HUANG TU, China, June 15 — 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."
