China to crack down on workplace accidents

China has announced it will toughen its position on workplace safety, the Wall Street Journal reported. The government said it had demoted or imprisoned 183 people deemed responsible for accidents at coal mines and construction sites, the main targets of its new campaign. Suspicions that the country’s workplace accident statistics are unusually low were given credence by a recent story suggesting at least 10 workers on Beijing’s Olympic stadium had been killed during construction. Officially, there were 65 construction fatalities in Beijing in 2006, out of an estimated one million workers on 10,000 construction sites. Li Yizhong, the head of China’s safety inspection body, said that he was ordering a probe into reports of accidents, and that if found to be true, "serious punishment would be given to those responsible according to the law."