Workers’ Acquiescence to Air Pollution: A Qualitative Study of Coal Miners in China

Abstract Coal extraction releases pollutants to the air that affect the health and well-being of not only the coal communities but also societies at large. However, coal also provides people with stable livelihoods. Given this, how do coal workers perceive air pollution that is produced by their own industry? To answer this question, I interviewed coal miners in China. My findings present a paradox: Although miners identify certain sources of air pollution, these same miners nevertheless deny the existence of air pollution. My findings reveal that, in order to collectively avoid the mention of any air quality issues, the miners must avoid a direct confrontation with authority—that same authority that has forged a formulated acquiescence among miners at work. Acknowledging air quality issues could disturb the miners’ employment stability by creating anxiety and fear, challenging their ontological security.


Introduction
For 13 years, 41-year-old Bo distributed explosive materials at 500 meters (0.3 miles) underground 20 days each month. During those 20 days, he worked 10, 8-hour day shifts and 10, 16-hour night shifts. At work, Bo spent about one hour distributing explosives for each shift of the extracting and tunneling miners (three shifts a day). He released them by weight based on each day's tunneling and extracting needs, recording each amount distributed on his electronic reading device. When Bo was done distributing materials, he guarded the warehoused explosives in his "cave" office. During his guarding hours, he read, napped and walked. By the end of his shift, he returned the reader device, elevated to the ground level, took a bath and went home.
When I asked Bo about wu mai smog that had gained global criticism of China's air quality, he mentioned the smoke caused by farmers burning straw, but didn't think it was an issue because it only temporarily occurred in the Spring and Fall. He avoided lingering outdoors.
Compared to the visible smoke from the burning of agricultural wastes, air pollutants from mining activities, such as particulate matter, toxic gases and heavy metals, are hard to discern. Burning of coal for commercial and household purposes also intensifies the density of these pollutants, causing severe air pollution around mining areas (Tripathi and Gautam 2007). All particles and pollutants have significant spatial and seasonal variations depending on the time of year, winter being the worst (Pandey, Agrawal, and Singh 2014). Such air pollution ultimately deteriorates human health (Singh, Singh, and Agrawal 1991).
Studies on health concerns among coal miners primarily focus on occupational illnesses, such as chronic heart, kidney and lung diseases (Hendryx and Ahern 2009;Hamby 2020). Preventable but incurable lung diseases such as pneumoconiosis (also called black lung) and silicosis are ubiquitous among miners as they inhale coal dust at work. Preventative measure like regulating the engineering dust controls in the mines, as Perret et al. (2017) discover, is evidently lacking even in high-income countries, and in less developed countries, due to the lack of financial commitment, systematic screening is even more limited. In addition to the limited engineering dust control, in Han et al.'s (2018) study on China's health management, researchers identify flaws in health examination, occupational health compensations and healthcare for coal workers.
Confronting such mining bureaucracy that does not prioritize the quality of life, coal communities experience obstacles in protecting their rights. Bell (2016) identifies four barriers to mobilization for environmental justice movement in the Appalachian coal communities: lack of social capital, lack of male representation in the environmental justice movement, misconstruction of extraction reliant community identity and unseen destruction by coal industry. If workers in the US face these mobilization challenges for environmental justice, shall we naturally assume that Chinese coal workers like Bowho usually experience worse labor conditions, fewer protections and presumably, more risks-would encounter even more obstacles in pursuit of a healthy life? If so, what would they be?
Building upon Bell's coal research in Appalachia, I ask these two research questions: How do Chinese coal workers make sense of smog caused by their own industry? What can we learn from them that can advance public policies to protect both livelihoods and the environment? I answer the questions in this study through in-depth interviews with 18 coal miners and spouses from two separate mines, Mineville and Farmville, in a Chinese town I call Great Glory. Using the theoretical framework of ontological security (Giddens 1991), I examine coal workers' perceptions of smog and their experiences at work. Findings indicate that inconsistencies exist in the ways that workers understand pollution. Specifically, workers identify straw burning and a local steel factory as the main sources of air pollution while also denying that air pollution is a problem. I confirm the link between their denial of air pollution as an issue and the control strategies miners are subject to at work, asserting that maintaining employment security is a contributing factor in their acquiescence toward the environmental risk.
