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Leiyangpan Mine, still in operation

Petitions, education, wildcat coal mines, and government malfeasance: ingredients for a hard-hitting piece of muckracking journalism.

China National Radio does not delve too deeply in its investigation of two teachers whose employment was made contingent on their success in convincing their families to stop petitioning about illegal, unsafe coal mines with ties to the local government, but its report is still worth reading.

The teachers had their classes suspended by county officials and were ordered to return home for "ideological work": convincing a 72-year-old man to stop his petitions about pollution from the illegal mine. Their story story gives way to a picture of a village whose farmland and water supply was ruined by unsafe mining practices, which then leads to a brief look at the connections between officials in Hengshan County, Shaanxi Province, and two coal mines that the province ordered to be closed several years ago.

The report is scant on some of the details and leaves you wanting to know more about the interactions of the people involved, particularly the petitioners.

But you've got to love an article that follows a litany of complaints about recalcitrant coal mines with state media boilerplate about how the State Council has taken "notably successful policy measures" to control the proliferation of illegal mines, and then follows that with a party secretary who tells state media journalists to mind their own business.

Two teachers from Hengshan County in Yulin, Shaanxi Province were recently forced to suspend classes so that they could return home and prevent their relatives from petitioning to higher levels of government over flagrant private mining operations. If they could not prevent their relatives' actions, they would not be permitted to return to work.

CNR reporters discovered that government officials and public servants in Hengshan are secretly investors in mining operations, and mines that the Shaanxi provincial government ordered to be shut down are still conducting illegal extraction.

Li Yanrong, one of the teachers ordered to stop classes, told reporters that she taught at Suzhuangze School, which was situated in a good location outside of metropolitan Yulin, so she was afraid of being transferred to a more remote location. Around June 28, the school leadership called her up to tell her that someone from the village had submitted a petition, and she was to return home to conduct ideological work. If it was successful, she could come back to work. If not, then the next semester she would be transferred away from Suzhuangze.

Suzhuangze principal An Hui said, "This has nothing to do with the school. It was the decision of the county leadership."