Global Policy Forum

By Joseph Kahn

With his handsome smile and full head of black hair, Hu Zhiguo hardly looks 44, much less gravely ill. The giveaway is his wispy voice, faint from clotted lungs. One doctor told him he had tuberculosis. Another guessed it was cancer. The final diagnosis, based on the cumulus of gray that clouds his chest X-rays, is a severe case of silicosis, a disease Chinese workers call dust lung.

Mr. Hu got the illness making cheap necklaces and bracelets from iridescent stones like opal, sold by the containerload to United States retailers. Working long days at a factory in booming Guangdong Province, he probably inhaled more quartz dust in 10 years than China's own safety standards would permit in a thousand.

Mr. Hu has now retreated to his hometown here in the rugged hills of Sichuan, where he tried, and failed, to help his wife run a dry-goods store. "I cannot lift a bag of rice," Mr. Hu whispered one recent evening in the back of the family shop. "I am a wasted man, waiting for death."

China has emerged as Asia's leading exporter of manufactured goods to the United States, but the workers who produce those goods are victims of a surge in fatal respiratory, circulatory, neurological and digestive-tract diseases like those American and European workers suffered at the dawn of the industrial age. China in that sense is not only recreating the industrial transformation that brought prosperity to Europe, the United States and some East Asian nations. It is also reliving its horrors.

Even by its official count, China already has more deaths from work-related illnesses than any other country or region, including the industrialized economies of the United States and Europe combined.Last year, 386,645 Chinese workers died of occupational illnesses, according to government data compiled by the International Labor Organization. The statistics may understate the situation in China's thriving east coast industrial centers, where tens of millions of migrant workers like Mr. Hu produce the bulk of China's exports for well under a dollar an hour without employment contracts, health care plans or union representation.

The company where Mr. Hu worked, called Lucky Gems and Jewelry, is now based at a multibuilding site in Huizhou, about two hours north of the mainland Chinese border with Hong Kong. It employs 3,000 workers, almost all of them from far away provinces, living in dormitories inside a gated campus or in the harsh residential community that lines the unpaved streets and construction sites surrounding the factory. Its owner, a Hong Kong businessman named Wang Shenghua, was a pioneer in bringing jewelry manufacturing to southern China in the mid-1980's, when he opened his first factory in the mainland's experimental economic zone of Shenzhen.

With Lucky and hundreds of small-scale rival manufacturers, China dominates a labor-intensive industry once scattered widely around East Asia and the Middle East.

Lucky says it takes safety seriously. While the owner, Mr. Wang, declined a reporter's request to talk with him and visit the factory, he appointed a lawyer to answer questions about its safety record. The lawyer, Kang Ziying, said the company has always protected its workers and invested heavily in equipment to prevent workers from contracting silicosis, though he acknowledges there have been some cases of the disease among its employees. "We have always met the government's standards for safety," Mr. Kang said. "Otherwise, they would not let us operate."

Mr. Hu was a 30-year-old peasant farmer eager to earn a worker's wage when he left his home in northern Sichuan in 1990. He traveled for four days, by train and bus, to Shenzhen. There, he landed a job at Lucky, introduced to the company by a distant relative. He learned how to cut and sand semiprecious stones like opal, topaz and malachite into hearts, stars, pearls, and diamond shapes that are strung together to make rings, bracelets and necklaces. Mr. Hu sat shoulder to shoulder with other cutters and polishers in confined workshops. Often working 12- and even 18-hours days, they generated clouds of dust that hung in the air even when windows were wide open and the fans were set to high. "It was always like dusk inside the factory, no matter how much sunlight there was outside," he said. "It was like a heavy fog. We got used to it."

By the late 1990's, Mr. Hu began having trouble climbing stairs and lifting rocks. He came to dread winter, when a common head cold caused prolonged torment. "If I walked quickly, I would run out of breath right away. If I got a cold, I felt like I was suffocating," he said.If anyone at Lucky was aware of the risks that workers might acquire diseases from exposure to quartz dust, Mr. Hu says that information was not shared with him. Local doctors first told him he might have tuberculosis, then lung cancer. By late 1999, he felt too weak to continue and took a low-paying job selling fruit on the muddy street in front of the factory.