My findings suggest that coal workers' unsuccessful confrontations with mining authorities concerning labor injustice undermine their power to pursue environmental justice. As an easy way out, either knowingly or unknowingly, miners develop trust that their policy-making authorities will solve air pollution issues. Such trust minimizes their anxiety upon experiencing unfairness at work or home, enabling the workers and their families to maintain their ontological security and their sense of a stable self-identity (Giddens 1991). Hence, denying that air pollution is an issue becomes a safe conclusion for miners to make in order for them to collectively distance themselves from disturbing information (Norgaard 2006:374) that would require them to confront power that already formulates acquiescence among miners at work (Gaventa 1982). This study adds a new barrier to environmental justice mobilization by connecting workers' perceptions of an environmental risk to employment relations. I argue that miners are non-active toward smog because they do not make or want to make the connection between smog and their own well-being. They avoid making smog an issue, for they believe they cannot change the situation. Situated in a Chinese coal community, this research has important implications for understanding environmental non-action by revealing how power dynamics at work can shape individuals' perceptions of environmental risks.

Air Pollution Perceptions and Coal
Air pollution perceptions are socially constructed, and as such, require analysis and interpretation with social and cultural sensitivities (Bickerstaff and Walker 2003). Under certain social and cultural circumstances, individuals' perspectives toward risks reveal their assumptions and values about social order, hierarchy and justice (Douglas 1973). For example, Ngo, Kokoyo, and Klopp (2017) argue that participation in air quality monitoring increased residents' awareness of air pollution and led to local actions to address air quality issues. People perceive their neighborhoods as less polluted than surrounding areas if they do not live next to a significant polluting source (Oltra and Sala 2014). Apart from outdoor air pollution, Hofflinger, Boso, and Oltra (2019) identify halo effects among people whose homes are heavily polluted with wood-burning smoke from stoves, that they perceive their homes as being less polluted than in the city even though air quality data show the opposite. Further, people's perceptions are closely connected to the development of strategies coping with health risks from air pollution (Hofflinger, Boso, and Oltra 2019). Specifically, higher income families tend to have more home halo effects than low-income ones (Hofflinger, Boso, and Oltra 2019). Studies have also shown that the environmental transparency of local governments moderate the relationship between actual air pollution at city levels and the public perceptions of air pollution (Peng et al. 2019). Air pollution perceptions are connected to individuals' physical senses or health conditions (Johnson 2012), and air pollution levels have a positive correlation with the sales of healthcare plans (Chang, Huang and Wang 2018).
While these studies show relationships between air pollution perceptions with various predictors, fewer studies explain why individuals might downplay the risks of air pollution. Tilt (2006) terms the downplaying of risks as "strategic risk repression." In Tilt's study of three occupational groups' perceptions of environmental pollution in a southwestern city of China, factory workers express the least concern. Tilt argues that the industrial workers' perceptions of pollution are likely to relate to a cost-benefit calculation in which they deem economic livelihoods to be their issue of greatest concern, followed by ecological and health risks. Tilt's study is important because it attends to the relationships between occupations and air pollution perceptions. However, the void of an individuals' actual job experience and the individual's choice-making for health insurance coverage, both connected to employment, misses the nuances of power dynamics in labor relations which can influence perceptions.
Current coal research focuses upon economic and environmental impacts of coal extraction and consumption, as well as the coal industry's greenwashing that influences public perceptions (Bell and York 2012). Coal industries actively construct ideology in coal mining towns to convince the public of the importance of coal and to gain trust among the public (Blaacker, Woods, and Oliver 2012). To maintain their power image, pro-coal organizations create smoke screens to address certain issues but not others to convince the public that they are being environmentally responsible (Harfmann 2021), to culturally brainwash coal communities by transforming social landscapes, appropriate cultural icons (Bell and York 2010) and induce fear and silence among the public (Cabrejas 2012). Even though coal mines adopt clean coal technology to mitigate pollution, clean coal technologies would not likely lessen the impact on either the environment or public health (Fitzgerald 2012). When coal and renewable energy are the choices, as in the case of mountaintop removal of coal by miners blasting in West Virginia, coal manifests capitalism's near-sighted greed in maximizing profits. Such short-term private benefit from coal mining results in not only degraded environment but also the loss of a potential wind development future in the area that would favor human well-being for generations to come (Wishart 2012).
