
The explosion took place against a backdrop of intense diplomatic activity in Beijing. The incident happened just days after high-profile visits by US President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin to the country.
A history of mining risks
China’s coal mines are considered among the deadliest in the world due to poor safety standards, weak regulation, and corruption as companies seek to profit from the country’s rapidly expanding economy.
The country has significantly reduced coal mine fatalities—often caused by gas explosions or flooding—since the early 2000s through more stringent regulations and safer practices, but major industrial accidents still happen. The disaster in Shanxi comes only weeks after a fireworks factory blast killed 26 people in Hunan Province, underscoring persistent gaps in safety enforcement.
The disaster in Changzhi is the deadliest mining accident reported in China since the November 2009 explosion at a mine in Heilongjiang province in the north-east killed more than 100 people. More recently, a 2023 collapse at an open-pit coal mine in the northern Inner Mongolia region killed 53 people, proving that infrastructure risks persist despite Beijing’s regulatory crackdowns.
Implications for African mineral resource nationalism
The scale of the Shanxi disaster introduces a critical talking point for resource-rich African nations, particularly Ghana, which are currently overhauling their own regulatory relationships with Chinese extraction firms. Chinese state-backed and private entities are major financial anchors across Africa’s traditional mining landscape. However, the domestic failure of regulators to curb a disaster at a heavily cited site like Liushenyu heightens concerns over how these same companies handle safety abroad.
This domestic catastrophe coincides with a major legislative shift across the continent toward “resource nationalism” and stricter local oversight. In Ghana, the Minerals Commission has aggressively advanced sweeping reforms to the Minerals and Mining Act, revoking hundreds of non-compliant licenses and ordering major international operators—including China’s Zijin Mining Group, which finalized its acquisition of the Akyem gold mine—to transition strictly to Ghanaian-owned contract mining models by December 2026. The explicit objective of these African policies is to shift away from old royalty-based models and take direct control over labor and safety regulations. As African governance bodies like the Minerals Commission increasingly assert that “labor is not the same as control,” the systemic compliance failures exposed in Shanxi will likely serve as a powerful justification for African regulators to enforce strict localized safety mandates rather than relying on foreign operational standards.
The tragedy highlights the ongoing friction between China’s soaring industrial demands and its stated commitment to rigorous workplace safety enforcement. As investigators dig into the compliance failures at the Liushenyu mine, Beijing faces the persistent challenge of enforcing safety mandates across a highly decentralized energy sector tasked with powering the world’s second-largest economy.