A short time later, when numerous colleagues began developing similar symptoms, Mr. Hu joined them on bus trips to the provincial capital, Guangzhou, to seek a diagnosis. There, a doctor at a hospital that specializes in occupational diseases suspected that jewelry workers might be developing silicosis in large numbers.

The pulmonary ailment comes from overexposure to silicon dioxide trapped in quartz, minerals, rocks and sand. Though it is one of the oldest known occupational diseases, it has only recently become a priority for Chinese authorities, who now consider it a leading work-related illness.Despite what Lucky workers described as a campaign by the company to deny the problem, provincial authorities eventually ordered all of Lucky's workers to undergo X-ray exams. How many workers showed signs of the disease is uncertain. At least 50 people claim to have fallen sick at Lucky. What is clear is that the company began battling dozens of workers over medical claims, while installing equipment to improve ventilation.

Mr. Kang, the lawyer, said some of the people seeking compensation were fakers and opportunists who either never worked there or who did not really have chronic illnesses. He acknowledged that the company invested $1 million to improve ventilation at the factory after 2001, but said those were not the first steps the company had taken to clean up the work environment.

Workers tell a different story. In the shadows of the Huizhou plant, where the ear-splitting whine of stonecutting machines pierces the air, about two dozen old friends and colleagues of Mr. Hu rent tiny rooms in restaurants, shops and private homes. They spend their days petitioning the government and gathering evidence to use against the company in court.

"Our boss cares only about the money in his pocket," said Liu Huaquan, a 39-year-old former craftsman at Lucky. In 2001, he was the first worker at the company to have silicosis formally diagnosed, but he is still fighting for compensation. "You would think he could share a small part of his profits with the workers who got sick," Mr. Liu said. "But he uses his money to deny that we exist."

Two former Lucky managers, Chen Xingfu and Yuan Tianhui, say that shortly after they were told they had silicosis, Lucky demoted them, cut their salaries in half and assigned them to haul rocks to and from a warehouse. The demotions, both men said, were intended to force them to leave the company so it would not be obligated to pay their medical expenses.

They said they resigned because their silicosis made it impossible to do heavy manual labor. They are now suing. Mr. Kang, the company lawyer, said their demotions were performance related.

The company has denied compensation to others who worked for Lucky before 1997, the year the company opened its Huizhou plant. Lucky's old Shenzhen factory has no legal tie to Lucky even though it had the same owner and many of the same workers, the company argued in court.The Huizhou factory does appear to have improved internal air quality, though workers said the main ventilation system was installed only after the first cases of silicosis were confirmed. Work stations now have vacuum tubes to suck up dust, which is spewed outside through exhaust valves. A light frost of silica crystals covers the factory grounds.Even so, stonecutters and sanders can be easily spotted at the end of the work day because their company-issued navy blue crew shirts have turned gray from the dust.

The factory failed a safety inspection by the Huizhou Center for Disease Control as recently as last summer. The center's report shows that some work stations had ambient silica concentrations as high as 70 times the standard allowed by the Chinese safety code, which is less strict than related American and European standards by a factor of 20.

Lucky rejected the results of that inspection and arranged a new test by another safety agency last October, which it passed. Workers say the company, informed in advance of the inspection, shut down some work stations before inspectors arrived. The company denies that.

Any improvements came too late for Mr. Hu. Doctors eventually confirmed that he had third-degree silicosis, the most severe form, and he was told that the only way to extend his life was to stop working.He stayed in Huizhou for two years, living on borrowed money, to force the company to pay his medical expenses. It refused, but eventually agreed to a one-time settlement proposed by the Huizhou government that gave Mr. Hu 200,000 yuan, about $25,000. He returned home.

Half a year later, most of the money is gone. Mr. Hu spent several thousand dollars to open a small grocery to generate income. But he found he could not even stock the shelves without collapsing from exhaustion. When he began coughing up blood this spring, he turned the store over to his wife.

Mr. Hu said he had spent most of the severance on hospital visits and intravenous injections of glucose and sodium chloride, which help relieve the pressure on his chest.

One day last week he called his 16-year-old son to his bedside and told the boy that he had to find a job instead of attending high school as planned. "I am on the threshold of death and this family must have income," Mr. Hu said. "He cried when I told him and I cried, too. But we are going to run out of money in a few months. There is no other way."

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.