Researchers also show that workers' perceptions and behaviors are often reflections of workplace structures and routines (Hodson 2001;Harrison 2020). Workers come to identify the needs and demands of their employers and consent to their own exploitation (Burawoy 1979;Gaventa 1982). Workers who feel powerless may be more likely to rely on the perceived benevolence of the elite who control access to a variety of material resources (Gaventa 1982). That benevolence would disappear if and when the powerless challenged the power relations. Hence, "while the benefits of the status quo are high for the powerful, the costs of challenge are potentially higher for the powerless" (Gaventa 1982:161). In this study, I reveal the link between coal workers' non-action toward smog and their acquiescence toward injustice at work, adding to the body of scholarship on mobilization barriers to the environmental justice movement. Next, I introduce the ontological security framework and explain why I use this framework to analyze the Chinese coal miners' perceptions of air pollution and their experiences at work.

Ontological Security
Workers' reluctance to recognize or admit to problems associated with pollution from their industries can be best understood using the lens of ontological security. Ontological security, termed by Anthony Giddens (1984:375), refers to the "confidence or trust that the natural and social worlds are as they appear to be, including the basic existential parameters of self and social identity." As is essential to ontological security, basic trust means feeling confident and faithful about the external world and positive that things will work out on their own (Giddens 1991:38-39;Brown and Joenniemi 2017). Giddens (1991) argues that routine and norms block an individual from feeling anxious toward unpredictability. These norms that are often taken for granted in one's interactions with others foster ontological security (Giddens 1991;Banham 2020). The development of trust chases away anxiety and despair, which means having a high level of ontological security allows individuals to fulfill social expectations, believing that their positions in the world will remain stable (Giddens 1991:38-55;Banham 2020).
Maintaining one's ontological security is a process that can lead to social acquiescence or denial. Such social acquiescence, or as Norgaard (2006:374) terms it, "the social organization of denial" manifests itself in diverse communities in the world. Norgaard (2011) finds that residents in a Norwegian town deny the existence of climate change by holding information at a distance, even while experiencing warm winters that close the community's ski resorts. After the BP oil spill of 2010, shrimpers sometimes found evidence of oil in shrimp they caught, though believed that it was still safe to eat, despite what they observed with their own senses (Harrison 2020). Auyero and Swistun (2009) take the study of pollution to the global south, albeit locating their study in a middle-income Latin American country, Argentina. By denying the harm of toxic contaminations, residents in that Argentine shantytown that had been contaminated by a petrochemical industry generally deny the harm of toxic contaminations in order to protect themselves from threats to their ways of life. These studies, taken together, indicate that even though people may be knowledgeable about harmful effects of environmental risks, they tend to choose to distance themselves from the consequences brought by these environmental risks. To recognize the health risks from pollution would necessitate identity work. This self-identifying process could perhaps lead them to fundamentally reorganize their lives and livelihoods.
Similar to the above studied populations in Nordic, Cajun American and South American areas, I find that the miners in a small coal mining town in China, also work to maintain a sense of continuity with regard to the ways they make a living. Even though to some limited extent, they are aware of the harmful effects of smog on their health, they stay disconnected from recognizing their power in seeking environmental justice. In what follows, coal mining is situated in the Chinese historical and economic context, and the differences among mines and workers are addressed.

Background of Coal Mining in China
Coal mining in China has exerted significant historical influence in solidifying Mao's Communist leadership; workers looked to the Communist leadership of the mine for their dignity as workers (Perry 2012). Between the workers and the government was a social contract (Lee 2007), "an implicit state guarantee of employment security and welfare in exchange for workers' political acquiescence." However, following the market reforms, the social and political status of the proletariats rapidly declined. Their labor was considered to be redundant and unnecessary (Lee 2007). Even though market reforms brought increased wages and improved material conditions, in post-Mao era, "the sense of injustice is pervasive" (Perry 2012).
When encountering injustice at work, coal workers do not usually seek help from their labor unions. Labor unions, as a component in the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, is a semi-governmental agency subjected to strict scrutiny of the government (Yao and Zhong 2013). Even though labor unions should be independent from enterprises, in practice, the union chair is usually on the payroll of the company. In this research, the state owned mine in Mineville has a labor union that functions as a propaganda arm of the mine, while in Farmville, labor unions do not exist, placing the workers in an even more vulnerable position to pursue workers' rights.
