The Gujiao mining district was to be built into a coal base, a key project during the Sixth 5-Year Plan period, and construction was started in August 1979. But in November 1981 a department in the province arrogantly gave permission to expand the small coal pit of Tianchidian commune in Loufan County under the Zhenchengdi mine in this mining district and loaned it more than 1.8 million yuan to do the job, thus affecting the construction and production of the Zhenchengdi mine.
2008 July 31, Shipeng Guo, “China mine disasters kill 20, landslide buries 10”, in Nick Macfie, editor, Reuters[1], archived from the original on 12 May 2022, Latest Crisis[2]:
At least 10 villagers in Loufan county in the northern province of Shanxi were buried by a landslide on Friday morning, Xinhua said.
Reporter Sun Chunlong had a scoop in the Xinhua-owned Oriental Outlook weekly magazine about the bursting of a mine-tailings dam on August 1 that submerged a hamlet in Loufan county, Shanxi , claiming more than 40 lives. Loufan authorities reported the event as a natural accident with a minor death toll.
On his blog, the thirty-two-year-old Sun posted an informant’s letter addressed to Wang Jun, who had recently been appointed acting governor of Shanxi province. The letter asked Wang to make a thorough investigation into a fatal landslide that had happened in this region the previous month; apparently, the landslide had been caused by the collapse of an illegal mining dump in Loufan county, and it had reportedly killed eleven people.
2011, Xin Xin, “Web 2.0, citizen journalism and social justice in China”, in Graham Meikle, Guy Redden, editors, News Online: Transformations and Continuities[6], Palgrave Macmillan, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 184:
The case of the Loufan landslide indicates how a mainstream journalist-blogger used his weblog to expose the cover-up of an accident in north-west China. Work-related accidents due to poor safety measures are another important aspect of social injustice in today’s China. The landslide took place at a local iron mine in Loufan county in the suburbs of the Shanxi provincial capital Taiyuan on 1 August 2008. Initially, the local authorities attempted to cover up the causes of the disaster by blaming the ‘bad weather’, and deliberately concealed the real number of casualties.
