Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: China is rocked by two fatal mining accidents, a top Chinese cartographer is placed under investigation, and tech giant Tencent prepares to launch a WeChat artificial intelligence agent.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: China is rocked by two fatal mining accidents, a top Chinese cartographer is placed under investigation, and tech giant Tencent prepares to launch a WeChat artificial intelligence agent.

China Rocked by Fatal Mining Accidents

An explosion at Liushenyu, a privately run coal mine in Shanxi province, killed at least 82 people on May 22, marking China’s worst mining accident in more than 15 years. Then, on Sunday, an illegal operation in Yunnan province—likely mining rare earths—collapsed, killing five people.

The official handling of these disasters followed a familiar pattern. Local authorities initially downplayed the casualties before the central government took over the investigation and published higher death tolls. Major accidents are a stain on officials’ records and often lead to prosecutions of low-level staff, creating strong incentives to suppress news about them.

An outpouring of online anger came in the days after the Liushenyu incident, but that discussion is now being curtailed by censorship. Chinese state media will be unable to publish follow-up stories unless they closely adhere to the official line.

Coal mining is a particularly sensitive topic in China because it has long been presented as a success story of government-led safety reform. After annual mining fatalities peaked at more than 7,000 in the late 1990s, Beijing launched an initiative in 2005 that pushed for increased safety regulations, stricter prosecution for negligent managers, and a crackdown on........

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