Based on household registrations, known as "Hukou" (mouths in a household), the government divides workers into two classes: non-agriculture and agriculture. Each class of workers have separate access to resources such as education, job, health insurance, housing, etc (Walder 1988;Otis and Wu 2018). Miners in Mineville mostly rely on working in coal for a living, while in Farmville, since agricultural residents are entitled to land, workers consider mining to be an important but secondary means of living to farming. Unlike their peers in Mineville who rely on coal jobs for employment benefits, contract miners in Farmville receive healthcare and retirement benefits that are accessible exclusively to farmers.
Despite differences in their Hukou statuses and the ownerships of mines, all are workers of coal whose work and life experiences offer insight into the Chinese coal community as a whole. A comparison between the two groups of miners explains the impacts of class and bureaucracy, important in understanding how they shape miners' perceptions of power as well as their powerlessness in questioning environmental risks. In the next section, I introduce my research data and the process of data collection, including my own reflection of the fieldwork experience.

Data and Methods
My research site, Great Glory, a coal mining-oriented city in northeast China, has a population of approximately one and a half million in an area of about eight thousand square miles, which is about the population of Hawaii and the size of New Jersey. Situated along the Shenyang-Changchun-Harbin beltway, Great Glory is one of the most polluted areas in the region, experiencing seasonal changes in its air quality. Great Glory breathes its best air in summer and its worst in winter. Intense haze events range from mid-October to mid-May when coal remains the major source of heating when it is cold outside .
Coal-fired stoves in Mineville apartments have been largely replaced by either electrical or gas-fueled ones. However, in the agricultural-oriented Farmville and the agricultural areas of Mineville, where single family houses are the main housing option, coal burning stoves are still common, especially during winter months. Even though the air quality in Great Glory has improved, credited to the country's industrial revitalization programs, China's northeastern region remains an area with among the poorest air quality (Liu et al. 2020). As Fuller (2019:86-182) notes, "People in the north [of China] tend to die earlier from heart and lung problems consistent with air pollution exposure." In Great Glory, mobilization against injustice is not new, although grassroot protests are primarily oriented to labor unrest. One of the most recent protests that mobilized thousands of miners and families accelerated wage adjustments for miners. Based on the history of Great Glory that miners are capable of mobilizing to initiate changes for their well-being, I initiated an investigation into how miners react to another threat to their quality of life-smog.
Access to the Great Glory community is also important in my field site choice. As a native of the Great Glory area, I am linguistically and culturally competent to conduct research. Originally from near the Shanghai area, my family moved to the northeast for employment in coal. Until I reached adulthood, I saw family members appointed, laidoff and transferred to and from different coal positions. I witnessed them making decisions in our family meetings. From a young age, I learned working in coal mines was attached to injury, permanent diseases and death. Even after I became an adult, I maintained contact with many of my friends from school. To acquire the best information from interviews, I relied on my former schoolmates to arrange referrals for me to interview. Many of them work in the coal companies of Great Glory; some hold positions with close contact to miners. The Institutional Review Board at the University of Oregon approved of my research proposal under protocol number 05312019.043, one month before I entered my research site.
To find participants, I asked my contacts to connect me with those who live and work in the Great Glory coal mines. Although none of my contacts are miners, they organized dinner meetings where I was connected with eight invited guests, three of whom became gatekeepers to the state-owned coal mining company in Mineville. Through a family contact, I met with the miners who worked in the privately-owned mines in Farmville. In total, I interviewed eighteen residents, nine from Mineville and nine from Farmville: fourteen miners and four spouses. The ages of my research participants ranged from thirty-six to sixty, with an average age of forty-four. Apart from the two office workers in Mineville who held the equivalent of college degrees, the rest were educated no further than high school.
To create the most comfortable interview environment, I agreed to meet my interviewees at places they selected, reminding them that (1) only I and my faculty advisor would have access to what they shared, (2) they could stop our conversation anytime, and (3) they should feel free not to answer certain questions. Before turning on my recorder, I obtained informed consent at the start of every interview and offered copies of consent forms. Like any dilemma doing qualitative research, I have no scientific measurement of how honest my research participants were in their responses as each individual may censor themselves for various reasons. Aware of the possibilities that my informants may not have been fully open to my inquiries, through probing and cross checking, I was able to identify patterns that help me understand the workers' situations.
