The National Bureau of Statistics announced on Wednesday higher-than-expected 9.5 per cent economic growth for the first six months, which it deemed stable and rapid.

On the same day the confirmed death toll from Tuesday's Tongchuan coal mine blast in northwestern Shaanxi Province rose to 26.

Some believe such destruction is the price that must be paid.

The benefits of fast growth should not be forgotten. Economic success has helped the world's most populous country lift hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty in the past two decades. But such miserable by-products are hard to bear.

As the country increasingly realizes the urgency with which prosperity using a sustainable approach must be pursued, such dear prices of development cannot keep on being paid.

Tuesday's explosion was the latest in a series of deadly workplace incidents that have struck China this year.

In terms of death toll, this disaster pales besides the Shenlong coal mine incident in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region just 8 days ago, which claimed 83 lives.

Early this year, in the worst disaster of its kind in the history of New China, the Sunjiawan coal mine catastrophe in Fuxin of Northeast China's Liaoning Province claimed the lives of 213 miners.

Shocking numbers of workplace deaths in incidents that are becoming more and more frequent have led the work safety authorities to scream: "Enough is enough."

Severe punishments rarely handed down in the past have been delivered swiftly against coal mine owners and local officials responsible for these tragedies. Some top local officials have been sacked, and coal mine owners sentenced.

In spite of harsh penalties, workplace safety, particularly in the mining sector, has not improved as desired.

The reasons behind this sad fact are many and complex. There is a lack of effective on-the-spot supervision and enforcement of workplace safety regulations.

The latest coal mine blast highlighted one of the underlying causes of such accidents, and revealed the gloomy reality in stark contrast to the rosy outlook economic results depict.

To fuel near double-digit economic growth, the country has had to keep consuming more and more coal. As a result, ever soaring demand for energy has led many coal mine owners to tell their workers to dig as if there were no tomorrow.

The country's top work safety authorities discovered outrageous malpractice during their investigations in the wake of the Xinjiang incident on July 11.

The small coal mine with a designed production capacity of 30,000 tons per year had already produced 180,000 tons of coal in the first half of this year alone.

Clearly, under such circumstances, even a coal mine with complete workplace safety equipment could not operate safely, not to mention those like that the Xinjiang coal mine which were poorly equipped to deal with such an incident.

The profits-before-safety mentality of some coal mine owners is to blame for these tragedies.

But it would be going too far to thus blame the power of the market for enticing coal mine owners to seek money at any cost.

The market is only a mechanism to allow users' demand to be met by producers' supply. Problems on either side lie largely at the door of development policies, rather than with the market mechanism itself. To fix these problems, the government should step in to ensure market work efficiently.

Unfortunately, some officials and researchers creatively embrace the "Kuznets Curve" theory for analyzing work safety matters. The inverted U-shaped curve was originally meant to describe the initial increase and then decrease of inequality of income distribution along a country's economic development.

But the officials and researchers claim that as China accelerates industrialization, workplace deaths and injuries are expected to continue rising inevitably as a similar curve implies.

Citing lessons drawn from developed countries, they argue that when a country's per-capita GDP is between US$1,000 and US$3,000, the rise in workplace deaths and injuries is difficult to curb. China's per-capita GDP just exceeded US$1,000 two years ago.

Will this sort of developmental curse haunt China? Can China sidestep it and find a sustainable route to prosperity?

Increasing numbers of workplace accidents do not allow for too much optimism.

But as the country has resolved to shift from extensive growth to a greener and more resource-efficient development pattern, the growing consensus is that China should defy the developmental curse to build a harmonious society.

We must caution against complacent thoughts that current fast growth and low inflation herald a golden period of development.

The country is undergoing a very difficult transformation in development pattern.

The problems developed countries have experienced is not a reason to expect the same thing to happen in China.

Policy-makers should face up to the serious work safety situation and make tough decisions to balance speed of development with workers' welfare.

(China Daily July 22, 2005)