Life has always been hard for the villagers of Gulang county in Gansu. But now it has got a lot worse. Many of the young men who went down the mines in order to earn a little extra cash for their families are now middle-aged men suffering from the chronic and fatal lung disease pneumoconiosis. They are unable to work and are crippled by debt from their medical bills.

The news today that the Shenzhen government has started paying out the wages owed by failed courier service DDS should not come as a surprise to anyone. Ever since DDS abruptly closed down last week, owing thousands of workers millions of yuan in unpaid wages, employees and company clients across the Pearl River Delta have been on the streets, staging demonstrations and demanding redress.

Two recent incidents have highlighted, once again, the dangers faced by migrant children in urban schools. On 17 January, a toddler died in a fire at an unlicensed kindergarten in Beijing, and yesterday Xinhua reported that the headmaster of a private school for the children of migrant workers in Nanning, Guangxi, had been arrested for beating a student and breaking his arm.

The similarities are chilling. In the multi-award winning movie Blind Shaft (盲井), two miners trick young migrants into working with them as their “relative” before killing them and extorting compensation from the mine boss. In a case reported by the domestic Chinese media on 26 December, a group of criminals murdered at least 17 young men in coal mines across the country before demanding compensation from their bosses.

New announcements from the State Council and the Shanghai government seem to offer some measure of cheer for migrant workers in the New Year, however, as with all government pronouncements, the devil will be in the implementation of the detail.

A few days ago Dan Harris of the China Law Blog confirmed a trend that we at CLB and others have noticed recently, namely that the non-payment of overtime is becoming the biggest single cause of labour-related lawsuits and arbitration cases in China. The problem has become particularly severe as the economy picks up again and enterprises, many of whom sacked vast numbers of workers last year, pressure their remaining employees to work long hours in order to fulfill new contracts.

In a surprising but welcome move, Time Magazine has included “the Chinese worker” in its final list of nominees for Person of the Year 2009. Hopefully, the nomination will spur the international community to look more closely, not only at the contribution China’s workers have made but also at the problems they face on a day to day basis.

The explosion at an illegal firecracker factory in Guangxi two weeks ago that left two primary school children dead and 11 others badly injured has provoked not only anger and sympathy for the victims but a wide-ranging discussion in the Chinese blogosphere about the problems of left-behind children and the inequities of the household registration system.

Have Chongqing’s prosecutors been watching too many episodes of The Sopranos? I ask merely because the latest installment in the Chongqing crime boss trials that have gripped the nation over the last few weeks has all the hallmarks of HBO’s award-winning drama series - corrupt politicians, crooked businessmen and vicious gangsters conspiring to organize strikes and monopolize the market.

On the same day that Zhang Haichao was awarded 615,000 yuan in compensation for pneumoconiosis contracted while working at an abrasive materials factory in Henan, another migrant worker suffering from the same disease was being given the runaround by hospital and government authorities in Sichuan. Xiao Huazhong, an elderly retired miner from Qu county in Sichuan, suffers from stage three pneumoconiosis and has been seeking compensation from his former employer for several years, so far all to no avail. His former employer, Liao Xing’an, is a local coal baron and one of the most powerful men in Qu county.