In my semi-structured interviews, I asked them about their work, like their daily routine, job requirements and benefits. I then asked about their thoughts on wu mai smog, such as polluting sources and changes they made to protect themselves from sickness (See Appendix A). Guided by my interview protocol, I expanded my conversations with the miners to include areas of their interest. Doing so allowed me to consider all information my informants willingly shared with me to be data for my later analysis. For example, a couple talked about their nine-year old son's weak immune system during wintertime, and how they purchased anti-smog masks for him and struggled to pay for his medical expenses.
To maintain confidentiality, I erased files from my digital recorder after saving them in a password protected folder and backing them up on a thumb drive. My empty digital recorder was the only device I carried to interviews. I used the most popular mobile chat application in China "WeChat" to schedule meetings. However, to respect privacy, only in person did I share my research agenda with my gatekeepers and potential interviewees. With codes that are known only to myself, I labeled my informants with one syllable names such as Bo, Cai and Dong, which partially follows the Chinese naming tradition but provides convenience for English speaking audience to relate.
I translated the interviews from Chinese to English by myself and used the English transcription for line-by-line coding. Informed by grounded theory methods (Charmaz 2014), I used the iterative approach (Tracy 2013) to refine analytic categorization. I engaged in a reflexive process of focused coding and memo writing during which I reviewed both the Chinese and English transcripts multiple times to ensure the quality of my analysis.

Findings and Discussion
Miners and their spouses reported two main sources of smog in Great Glory: straw burning and steel production. However, despite their descriptions of these sources and their discomfort, they either denied air pollution existed or were inactive (quiescent) in environmental engagement: Sixteen (89%) described the impact of air pollution on themselves and their families, among whom twelve (75%) attached "no", "none", or "don't know" to their statements on air pollution (i.e. "no" means the respondent said there was no air pollution in Great Glory). Two (11%) denied the existence of air pollution without indication of any impact on their lives.
Why would the miners hold conflicted views on smog and remain acquiescent in countering this health risk? In what follows, I explain miners' acquiescence by revealing the power struggles they encounter at work. My findings show that miners' reliance on the mining authority for job security silences their voices on smog issues. They dealt with more serious air pollution issues, coal dust in the mines and depended on their health insurance through employment for the diagnosis and treatment of lung diseases. For them, standing up for clean air is ontologically insecure, which may bring consequences such as losing their jobs, health care, retirement pension, family income, education of their children. To maintain their ontological security, they exclusively rely on their authority, for both job security and clean air.

Blaming the Visible: Straw and Steel
Miners-particularly those who work in the state owned mine in Mineville, the nonfarming class-reported straw burning activities as being the cause of the local air pollution. According to them, straw burning occurs every spring and fall. During the burning days, the visibility is low. They experience discomfort in breathing and difficulties keeping their eyes open.
I interviewed mining technician Dong in his shared open-door office with free-flowing traffic of curious colleagues, frequent interruptions by phone calls, water and document deliveries and asking me to whom he was talking. On the straw burning in Great Glory, he described the following: Straw burning … is to the extent (that I am) not able to see the car in front of me. One wouldn't see another person five steps away. That's about three years ago. The burning was that bad in those years. But later, the country banned burning straw. There are satellites monitoring high above. It hasn't been as bad these years, but they (farmers) are still burning.
Dong pointed out to me the most visible air pollution-burning from the farm fields-and expressed a sense of powerlessness even with the implementation of burning bans. Farming, as the most important food source, cannot stop. Until farmers find feasible alternatives to burning straw, they are forced to continue to burn and receive blame from the non-farming residents. However, if it may have been difficult for Dong to reveal the harmful air produced by mining activities at his workplace due to concerns about his continued employment, we could observe a pattern from the same avoidance by Yong, the railway maintenance worker of Mineville: Smoky … Farmers burn things in fall. This year is better. This year policies are strict. Those who are caught burning crop debris could be detained. A few years ago, during fall, you couldn't imagine (how bad the air was). It was difficult to breathe. Farmers burn garbage and crop debris, to clean up their field. … The air makes me cough. Not good for health. " Both Dong and Yong revealed two things: First, they were both aware that polluted air impacted their lives but none of the pollution was from mining. Second, they are non-active toward the poor air condition because the burning ban policy had already been in place. This could mean either they trusted the policy makers to solve the air quality issues or they were afraid of challenging policy makers for implementing ineffective policies. Either trust or fear, or both, blaming the agricultural cause of air pollution took attention away from the coal industry they were serving. Their non-action toward poor air quality enabled Dong and Yong to go about their lives with a sense of security.
