“Body Exploitation”--- the mines not the labors

    From 1905-1945, the Japanese aggressors had dominated the Benxi Coal and Iron Company for 40 years. They robbed the coals and irons in Benxi madly, push the “Body Exploitation” policy – the mines not the labors. On Apr 26th, 1942, a big gas blast took placed in Benxi colliery. To reduce the mine loss, the Japanese aggressors ordered to shut off the ground fan and blocked out the mouth of the well, regardless of the fates of the Chinese labors under the well. These decisions made numbers of miners who could still be rescued stifled under the ground, and thousands of Chinese miners died in the gas blast. The Japanese aggressors ignoring the safe producing, merely robbing the mines, the gas blast tragedies took placed now and then in each colliery.
To conceal the crime, the Japanese aggressors built “the monument of dead industrial soldiers” after the Benxi gas blast. 1,327 dead labors in the gas blast were recorded on the monument. But the Japanese war criminal 古海忠之 fesses that this blast “took away over 1,800 miners’ lives” in fact. Behind the monument is the “Ten Thousand Grave” with piles of bones. Li Yongpu, a survivor of the Benxi Colliery gas blast, pointed out: “On the second day of the blast, the cleaning work was started, I attended the work myself. It was really a terrible memory. We had carried out the dead labors’ body by tramcars and bags for 7 to 8 days. At the end, because of the hot weather, the dead labors’ bodies perished and the mine was full of the bad smelly. Then the Japanese soldiers ordered us pour alcohol into the mine, but even that the bad smelly could not be eliminated. It was impossible to continue the cleaning work. Many dead labors’ bodies were buried under the mine.” He attested that more than 3,000 labors died in the blast.

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