While 100% of Mineville participants reported straw burning as the cause of poor air quality, among the farming miners in Farmville, only one couple (33%) identified it as such. The majority of Farmville interviewees reported air pollution from household coal burning. Lang works part time in Farmville, 20 days a month, in the same compressed shifts as the full-time miner Bo in Mineville, but Lang spends the rest of the month farming commercial crops. When asked about smog, Lang and his wife Jin turned to the coal fired stoves in personal households. Jin and Lang's description of Farmville is familiar. I was born and raised in coal-fired houses, apartments, and split my upbringing between Mineville and Farmville, going to school and visiting relatives. During my research period, I observed Farmville had not changed much, as one level houses were still the main housing option. Even though Jin and Lang moved to a coal-free apartment in town, their family, relatives and friends left behind in their village are still relying on coal for fuel. Asking them not to burn coal could equate to asking them to starve or freeze in winter. Such potential guilt forbids them from advocating for clean air.
The second polluting source is the steel factory, located in the industrial park, about five miles from the city center. "A factory that other cities did not want," Yong, the railroad worker in Mineville said, "it pollutes badly." Then he described the black cloud hovering above the factory seen from a few miles away. When I asked why the city would accept such a polluting factory, Yong shared, "It … pays taxes and … offers jobs. Without coal mines and the steel factory, Great Glory would not have any sources generating revenue." For Yong, resisting pollution from the steel factory would cause the city to lose tax revenue to finance public services and to increase unemployment. Therefore, accepting, albeit reluctantly, the black cloud as part of Great Glory's identity, allowed him to continue his roles in the mining society as a coal worker, so he wouldn't have to find work in another city which may shatter his family structure, risking his role as a father, husband and son.
The steel factory means more than damaging public health. Extraction miner Sun in Mineville worked as a steel factory contract driver during his rehab break for a foot injury from mining. According to him, jobs in the steel factory belonged to those who had "connections." The factory was "raising" a group of people who didn't need to work hard or work at all. The function of a factory as society stabilizer was also mentioned in my interview with Dong. In his free-for-all office in Mineville, he shared the bureaucratic history of factories and how they served as a stabilizing force for the mine: To calm miners' turnover, they (the mining authority) opened a hatchery. At the beginning, the hatchery hatched some chickens, then some ducks. Then the hatchery did not run well. The hatchery was really just a place that offered jobs exclusively for miners' families. After the hatchery was closed, they opened a clothing factory … Though transformed a few times, the hatchery stabilized the mine's workforce by providing jobs to the miners' families so they did not need to work elsewhere, allowing the family unity to remain unbroken and the workers' engagement in mining strong. As depicted by both Sun and Dong, the presence of factories in Great Glory steadies the continuation of the city's mining identity. Even though the polluting steel factory hardly indicates fair and equal opportunities in its recruiting process, it could signify a stable mining society that might survive the decline of coal. However, this also means that standing up against the pollution produced by the steel factory would require people to confront the privilege of the few and their power, to which they have access.
Despite the workers identifying agricultural and industrial air pollution sources in our interviews, they chose to be silent about smog. They bolstered their ontological security by tolerating the consequences of the pollution and maintaining their nonaction status quo. They downplayed the significance of air pollution by "othering" (Bickerstaff andWalker 2001, 2003) it as a metropolitan issue: Compared to Beijing, Great Glory "doesn't have as much smog." Air pollution is only "terrible in other cities" and Great Glory has "no air pollution." "Mineville is surrounded by mountains" that naturally filter polluted air. By downplaying smog, the mine workers created a halo effect (Bickerstaff 2004;Xu, Chi, and Zhu 2017;Hofflinger, Boso, and Oltra 2019), a feeling of protection where they recognized the presence of air pollution but denied that it affected them.
Coping strategies to reduce health risks from air pollution plays an important role in perceptions of air pollution (Hofflinger, Boso, and Oltra 2019). Workers' coping strategies-purchasing personal protective equipment (masks, air purifiers), locating medical treatment and surviving after retiring from coal-all require disposable income, health insurance and retirement monies. For miners in Great Glory, all of these necessities come from being employed in coal, so workers' relationships with their employers become critical in considering whether to voice air pollution concerns. Next, I show miners' work life and how their non-action is made possible through their perceptions of power. The experiences of full-time workers with benefits in Mineville contrasted with contract farmer miners in Farmville establish labor force dualism (Zhang 2015), creating distinct grievances and shaping compliance and resistance for the two groups of workers. Such a dualistic labor regime not only helps mining authorities achieve greater flexibility in managing the workforce but can also serve as a divide-and-conquer strategy to undermine worker resistance (Zhang 2015). The separation among miners in Mineville and Farmville sets an example. When I asked Farmville miner Lang and his wife Jin about a recent protest about wage issues in Mineville, Lang replied as follows: The riot in the (state-owned) mine. … That was a really big one. … Our mine, … is one of the ten something in Farmville … quite famous. Also (the owner of the mine) has quite a good reputation. He never owes any wages to workers. … Whether or not other mines owe any money to workers, I don't know. Our mine here doesn't owe (any wages to workers).
In his response, Lang separated himself from the workers in Mineville in two ways: First, his paychecks were on time and his mine has a reputation of not owing wages. Second, he used the authority's language "riot" to describe the worker's strike, a way to endorse the government's decision in cracking down on the miners' protest. When asked about his own experience asking for a raise, Lang repeated his boss's words: "You come to ask for a raise. If I accept it, others will come for a raise. Then the whole mine will be in chaos." He then justified for his boss, "He thinks of what benefits the company. That's a big company. We can't say anything about it. … It's just like that." Once again Lang used the authority's language to explain why he was not eligible for a raise. His endorsement of the officials' rhetoric reflects his powerlessness for fear of losing his boss's favor.
As Lang put it, he had two options: "If you want to work, come to work. If you don't want to work, don't." Borrowing the official's languages as his own allowed him to keep his job and feel ontologically secured in his role as a farmer, miner and husband who provided for his family. Internalizing the values of the superior reflects workers' sense of powerlessness (Gaventa 1982). As Freire (1970) puts it, his voice is the voice of the dominant, but his. Workers like Lang gradually speak out less and less, learning to become silent, eventually not speaking out at all. On the Farmville side, a miner named Wan commented on his experience involving an unfair deduction from his paycheck: We wouldn't be able to ask for that money back. Why would we bother? … The chance of getting the money back is too slim. The chance is small that they would return the money deducted (from the paycheck). We just let them. If there's any fine in the paycheck, we'd be quiet about it.
For Lang and Wan, they traded justice for silence. Their nonconfrontational decisions enabled them to continue their work in their mine, maintaining a sense of employment security.
Over at Mineville, even though in the past workers had mobilized to protest against wage issues-some of which did accelerate policy implementations-their current practice is to routinely remain silent. One Mineville worker who was quiet about unfair deductions was Cai. He was eligible for one-time financial aid from the labor union for his wife's cancer treatment. He received partial funding, and was able to realize the exact amount of financial aid he was entitled to receive only when the labor union followed up with him. He then knew his supervisor to whom his fund was delegated had kept the rest. Instead of confronting his supervisor for stealing his fund, Cai said about his supervisor, "He could return a favor to the head of the labor union in the future. The labor union is the mine's labor union. … It must listen to the mining leadership." Mining for more than two decades, Cai had learned the social protocol regarding how workers are exploited by both their supervisors and the labor union. As a form of thought control (Lukes 1974), this process of workplace socialization creates powerlessness among workers. Cai thought about leaving. "If I go to work at another job, the work years I have spent in the mine will be wasted. Quitting because a mine is closed and quitting because of personal reasons are two different things. If the mine is shut down, it will have to take care of the workers. It will continue to pay for your retirement pension. If you want to quit, the mine will not bother to pay those things." If the motivation for keeping his job was to gain financial security upon retirement, it becomes understandable why Cai would not act on causes that could undermine his livelihood, or even think of using his voice to improve the air quality in Great Glory.
Cai's colleague Bo also had a difficult relationship with his supervisor. For years, Bo had been paid less than his peers who did the same job with the same years of work experience. In his battle to win a raise that was long overdue, Bo saw a secure future by not taking action. He said: Talking doesn't work. Almost all of us have talked about this (the paycheck review request) with our supervisor. The supervisor said he couldn't do anything. He didn't give anyone a raise. … What else can you do? We don't have other solutions. ["没 有 办 法 "] … It (negotiating salary) doesn't work. … We asked for a raise. You go, you won't win. You come back, then your supervisor will punish you, put small shoes on your feet (retaliate). Both Cai and Bo described their fight for justice at work and shared their sole dependency on the mining authority in Mineville for their job security. Such dependency is consistent with the dependency seen in "closed societies" (Freire 1970) like Great Glory coal mines where highly unequal relationships exist between workers and employers. Those who are "unable to engage actively with others in the determination of their own affairs also might not develop political consciousness of their own situation or of broader political inequalities" (Gaventa 1982:18). For the air quality issues, workers and their families choose to live in "a state of political passivity" (Gramsci and Carl 1957:29). Workers have but two options: deny their dignity at work by continuing to submit themselves to management's exploitation or leave their mining jobs, risking the loss of job security. Standing up for themselves is not a viable option.
Through workers' perceptions of their mining management regarding their financial situations at work, I find that miners in Great Glory have little protection over their rights as workers. Their awareness of potential retaliation from their supervisors-especially the loss of their jobs-contribute to their acquiescence (Gaventa 1982). With this learned acquiescence from work, miners already suffering from coal dust in the mines perceive little power on their own to improve the air quality in Great Glory. Through allowing the exploitation of their economic benefits by their mining authorities, workers choose to maintain their status quo in order to maintain their mining identity and other roles they play at home. The solidification of their ontological security makes it possible for my research participants to be nonactive to smog issues in Great Glory. Such nonaction, I argue, is rooted in their lived experience working in the dominating Chinese state-owned coal industry.

Conclusion
This research begins with inquiries about how the public makes sense of smog caused by the coal industry and how public policies can be advanced for the well-being of both human societies and natural resources. I then focus my micro-level analysis on the people living and working in a coal mining town in China, their perceptions of health risks by smog and social risks against smog. Unlike their Appalachian peers who choose not to participate in environmental justice movements as per the four barriers detailed in Bell's Fighting King Coal (2016), Chinese miners have little protection at and outside of work regarding their rights to fair paychecks and clean air. They make no connection between why smog is an issue and what changes they can make. Miners and their families deny smog is an issue and disbelieve their own power to improve air quality. This research has shown that miners' denial and doubt are strategic choices that allow them to maintain their ontological security in order to continue their employment stability. Even if miners were right that air quality in Great Glory is currently not a major health threat, it could be too soon to tell, as most pollutants are invisible, and symptoms may take years to develop.
While miners' narratives are revealing, this research has several notable limitations that future research might pursue. Despite observing strong patterns across interview transcripts, the small sample size (n ¼ 18) makes it difficult to make wider claims regarding the Chinese mining industry. First, most of the interviewees are active workers (94%), with jobs that require them to be in healthy condition to remain employed. Their health status may hinder their perceptions of smog issues, which may well differ from those held by retired workers suffering from health issues, such as the common black lung disease. These participants' active employment status also means that they may not want to reveal too much about their employers. Second, the majority of these research participants are male (75%). Their views on air quality issues may be biased because studies show that gender differences exist in perceptions of environmental risks. Men, in particular, tend to have less knowledge of air pollution than women (Bell, Fitzgerald, and York 2019;Liao et al. 2015;Teng, Tseng, and Chan 2018;Bell 2013;Ergas and York 2012;Bell and Braun 2010;Kingsolver 1989). Future research should expand the scope of respondents to include retired coal workers and more importantly, women.
Moving forward, the well-being of a society calls for a decrease of environmental stress (Dietz, Rosa, and York 2009) and an increase in human development (Foster, Clark, and York 2010). Future sustainable societies rely on collaborations at work that fully utilize the agency of all workers (Foster and Clark 2020). Because change enactment is often led by people who might not listen to the voices of those most affected by changes (Harrison 2012), we might do a better job at crafting policies by including the perspectives of people living and working in places that suffer from pollution.